There is a lot of disinfo, deliberate ignorance, and intellectual dishonesty about what the mRNA vaccine is and the mechanism behind it. I joke about this thing being a ‘gene altering mystery fluid’ that doesn’t do anything against Chinese lung herpes but it’s so much worse than that

It’s true mRNA technology has been around for a while. What kept it from being used in widespread vaccination was a lack of a way to protect the mRNA long enough to get inside of cells and ribosomes, where it can be “read” to construct a protein. Instead of admitting this, they (Moderna, Pfizer, etc.) went ahead with an extremely lipid-soluble coating. That would guarantee the mRNA injected easily and quickly passed through membranes so it could get to the site of action (ribosomes)

But it also meant that, unlike other vaccines which have their particles taken up in normal lymph flow and end up in lymph-nodes local to site of injection where foreign, antigenic molecules are processed by dendritic cells and stay in the extracellular space otherwise (outside and in-between cells, the interstitium), the mRNA injected in these vaccines ends up everywhere, easily passing from the interstitium to the blood stream and across the blood-brain barrier

Oops

Compared with getting a virus, the virus is only able to bond with and enter some cells; injecting its genetic material and taking over production to make more virus. It is limited to cells displaying molecules each virus is capable of binding to (in the case of SARS-CoV-2 this is a molecule called ACE2)

In “normal” vaccination, only dendritic and a few other immune cells (which are designed to ingest and deal with antigenic molecules) end up with viral proteins in them. These specific cells are part of the immune reaction that ends up with long term and robust immunity

With mRNA vaccination the injection is in the deltoid (most of the time) but the particles of mRNA move easily in and out of cells and across their membranes. Any cell and subsequently its ribosomes which come into contact with the exogenous mRNA will start to produce the altered SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins that the mRNA instructs for

In the normal course of cellular function the master copy of your build and operating instructions (DNA) has a page or chapter photocopied as needed (mRNA) and sent out to factories (ribosomes) which read the instructions and build proteins according to them. During this process, whatever protein is being made gets reported back to the immune system

This happens by each of your cells taking one of the things its factories are making and displaying them on the outside of their cell membrane. You can think of this as a sign at city limits which has an example of what each factory is making inside. Security (T-Cells of the immune system) come by but can’t get inside, they just look at the sign to see if something is off. If something is,they can nuke the whole city (induce lysis) or tag the sign for other bulldozer immune cells to come by and level it

This function fights both cancer and viral infection. If either of those things cause a cell to start making abnormal or foreign proteins then the cell is instructed to kill itself (lysis) or is tagged to be destroyed by other immune cells

Up until now in human history you could only end up with antigenic (things which set off an immune response) molecules displayed to the immune system on a subset of cells. Either a virus infected your cells and that virus could only attach and enter a tiny number of overall cells in your body (like SARS-CoV-2 and cells which display ACE2) or you could get cancer (which is essentially one cell over and over and over)

Outside of that, antigenic molecules would be immediately destroyed by natural killer cells or would be collected through lymph and processed then displayed by dendritic cells in lymph tissue (nodes mostly). These dendritic cells look like massive tree root systems and all they do is process foreign material and display it on the Major Histocompatibility Complex

source: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK27156/

That’s the molecule complex that acts as the “signs at city limits” announcing what’s going on inside a cell to the outside world. It is the sign security (the immune system) monitors in order to know if there is an issue inside, as security is a cell itself and cannot enter another cell. The immune system is blind to the intracellular environment besides these signs (MHC)

One type of T-Cell, T-Helper Cells, move up and down the “root system” of the dendritic cell, just looking at all the signs. In this way, your lymph nodes and spleen (where this process mostly happens) act as security checkpoints eventually coming across fragments of anything that ends up in your body. If they find something wrong, they induce an immune response to that thing which will eventually reach wherever the molecules they saw came from

Back to what we are doing by injecting these lipid-soluble mRNA particles into people’s bodies; littering them throughout all tissue, dependent on each individual’s weight, lipid percentage, hydration, cardiovascular state, anatomy, etc. Wherever concentrations of these end up you have random cells which start to produce altered spike proteins and display them on their signs. The immune system notices and starts attacking those areas

As each mRNA vaccinated cell is destroyed they spill their contents of altered spike protein (cytotoxic itself) into the local area. The vaccine makers know the path to immune activation is through MHC (signs), and don’t really address or care about all the excess spike protein being made. They want the sign to say “altered spike protein” but in the background factories (ribosomes) are churning out actual spike protein into the inside of the cell This is how a virus reproduces as well. Once infected, more viral particles are constructed inside a cell but they don’t get released to go infect other cells until the first infected cell is destroyed and they can escape

Once these signs are made they are permanent, sort of, and this is where the analogy breaks down. All the atoms in your body are replaced about once a decade. Even your bones are constantly re-structured by osteoclasts and osteoblasts, so every ten years you have entirely different atoms making up those bones. Even cells that generally don’t replicate or die until you do like neurons and muscle (muscle cells themselves get bigger when you work out, mostly, you don’t get new muscle cells although nothing is ever 100%) constantly replace their constituent parts

The MHC displaying the product the factories are making will stay embedded in the cell wall until that section of the membrane is replaced due to other natural processes (such as endocytosis). This means that people who end up with persistent neurological or cardiac side effects may have them for years until most of the signs stating the cell is making spike protein are torn down. For neurons in the brain that could be years, not to mention the fact that in the meantime the immune system is actively trying to kill off any of those cells, often successfully

This is why I’ve been joking and calling it gene altering mystery fluid. I know its not quite perfectly accurate - but hey, up yours - at this point in my life I want to be proven wrong and not just about this

𝙃𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙙𝙞𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙗𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙡𝙮. 𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙞𝙨 𝙨𝙤 𝙢𝙪𝙘𝙝 𝙬𝙚 𝙙𝙤𝙣’𝙩 𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨. 𝘼 𝙜𝙞𝙜𝙖𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙘 𝙥𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙤𝙢𝙚 𝙞𝙨 𝙙𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙈𝙃𝘾. 𝙒𝙚 𝙙𝙤𝙣’𝙩 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙖 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙢𝙚𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙞𝙨𝙢𝙨 𝙬𝙚 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙮𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝. 𝙉𝙤𝙩 𝙤𝙣𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙡𝙖𝙧𝙜𝙚 𝙨𝙬𝙖𝙩𝙝𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙈𝙃𝘾 𝙗𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙠 𝙗𝙤𝙭𝙚𝙨 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙤𝙡𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙛 𝘾𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙎𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 (𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙗𝙤𝙙𝙮 ‘𝙠𝙣𝙤𝙬𝙨’ 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙞𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙞𝙨𝙣’𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙖𝙩𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙠) 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙤𝙥𝙚𝙣 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣. 𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙣𝙤 𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙜𝙞𝙩𝙪𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙨𝙩𝙪𝙙𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙤𝙣 𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨, 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙖𝙛𝙚𝙩𝙮 𝙙𝙖𝙩𝙖 𝙞𝙨 𝙣𝙤𝙣-𝙚𝙭𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙗𝙚𝙮𝙤𝙣𝙙 “𝙞𝙩 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙗𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙮 𝙙𝙤𝙚𝙨𝙣’𝙩 𝙠𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙤𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙨𝙩 90 𝙙𝙖𝙮𝙨”

Governments and corporations saw the opportunity to make hundreds of billions of dollars and quickly grabbed whatever was on the shelf, dusted it off, and rushed it to market. It’s one of the reasons that massive and rapid distribution is the key. Not knowing what would happen, it was and is imperative to get as many doses injected as possible

While careful, isolated, controlled, longitudinal studies would easily recognize collective negative effects, even though the specifics differed, uncontrolled mass distribution during phase 4 study will make it easy to mask. Investigating any specifics, like myocarditis, will only ever bring up a low level signal that is easily dismissed as “COVID causes myocarditis too!”

The collective information provided by all the signals would tell a different story. The VAERs database provides the strongest signal but is easily ignored due to its unverified nature. 𝗜𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗳𝘂𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟲 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗮 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁. 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽𝘀, 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗸𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵

These vaccines also have no hope of imparting robust long term immunity and are effectively short term antibody therapy to one specific part of one specific strain. You need to have a broad spectrum of antigenic sites to induce robust and long lasting immunity. That’s why vaccines are more complicated than re-producing a single bacterial protein and rubbing it on a cut

Although doing that with whole, dead bacteria (scabs) is where we saw inoculation first work. Whether the vaccines were attenuated, destroyed, or dead - the only vaccines we have ever seen impart robust and long lasting immunity provided the whole host of antigenic particles found in the wild. It’s another reason why mRNA wasn’t in widespread use in addition to the technical problem of a protective coating or encapsulation. They just don’t work very well and are not vaccines

Mild endogenous antibody therapy would be a better description which is why they had to change the definition of the word ‘vaccine.’ Also, ‘cause some people cry and shit their pants at ‘gene altering mystery fluid’. Even though, you know...

I’m not going to bother vaguely asserting some education, position of authority, or access to unavailable information. On the contrary, anyone who reads this will see I know what I’m talking about. I tried my best to both use proper technical terminology so this can all be easily verified and researched further as well as bridge the technical gap so anyone could understand the mechanism behind the vaccine

𝗕𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲, 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗺𝗥𝗡𝗔 ‘𝘃𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀’ 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱, 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝘂𝘀𝗲, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘀. Every time anyone brings up a specific side effect they won’t get anywhere and legacy media will always have the fallback of, “basically the same as without the vaccine but having COVID.” What about the risk before? How come people were banished from social media and fired from their jobs for bringing this up?

Just imagine people whose lives were upended for statements like “myocarditis is nearly unheard of in children.” I hope this helps someone explain to a loved one and win them over. As more and more shots are mandated to keep “antibody levels” high (since when are you supposed to walk around with high antibody levels? That’s a sign of infection, not immunity, antibody levels should fade quickly and be replaced with primed memory cells), people’s careers end and anyone speaking about this is silenced but people will have questions

In early 2022, the Australian FDA acknowledged they don’t know if frameshift in the stop codon is even possible and that’s not counting the plasmid contamination

An anon’s serotonin dysregulation theory could be happening but there’s no clear evidence of it (yet)

Even the tampered official data is pretty damning Whatever the fuck the gene altering mystery fluid does to DNA is inheritable

“Hey, remember when we all agreed that genetic code from RNA viruses could never integrate into host DNA? Well, its probable” - See: Potential Mechanisms for Human Genome Integration of Genetic Code from

SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination: Implications for Disease by Anthony M. Kyriakopoulos, Peter A.McCullough, Greg Nigh and Stephanie Seneff. ISSN: 2329-6895

In conclusion, I leave you with some words from the 2nd volume of the I Told You So trilogy:

June 19th 10PM is the Roast of Star Wars July 3rd is the Roast of America I'll get a headcount as to how many people can be in the basement, it's on the list of places to hold the next Cars & Women Magazine live reading

I think the basement at the Bibblebash Comedy Bunker can accommodate , the place is on the list of potential venues for the next Cars & Women Magazine live reading

Big ups to for letting me go past the time limit here

While the appeals process for 718Tv goes on and on and on like the Simpsons staggering across the sands of time, the third book is almost done and with it comes a lot of flyers I’ve been itching to put up of the I Told You So trilogy

Glorious Leader, Michael van Gore of Anatomy of the Heads, has secured a spot in the Indonesian Homeowners Association and has now cemented the first formal steps of his evolution as a global supervillain. With this expands Cars & Women Magazine to do everything in-house, and with this I bring good news: Issue #11 is manifesting through sheer tyranny of will and soon the stapling then mailing out with ransom letters made out of cut up newspaper and magazines

While I have your attention, I don’t really have a clue what to write here and am happy to field any suggestions. If the goal is getting the I Told You So trilogy and my novel out, keeping the zine in motion, screenprinting shirts and putting up flyers/stencils - what goes on substack?

Closing out with a chapter in Know Bueno will be about SIDS, which is in convenient thread format here:

Oh, and a new pfp. Shoutouts to revolving style, find him over at IG

It’s been a while, I know. But remember: nothing is over for someone who tries

Volume II of the I Told You So trilogy is complete - amazon.com/dp/B0FPX6XLP9

I will figure out what to put here on substack now that the next five and a half months or so are more or less gonna be shilling It’s All One Thing™

When you self publish on Amazon, you have a six month window of time to make the algorithm as friendly as it can get with your book

Ratings and reviews help a ton, which is why (most) YouTubers with a zillion subscribers (still) do the Like, Comment and Subscribe dance. Remember when the world (re)discovered Plastic Love by Mariya Takeuchi? With each thumbs up and reply the egregore of that song grew and grew

Outside of sales, posts, DMs and so on - direct links don’t help (in this regard), but searching the title - It’s All One Thing™ - and crawling through the results until you get to the book and click on it will

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put up some more flyers and stickers of my book. Maybe hassle some people to get on their podcast or show

Still on IG at stained_hanes. Respawned where everyone plays pretend at stained__hanes

Also, if you picked up a copy of All Dogs Go To Heaven Except Pit Bulls a rating and review would help tremendously. Thanks

Yours truly,

• stained hanes

  

If a cop pulls you over, if you’ve been drinking, especially a lot, it’s gonna smell, he will smell it the moment you roll down the window. Don’t use gum, don’t use cologne to hide the smell. The only thing that works are cigarettes. Keep a Marlboro in your center console.

If you smoke, you know what to do.

If you do, light that shit up and hotbox your car with the smell of Marlboro Man. Do not roll down your window until the cop gets out of his car and taps on the glass.

Then roll it down. The cop is gonna say "broken tail light, didn’t full stop at stop sign some, etc." The second he asks you if you’ve been drinking say no, say you don’t drink because you take an antidepressant medication but that doesn’t hinder your driving.

There is no warning on most antidepressants that say do operate machinery.

He will go back to his car, yadda yadda, lets say he still thinks you’ve been drinking - and realistically speaking it’s hard to hide it if you’ve have - he will ask you to take a field sobriety test.

Refuse it.

Say even if you pass it they’re gonna say you failed no matter what & want you to blow into their breathalyzer. Tell the officer if he really thinks if you’re under the influence that you’ll be more than willing to cooperate & go to the local hospital or jail and get tested there.

This is the ultimate bluff, whether he calls it or not. This will take a lot of the officer's time if in fact you aren’t under the influence and just a little out of it. Driving while tired, technically not against the law. 9 times out of 10 they won’t call the bluff.

Now this won’t work if you’re sloppy drunk. And if you’re sloppy drunk you shouldn’t be driving anyway, but let’s say you just had [REDACTED] and you’re lightly buzzed. That is no reason why you should get a DUI. Use this advice wisely ladies and jerks.

The last time I got mass reported, I would tweet at Elon Musk, Twitter Support and Twitter Safety instead of plug my site whenever a tweet or thread of mine on Trash Radio would do numbers. His response to me pointing out what happened was “give me more money”

I eventually got my account back, but no one moves unless you bang on doors and ask the same thing over and over and over. This seems to be a function in any site where support is automated. YouTube is somehow a hundred times worse than this, and this is pretty gay and demoralizing

I’ve got books to write, things to record, flyers to put up and people to play phone tag with - so to streamline things I’m going to automate my “Hey, I got mass reported can I get my account back?” song and dance. Every 8:00 AM after the Good morning and “you only have today guys make the most of it” tweets

So when these go out, a retweet or quote tweet, anything helps. Nothing stays at the bottom of the ocean forever, but it doesn’t make it any less underwhelming

I got mass reported by pit bull mommies, proving that the only thing worse than sub-canine are their owners. While I’m here, this is a good reminder that pit bulls can be expertly trained to listen to nobody. There is no pit bull debate to be had. Either you make unprincipled exceptions for violent animals that put everyone around them in harm’s way or you’re a normal person fit for society

And here’s rounding out the obligatory book plug - amazon.com/dp/B0D9M5YV26. Turns out Mike Redbar’s a fan! Who knew?

Okay, back to the point of this update:

The last time this happened, I learned that no one on Twitter moves unless you make a scene. So whenever a tweet or thread made the rounds, I’d hassle Elon, Safety and Support about getting mass reported

You can find that tweet here - x.com/TrashRadio_/status/1886598207062290733 - a RT or quote tweet would be much appreciated. Feel free to hassle the Ketamine addicted 50 something year old “finally, I’m the cool kid!” autist Daddy’$ Money who owns the site, or Safety or Support or X with this. It’s how I got out of purgatory both times this happened.

And yes, I really did file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. No, I didn’t think I’d ever do such a thing because childless pit bull owners can coordinate better than RW culture war jerkoffs

The appeals process is like trying to describe a red apple to a colorblind person who has never seen produce. That being said, others were nuked for much less and without the option to appeal (the editor of All Dogs Go To Heaven Except Pit Bulls was permabanned, without the option to appeal, for criticizing Elon’s “absentee R selection parenting”.

One step at a time

One punch at a time

One round at a time

Schizophrenia is one of the worst illnesses to have. It shaves off about 15 years of a lifespan on average and it basically takes a full team of people available 24/7 giving comprehensive care to someone with it

In other words, this illness is historically difficult for any modern healthcare system to properly deal with. Especially when it involves a grown adult that is more or less harmless to others that probably doesn't want to be under surveillance

The worst part about schizophrenia is that their reality is totally incongruent with anyone else's, even other schizophrenics, and so they feel as if they're just walking on clouds all the time because there's no common ground to communicate their experiences

If you think you'd find listening to a schizophrenic "interesting" then you simply haven't listened to one long enough

Very often they see connections in things that others don't, which is alienating, and so to them it feels like everyone else is living in a tiny world (which causes people to romanticize this illness, even though the reality is purely tragic)

There are perhaps no other illnesses that so effectively remove your ability to be truly understood by others

Talk to one and see them try to respond to questions while with the voices in their head, often looking so exhausted and in need of rest

"Schizophrenia is the most serious of all mental conditions and is characterized by repeated relapses and significant functional impairment. Diagnosis requires a psychotic episode that lasts at least 6 months. Patient lack of compliance will inevitably lead to relapse and may have serious consequences. [...] The potential for comorbidities further adds to the complexity of the illness and will require additional psychiatric and/or medical treatment. These further complicate already arduous clinical circumstances. Patients with schizophrenia need comprehensive care, compassion, and support. They deserve this." - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4106628/

Calling my bookie to place a bet on young women pretending to be schizophrenic because faking autism, tourette syndrome, and whatever illness du jour comes and goes for attention will no longer be in vogue

Besides, 99% of women with Tourette's are faking it. Just like with autism

Its funny but for all the wrong reasons. It’s okay, you can laugh

If you got this far, between you and I, a lot of schizo posting on the internet is manufactured to drown out actual schizos as a whole to make sure another Terry Davis isn't recognized

SUPERPREDATOR.ZONE/CELEBRITY/VILEHEART

She was made out of steel, plastic, and a lot of other things by a nice couple who eventually divorced and left her to take care of herself.

He was made mostly out of clay by an elderly Jewish man with a warm smile, a sprightly demeanor, and a persistent cough. He mostly did housework, but also was a friend to his maker. When the inevitable happened, he was inconsolable for some time. He spent almost seven years silently feeding pigeons in Central Park, stopping only to buy more bread when needed.

She liked to undertake little projects, but was absent-minded and frequently lost herself in her work.

He had a sharp attention to detail, but generally felt pretty creative.

She mostly liked to watch old movies, but would usually go see anything that had Tom Cruise in it. She wanted to buy a cat, but knew that her absent-mindedness would be a problem. Her psychiatrist suggested a stuffed animal. This depressed her, for some reason.

He had a good-sized collection of books, and had learned Spanish, Italian, sign language, and bicycle repair from them

She enjoyed working with her hands, and would spend days in her garden, or sculpting, or painting. One room of her house was carefully temperature-controlled, and contained a collection of old records that would make any hobbyist weak in the knees.

He finally placed a personal ad in April, with some trepidation and more than a little hope.

She bought the paper that day because the cooking supplement looked interesting, and happened upon his ad more or less by chance.

Their first date contained absolutely no uncomfortable silence. She showed him how to knit. He taught her how to dance. They discovered a mutual enjoyment of folktales. They lost track of time because neither needed to sleep, and their first date wound up being two weeks long.

Their second date was a month long, and ended only because they both agreed that they should probably just get married.

And so they did. After a conversation that was both shorter and less awkward than you might expect, they decided to adopt.

But adoption could wait. First, they went to an animal shelter and got a kitten.

Good evening ladies and jerks, thanks for pulling through this evening. How bout a hand for Bulgarian Bar for having us here

Hallowed, keep up the good work and thanks for letting Queens trash in the building

I was given 15 minutes to discuss postmodernism. So I asked my constituents, fellow operators, homies, well wishers, neighborhood ne'er-do-wells and most importantly - my friends. Cars & Women Magazine is proof my friends are smarter and funnier than 93% of people out there with substacks you pay for, weekly columns somewhere and blue ticks next to their name on Twitter back when it was the Mark of Cain. Our vibe director Mr. Nick Dove argues its higher than that, and on some days I'm inclined to believe he's right. So I ask them:

What is postmodernism? Lets see what they came up with:

- when critique comes first before context

- Underlying assumption that we have reached the peak, or at least can “see” the peak of civilizational progress. There are no more frontiers. The mindset that we’ve already accumulated all the benefits of progress and have yet to understand the detriments of this progress.

- Postmodernism is a philosophy based on turning objective reality into the subjective interpretation of the individual.

- Came from the Frankfurt School and died in the 60s anywhere sensible but in some places lives on among people who are mostly unemployable anywhere sensible

- A friend of mine whose family came here from Sicily in the late 1800s described it as "As a philosophy, postmodernism rejects concepts of rationality, objectivity and universal truth. It instead emphasizes the diversity of human experience and the multiplicity of perspectives - so if you take Nietzsche's perspectivism and boil out the common sense then you get that nonsense" Then again, when he and I hang out he points out the Stop Uyghur Genocide stickers someone puts up around the city and he tells me "bro, we gotta do something about the wiggers" so make of that what you will

- Postmodernism is a thought experiment that decided to be reality. No fault of our own. Sometimes things just happen

- Online, properly applied, is Street Fighter practice mode.

- Postmodernism is a philosophy based on turning objective reality into the subjective interpretation of the individual. Men can get pregnant and chest feed. Women are "people who bleed". There are 70 genders. Working a job is slavery.

- I've seen the word "Voltaire" multiple times today so just talk about that

- Someone I look up to and respect said it is "The death of human spirit, and the triumph of resentment, consensus and hedonistic altruism over leadership and excellence. It's a man selling his grand piano so his girlfriend can squeeze another wardrobe into their studio apartment"

- Men with hats = Modernism / Women with tattoos = Postmodernism

They're not wrong.

I've always felt that a cause and symptom - an emergent behavior if you will - is getting rid of this whole "words mean things" business. Since time immemorial society dictated language. For the past decade or so its been the other way around

The past decade this whole "words mean things" has been beaten with pipes and chains, rolled up in a Persian rug, set on fire and thrown off the roof. Such things don't happen just because. Nothing happens in a vacuum

A neighbor of mine is convinced its because the Large Hadron Collider was turned on and something went terribly wrong, and every test they've ran has been cover for trying to fix it and just make it worse. I'm of the belief that mumbo jumbo times started with the the Mayan calendar coming to an end in December 21st 2012

Sure, things were already starting to get silly by then. Tumblr broke containment and started creeping into everyday life through online then social contagion, we were three maybe four years into the Greatest Depression that still looms over every aspect of our lives. Even among the land owning gentry the blood and thunder just a moment away from everything out there bothers them the m o s t

The point is 2013 pulls around the corner and all bets are off. No one's coloring inside the lines anymore. The most bitter and caustic cynic years later is convinced there are no more beliefs - just people and egregores of control. This "words mean things" ordeal is now a rising and dying entity getting the pipes, chains, rug, kerosene, match and heave ho off the roof routine day in day out and its still going on and its gonna happen tomorrow. Most of you already know this

And so we find ourselves under the global algorithm driven marketing and surveillance mind control grid. People are unable to eat or shower without their phone nearby and will sooner loose their mind over leaving it home instead of their keys or wallet. This thing. This infinite direction digital ayahuasca pocket screen scrying machine

Is this a symptom or a cause of postmodernism? There's a lot of overlap between the two and I don't know where to start but I know you seen it. Did you know people keep pitbulls as pets? All dogs go to heaven except pitbulls and that has nothing to do with postmodernism. But people (women) defend the existence of having this thing on a leash. "Gee, I hope no living thing makes any sudden movements around by precious beast I sublimate the desire to nurture over"

Women have it bad under postmodernism. Gay men now breed them like cattle and kick surrogate mothers out their hospital beds so they can pose for photos with the babies they didn't grow and birth without considering the surrogate mother has vaginal stitches, postnatal depression, sore milk impacted breasts and is in pain

Is it postmodernism or post-modernity that psyops, brainwashes, misleads, misdirects and preys upon women to leave the pregnancy force and waste their best years having a child making someone else rich? Cause since this event started tomboy genocide has claimed another small North American town

Birth control is a sales funnel to SSRIs - is that postmodernism or post-modernity?

It becomes daunting, if not impossible, to tell where this starts and stops making sense. Is this what we get for challenging grand narratives and universal truths? Our reward for destroying our beautiful language and giving meaning fluidity? The mutation in the connection between power, dynamics, culture and knowledge?

Deconstruction and fragmentation in art forms and identities and concepts of the self, dissolving the high and low culture divide - and everything from information dissemination, media, public discourse and proof of the existence of objective metaphysical evil

There are many people out there who aren't religious but can see the world as an engine powered by the suffering of others and for this reason they stay online. Online is a containment zone. You can have fun online but barring few outlying exceptions you can't do good online.

The only way to be good is to do good and to do good you have to go outside. Even if online is how you met someone you fell in love with you still had to go outside to confirm they weren't a skinwalker, a fed or your doppelgänger from the timeline next door

There are proxy wars waged by money men and industrialists using internet talking heads are used in an attempt to advance and further interests that don't benefit the general public they keep online

None of these so called "people" ever suggest to their audience how much more important their friends, loved ones, block, parish or neighborhood is than the 29 out of 30 headlines that don't affect the fridge being full and lights staying on

They never discuss how expensive things are getting, don't seem to affect change in meatspace and never offer anything beyond outrage as policy. Its all stage-one thinking. Notice, and move on. Not one will ever remind people of the civics of this country like ballots, initiatives, town hall meetings, zoning board meetings, hell none of them can tell you what the Chamber of Commerce IS and would probably stutter then cry if you asked them how much a gallon of milk or carton of eggs cost

After all, you have more fun as a cult member but make more money as a cult leader. Is this postmodernism or post-modernity?

But its not all doom and gloom, ladies and jerks. So much is up for grabs right now

Its no longer a matter of time but a matter of priority. You don't have to run out of reasons NOT to do something before you finally scale that wall inside to do it - the same way you don't need to throw a party to eat Party Mix

We're living in the golden age of art and its only going to get better. But we are overwhelmed by choice and desensitized by familiarity

That being said:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied

real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring

Imaginary good is boring

real good is always new, marvelous and intoxicating

The good and bad news is its all in your hands

Thank you and goodnight

Back in 1979, the major enemy of the United States was the Ayatollah Khomeini, religious leader and dictator of Iran, and everyone thought he was a big problem. Man, we had no idea...

Ruhollah Mousavi was born in 1901 or 1902, depending on who you ask, in the town of Khomeyn, from whence his popular name was derived.

By any account, he was a joyless husk of a man. He once told Time Magazine, "There is no room for play in Islam. It is deadly serious about everything."

With deadly serious fervor, he threw himself into the study of Islamic theology and attained the rank of Ayatollah, a religious title designating an advanced scholar but carrying no particular political significance.

In 1962, the monarch of Iran (known as the Shah) passed a bill that allowed municipal officials in the country to take their oaths of office on whatever holy scripture they preferred.

While it might sound like a trivial issue, the move offended Khomeini and other Islamic fundamentalists, who considered the Koran to be the only appropriate swearing mechanism.

It was akin to how American fundamentalists react at the prospect of taking the words "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance, only with more rage and less televangelizing.

While the United States has a blase attitude toward protests and boycotts, the monarchy in Iran was less flexible. The order was rescinded, and suddenly Khomeini was a force to be reckoned with. The fallout from the swearing issue led to widespread unrest, as the secular monarchy struggled to contain the strong fundamentalist population.

The Ayatollah was sent into exile in 1964, moving first to Turkey then later to Iraq. From Iraq, he launched a series of vicious verbal attacks on the monarchy, first against the Shah who exiled him and later against his son, who succeeded to the throne.

Khomeini was a Shi'ite Muslim, but his beliefs were an extreme form of the Shi'a creed. From exile, he developed the concept of a theocracy, which dramatically changed what had previously been a largely apolitical branch of Islam.

Shi'ites had practiced something akin to separation of church and state for centuries, but the unpopularity of the Shah's regime prompted many to reconsider, especially when the monarch sent troops to arrest Khomeini and control unrest. In addition to espousing a religious state, Khomeini accused the Shah of pro-Israeli and pro-U.S. sympathies, further inflaming his followers.

Khomeini called for a clerical state to succeed the "corrupt" Shah throughout the 1960s and 1970s, building a power base within the country among his religious followers. In 1978, a series of student demonstrations rocked the Shah's regime, leading to widespread defections from the country's power base, mainly merchants and the middle class. The following year, the Shah fled into U.S. protection and Khomeini seized power.

Although everyone from the Communists to liberal Democrats had supported the revolution, Khomeini shunted aside everyone except those who embraced his vision for a political Islam. He appointed himself Supreme Ruler, with a "parliament" made up of clerics who took their marching orders from Tehran.

Khomeini instituted a strict regime of Islamic law, ordering women to wear veils and suspending the criminal justice system in favor of religious courts. A democratic apparatus was put into place, but for appearances only, much like the British monarchy.

In November 1979, a group of student radicals overran the U.S. embassy and took everyone inside hostage, with Khomeini's support, in retaliation for the U.S. agreeing to shelter the Shah. The crisis lasted for more than a year, paralyzing Jimmy Carter's presidency and eventually contributing greatly to his loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. After the Shah died, the hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, the day of Reagan's inauguration.

Reagan wasn't one to take aggression lightly; his brilliant response to the threat he perceived from Iran was to arm Saddam Hussein with conventional, chemical and biological weapons and unleash him on America's enemy. That'll teach him!

Hussein had seized power in neighboring Iraq at about the same time Khomeini made his grab in Iran. Naturally, the two despised each other. In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. The war lasted nearly eight years, depleting the resources of both countries. The Soviets surreptitiously aided Iran even, as U.S. envoys like Donald Rumsfeld spread goodwill in Baghdad, because you just can't have enough proxy wars to satisfy some people.

U.N. brokered a peace agreement to end the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. By then, Khomeini had become a quaint sort of evil Hollywood-style icon, not dissimilar to Fidel Castro. While Saddam Hussein stepped up to the plate as the hot, young despot du jour, Khomeini began actively supporting international terrorism.

At the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Khomeini faced a public that had been demoralized by massive casualties and a peace agreement which amounted to an outright defeat. To cheer up the masses, the normally humorless cleric decided to have a little fun and issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims everywhere to kill an obscure, semi-talented author named Salman Rushdie for writing a tepid book called The Satanic Verses:

"The author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all Moslems to execute them wherever they find them."

Rushdie wasn't a Shi'ite, nor was he Iranian. The proclamation was ludicrously, outrageously inconsistent with any reasonable reading of Islamic and international law, but it was a great excuse to fight, so a lot of people got really upset about it (especially Rushdie, whose life was essentially ruined by the order). Khomeini's status at home as lead hellraiser was secured.

The proclamation was also groundbreaking in the politicization of fatwas. Khomeini had previously abused the fatwa to deliver death sentences to thousands of his domestic political opponents, which was already a gross distortion of the original concept of the fatwa. The precedent set by Khomeini was subsequently exploited by Osama bin Laden, who issued religious edicts that purported to give the force of Islamic morality to his politically motivated attacks on the United States.

Certainly, Khomeini holds much more responsibility for the rise of international terrorism and attacks on U.S. interests than his neighbor, Saddam. In addition to the whole fatwah thing, Iran sponsored several conferences in the late 1980s, which brought together the leadership of several Islamic extremist groups, including the future leaders of al Qaeda, according to terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky.

Tehran attempted to place itself squarely at the center of the world of terrorism, with qualified success. Although Khomeini succeeded in provoking and supporting some terrorism overseas, the Iranian effort was overshadowed by the rise of al Qaeda in the mid-1990s, under the leadership of his fellow crazy ideologue, bin Laden.

Just a few months after sentencing Rushdie to death, Khomeini himself died of prostate cancer in June 1989. Although the man died, the revolution lived on.

Doubtless he would have been disappointed by Iran's expression of sympathy to the United States on September 11, and he probably would have been infuriated by the fact that Iran is currently trying to patch up relations with the U.S. in order to avoid being the next target of George W Bush's wrath.

But the Ayatollah is still remembered as a hero by the government officials who purport to speak for the people of Iran. Will there ever be another ayatollah? Well, nearly half of all Iraqis in a recent poll favor creating an Islamic state... Salman Rushdie better watch his back...

I hope people never forget that the reason that there’s an islamic fundamentalist state in Iran today is because Eisenhower sent Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA to overthrow the government to protect the interests of British Petroleum and it permanently fucked up the country.

Rush Limbaugh was born into a prominent Missouri family, and raised in a town about thirty miles from the Kentucky border. His grandfather, the first Rush Hudson Limbaugh, was America's Ambassador to India in the Eisenhower administration. His uncle, Stephen Limbaugh, was appointed federal judge by Ronald Reagan, and his cousin, Stephen Limbaugh Jr, was appointed to the U.S. District Court by George W. Bush. His father was a prominent local attorney, who imbued his children with conservative ideology. His brother, David Limbaugh, is a lawyer and conservative writer.

He started in radio as a disc jockey on his home town's KGMO (part-owned by Limbaugh's father) while he was still in high school, using the on-air name "Rusty Sharpe." He dropped out of college, and eventually landed a job as a morning disc jockey at a small top-40 radio station in McKeesport, PA, near Pittsburgh. He quickly moved to a bigger station in Pittsburgh, where he worked as "Jeff Christie", and then to Kansas City, where he used his real name. Several times over several years he was fired for making too many, too rude political comments. Frustrated at his lack of success, he left radio, and took a job selling tickets for the Kansas City Royals baseball team.

Limbaugh's radio career was revived by Norm Woodruff, a San Francisco radio executive who urged friends at Sacramento's KFBK to hire him at a time when he was essentially unknown in the radio business. Woodruff even took Limbaugh shopping for clothes, improving his appearance to make a better impression on KFBK brass. The station decided to take a chance, putting Limbaugh on in what had been Morton Downey, Jr.'s time slot. His ratings were better than Downey's, putting Limbaugh's career back on track. In telling the story of his success, Limbaugh occasionally mentions Woodruff's help, but he never mentions that Woodruff was openly gay, and died of AIDS in the 1980s.

Limbaugh's biggest break came in 1987, when the Federal Communications Commission repealed its Fairness Doctrine, a rule that had required radio and television stations to provide equal time to both sides of political debates. Freed from any requirement to air rebuttals to provocative opinions, Limbaugh's radio style suddenly looked much more profitable, and within months he left Sacramento and signed with the ABC Radio Network, which syndicated his show from New York. Limbaugh is now syndicated by Premiere Radio Networks, which is owned by Clear Channel Communications. He is heard on about 600 stations nationwide, with little room for further growth -- there is no major market area where his program cannot be heard.

When substituting for Pat Sajak in a 1990 episode of Sajak's ill-fated late night talk show, he was heckled and booed by the studio audience after he made anti-gay comments, until the auditorium was emptied, leaving Limbaugh to finish the show in front of hundreds of empty seats. He had his own half-hour syndicated TV show from 1992-96, produced by Republican operative and later CEO of Fox News Roger Ailes and filmed in front of studio audiences pre-screened to be friendly to his conservative perspectives.

Limbaugh backs conservative causes without any exceptions -- he supports capital punishment, opposes abortion, claims that global warming is a lie, etc. Callers are pre-screened; few who disagree with the host are allowed on the air. There are rare guests -- occasionally Vice President Dick Cheney or other Republican officials drop in for a interview. For three hours daily, five days a week, Limbaugh weaves his opinion with a sense of humor, sarcasm, and a confident voice that sounds accurate and authoritative, even if the facts he recites are often far from correct.

He has claimed, for example, that no-one was indicted in the Iran-Contra scandal (14 were), that America has more forest land now than in 1492 (according to US Forest Service estimates, about 250,000,000 acres have been cut), that 75% of Americans who earn minimum wage are teenagers on their first job (in reality, the vast majority of minimum wage workers are over the age of 20), on and on. He has also given occasional credence to fringe conspiracy theories, claiming, for example, that Vince Foster was murdered instead of committing suicide, and that the crime took place in an apartment leased to Hillary Clinton. Limbaugh has also accused German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of being a member of Germany's Red Army Faction, a communist guerilla group blamed for more than 30 murders.

Limbaugh came to manhood in an era when the nation had a military draft for the Vietnam war. He avoided service by having his physician certify his medical unfitness due to an "inoperable pilonidal cyst" and "a football knee from high school." He played one year of varsity football in high school, and his coach, Ryland Meyr, said later he remembered no injuries to Limbaugh. Those who loathe Limbaugh sometimes describe his pilonidal cyst as "a boil on his butt", but that is an oversimplification. A pilonidal cyst is a chronic collection of pus or an abnormal draining passage leading to an abscess, located in the opening between the buttocks muscles. It is susceptible to infection, which can be dangerous on a war front, so severe pilonidal cysts have long been (and still are) legitimate grounds for exemption from military service. The peculiar thing is that Limbaugh denies he ever had a pilonidal cyst, dismissing it as "internet bull", though the record is plain.

But Limbaugh reaches ordinary Americans, because he sounds like an ordinary American. Sometimes he sounds like an ordinary working stiff, as he complains about the wealthy elite who control America: "All of these rich guys -- like the Kennedy family and Perot -- pretending to live just like we do and pretending to understand our trials and tribulations and pretending to represent us." Limbaugh's current contract pays him $45-million per year, and he has spoken of friends who make $180,000 per year and "don't consider themselves rich". He has said of the official poverty line, "$14,400 for a family of four? That's not so bad." Commenting on corporate outsourcing and layoffs, Limbaugh once wondered, "Why is it that whenever a corporation fires workers, it's never speculated that the workers might have deserved it?"

Limbaugh's impact on America has been huge. Talk radio was a very minor niche when his program was first syndicated, and stations that aired a conservative-tilted program almost invariably balanced that with a liberal-tilted program. Now, talk radio is almost exclusively conservative, and Limbaugh has spawned many imitators, including Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, and Tony Snow -- all of whom got early exposure guest-hosting on Limbaugh's program. In 1994, Limbaugh was widely credited as Republicans were elected to control of Congress, with several newly-elected Congressman openly calling themselves "the Dittohead caucus."

In his book The Way Things Ought To Be, Limbaugh wrote, "I believe that strong, wholesome family values are at the very core of a productive, prosperous, and peaceful society." So what are Limbaugh's family values? His first wife, Roxy Maxine McNeely, was a sales secretary at a Kansas City radio station. She was granted divorce under grounds of incompatibility after almost three years of marriage. His second wife, Michelle Sixta, was an usher at the Royals' ball park. They divorced after about five years. He met his third wife, aerobics instructor Marta Fitzgerald, through CompuServe's dating service, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas performed their wedding ceremony. According to the Palm Beach Post, Limbaugh and Fitzgerald maintained separate houses during their marriage. She divorced Limbaugh at his request after ten years of marriage, at about the time Limbaugh began dating then-CNN anchor Daryn Kagan.

In 2003, Limbaugh was forced to resign as a football commentator at ESPN amid allegations of racism, after he said in a telecast that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated, and given extra attention because the league and the media wanted a black quarterback to be successful.[1] So is Limbaugh a racist? On his show, he routinely pronounces "ask" and "asked" as "axe" and "axed", he routinely calls light-skinned African-Americans like Halle Berry and Barack Obama "Halfrican-Americans", and he has frequently described President Obama as "an immature childish manchild" and "essentially a primitive, indigenous guy." He once told a black caller to "take that bone out of your nose and call me back", and asked, "Have you ever noticed how all newspaper composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"

When his comments are taken as offensive, Limbaugh seems to enjoy the added attention. Among his more famous lines, he described the abuse at Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were stacked naked, sexually taunted and beaten while blindfolded, as the equivalent of "hazing, a fraternity prank". He called 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton "the White House dog", and eulogized Kurt Cobain as "a worthless shred of human debris." In 2006, when it was revealed that Republican Congressman Mark Foley had sent sexually explicit emails to an underage Congressional page, Limbaugh was the first and one of the few media voices to announce the teenager's name. He also blamed the boy for leading the Congressman on, wondering on the air if "maybe the page is out there engaged in some kind of chicanery."

In 2001, Limbaugh announced on his radio program that he had been losing his hearing, and was "almost completely deaf." He then had a cochlear implant installed in his left ear, and said that his hearing was mostly restored. In 2003, responding to published reports that he was under investigation for purchasing illegal drugs, he announced that he had become addicted to prescription opiates such as oxycodone as a result of long-term back pain. Oxycodone is marketed under such familiar brand names as Percodan, Percocet, and OxyContin, and hearing loss is a well-established side effect of oxycodone addiction.

Limbaugh, of course, has always called for harsh penalties for drug abusers, arguing that "if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up." After admitting his own addiction, he took a month off his radio show to undergo rapid rehab. He then spent the next several years battling Florida investigators who sought his medical records to investigate him for "doctor shopping" -- the crime of obtaining the same prescription from more than one doctor, since Limbaugh's use of oxycodone had been far in excess of the amount any doctor would plausibly prescribe. Claiming a right to privacy, he was assisted in his courtroom appeals by the American Civil Liberties Union, a group he has often criticized before and after accepting their help. In a 2006 plea bargain, charges were dropped in exchange for Limbaugh's payment of $30,000, agreement to undergo 18 months of drug abatement therapy, and his agreement to submit to random drug testing.

In June 2006, Limbaugh had further drug problems when a bottle of Viagra was found in his luggage at the Palm Beach Airport. The prescription was not in Limbaugh's name, but no charges were filed against Limbaugh, who was returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic with four male companions.

In October 2006, responding to television ads showing a shaky Parkinson's-afflicted Michael J. Fox pleading for voters to support candidates who would fund embryonic stem cell research over Republicans who oppose such research, Limbaugh said Fox was simply faking his symptoms. "He is exaggerating the effects of the disease," Limbaugh said. "He is moving all around and shaking and it's purely an act... This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting."

Since Limbaugh's Sacramento days, his show's theme song has been an endless bass-beating loop snipped from a 1984 song by The Pretenders, "My City Was Gone." The song, though, has potent and openly liberal lyrics, written by Chrissie Hynde to protest over-development: "I went back to Ohio / but my pretty countryside / had been paved down the middle / by a government that had no pride." Limbaugh never sought permission to use the music, never paid royalties, and Hynde, living in England, heard only occasionally about her song's hijacking. She had no comment until 1997, when Limbaugh answered a reporter's question about the song by explaining that it was "icing on the cake that it was [written by] an environmentalist, animal rights wacko and was an anti-conservative song. It is anti-development, anti-capitalist, and here I am going to take a liberal song and make fun of [liberals] at the same time." Upon reading that, Hynde had her representatives contact Limbaugh and demand payment. At Hynde's request, Limbaugh's royalty checks for using her song are now made payable to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

A longtime smoker who frequently denied the ill health effects of cigarettes, Limbaugh died at his home in Palm Springs, Florida from lung cancer in 2021.

[1] "Limbaugh's Comments Touch Off Controversy", ESPN News Services, 1 October 2003.

Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, English statesman, was born at Broadlands, near Romsey, Hants, on the 20th of October 1784. The Irish branch of the Temple family, from which Lord Palmerston descended, was very distantly related to the great English house of the same name, but these Irish Temples were not without distinction. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I they had furnished a secretary to Sir Philip Sidney and to Essex in Sir William Temple (1555-1627), afterwards provost of Trinity College, Dublin, whose son, Sir John Temple (1600-1677), was master of the rolls in Ireland. The latter's son, Sir William Temple, figured as one of the ablest diplomatists of the age. From his younger brother, Sir John Temple (1632-1704), who was speaker of the Irish House of Commons, Lord Palmerston descended. The eldest son of the speaker, Henry, 1st Viscount Palmerston (c.1673-1757), was created a peer of Ireland on the 12th of March 1723, and was succeeded by his grandson, Henry the second viscount (1739-1802), who married Miss Mary Mee, a lady celebrated for her beauty.

The 2nd viscount's eldest son, Henry John, is mentioned by Lady Elliot in her correspondence as a boy of singular vivacity and energy. These qualities adhered to him through life, and he had scarcely left Harrow, at the age of eighteen, when the death of his father (April 17, 1802) raised him to the Irish peerage. It was no doubt owing to his birth and connections, but still more to his own talents and character, that Lord Palmerston was thrown at a very early age into the full stream of political and official life. Before he was twenty-four he had stood two contested elections for the university of Cambridge, at which he was defeated, and he entered parliament for a pocket-borough, Newtown, Isle of Wight, in June 1807. Through the interest of his guardians Lord Malmesbury and Lord Chichester, the Duke of Portland made him one of the junior lords of the Admiralty on the formation of his administration in 1807. A few months later he delivered his maiden speech in the House of Commons in defense of the expedition against Copenhagen, which he conceived to be justified by the known designs of Napoleon on the Danish court. This speech was so successful that when Perceval formed his government in 1809, he proposed to this young man of twenty-five to take the chancellorship of the exchequer. Lord Palmerston, however, preferred the less important office of secretary-at-war, charged exclusively with the financial business of the army, without a seat in the cabinet, and in this position he remained, without any signs of an ambitious temperament or of great political abilities, for twenty years (1809-28). During the whole of that period Lord Palmerston was chiefly known as a man of fashion, and a subordinate minister without influence on the general policy of the cabinets he served. Some of the most humorous poetical pieces in the New Whig Guide were from his pen, and he was entirely devoted, like his friends Robert Peel and Croker, to the Tory party of that day. Lord Palmerston never was a Whig, still less a Radical; he was a statesman of the old English aristocratic type, liberal in his sentiments, favorable to the march of progress, but entirely opposed to the claims of democratic government.

In the later years of Lord Liverpool's administration, after the death of Lord Londonderry in 1822, strong dissensions existed in the cabinet. The Liberal section of the government was gaining ground. George Canning became foreign minister and leader of the House of Commons. Huskisson began to advocate and apply the doctrines of free trade. Roman Catholic emancipation was made an open question. Although Lord Palmerston was not in the cabinet, he cordially supported the measures of Canning and his friends. Upon the death of Lord Liverpool, Canning was called to the head of affairs; the Tories, including Peel, withdrew their support, and an alliance was formed between the Liberal members of the late ministry and the Whigs. In this combination the chancellorship of the exchequer was first offered to Lord Palmerston, who accepted it, but this appointment was frustrated by the king's intrigue with Herries, and Palmerston was content to remain secretary-at-war with a seat in the cabinet, which he now entered for the first time. The Canning administration ended in four months by the death of its illustrious chief, and was succeeded by the feeble ministry of Lord Goderich, which barely survived the year. But the "Canningites", as they were termed, remained, and the Duke of Wellington hastened to include Palmerston, Huskisson, Charles Grant, Lamb (Lord Melbourne) and Dudley in his government. A dispute between the duke and Huskisson soon led to the resignation of that minister, and his friends felt bound to share his fate. In the spring of 1828 Palmerston found himself in opposition. From that moment he appears to have directed his attention closely to foreign affairs; indeed he had already urged on the Duke of Wellington a more active interference in the affairs of Greece; he had made several visits to Paris, where he foresaw with great accuracy the impending revolution; and on the 1st of June 1829 he made his first great speech on foreign affairs. Lord Palmerston was no orator; his language was unstudied, and his delivery somewhat embarrassed; but he generally found words to say the right thing at the right time, and to address the House of Commons in the language best adapted to the capacity and the temper of his audience. An attempt was made by the Duke of Wellington in September 1830 to induce Palmerston to re-enter the cabinet, which he refused to do without Lord Lansdowne and Lord Grey, and from that time forward he may be said to have associated his political fortunes with those of the Whig party. It was therefore natural that Lord Grey should place the department of foreign affairs in his hands upon the formation of the great ministry of 1830, and Palmerston entered with zeal on the duties of an office over which he continued to exert his powerful influence, both in and out of office, for twenty years.

The revolution of July 1830 had just given a strong shock to the existing settlement of Europe. The kingdom of the Netherlands was rent asunder by the Belgian revolution; Portugal was the scene of civil war; the Spanish succession was about to open and place an infant princess on the throne. Poland was in arms against Russia, and the northern powers formed a closer alliance, threatening to the peace and the liberties of Europe. In presence of these varied dangers, Lord Palmerston was prepared to act with spirit and resolution, and the result was a notable achievement of his diplomacy. The king of the Netherlands had appealed to the powers who had placed him on the throne to maintain his rights; and a conference assembled accordingly in London to settle the question, which involved the independence of Belgium and the security of England. On the one hand, the northern powers were anxious to defend the king of Holland; on the other hand a party in France aspired to annex the Belgian provinces. The policy of the British government was a close alliance with France, but an alliance based on the principle that no interests were to be promoted at variance with the just rights of others, or which could give to any other nation well-founded cause of jealousy. If the northern powers supported the king of Holland by force, they would encounter the resistance of France and England united in arms, if France sought to annex Belgium she would forfeit the alliance of England, and find herself opposed by the whole continent of Europe. In the end the policy of England prevailed; numerous difficulties, both great and small, were overcome by the conference, although on the verge of war, peace was maintained; and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was placed upon the throne of Belgium as that nation's first king, Leopold I.

In 1833 and 1834 the youthful queens Donna Maria of Portugal and Isabella of Spain were the representatives and the hope of the constitutional party in those countries -- assailed and hard pressed by their absolutist kinsmen Don Miguel and Don Carlos, who were the representatives of the male line of succession. Lord Palmerston conceived and executed the plan of a quadruple alliance of the constitutional states of the West to serve as a counterpoise to the northern alliance. A treaty for the pacification of the Peninsula was signed in London on the 22nd of April 1834; and, although the struggle was somewhat prolonged in Spain, it accomplished its object. France, however, had been a reluctant party to this treaty. She never executed her share in it with zeal or fidelity. Louis-Philippe was accused of secretly favoring the Carlists, and he positively refused to be a party to direct interference in Spain. It is probable that the hesitation of the French court on this question was one of the causes of the extreme personal hostility Lord Palmerston never ceased to show towards the king of the French down to the end of his life, if indeed that sentiment had not taken its origin at a much earlier period. Nevertheless, at this same time (June 1834) Lord Palmerston wrote that "Paris is the pivot of my foreign policy." Adolphe Thiers was at that time in office. Unfortunately these differences, growing out of the opposite policies of the two countries at the court of Madrid, increased in each succeeding year; and a constant but sterile rivalry was kept up, which ended in results more or less humiliating and injurious to both nations.

The affairs of the East interested Lord Palmerston in the highest degree. During the Greek War of Independence he had strenuously supported the claims of the Hellenes against the Turks and the execution of the Treaty of London. But from 1830 the defense of the Ottoman Empire became one of the cardinal objects of his policy. He believed in the regeneration of Turkey. "All that we hear", he wrote to Sir Henry Bulwer (Lord Dalling), "about the decay of the Turkish Empire, and its being a dead body or a sapless trunk, and so forth, is pure unadulterated nonsense." The two great aims he had in view were to prevent the establishment of Russia on the Bosporus and of France on the Nile, and he regarded the maintenance of the authority of the Porte as the chief barrier against both these aggressions. Against Russia he had long maintained a suspicious and hostile attitude. He was a party to the publication of the "Portfolio" in 1834, and to the mission of the "Vixen" to force the blockade of Circassia about the same time. He regarded the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi which Russia extorted from the Porte in 1832, when she came to the relief of the sultan after the battle of Konieh, with great jealousy; and, when the power of Mehemet Au in Egypt appeared to threaten the existence of the Ottoman dynasty, he succeeded in effecting a combination of all the powers, who signed the celebrated collective note of the 27th of July 1839, pledging them to maintain the independence and integrity of the Turkish Empire as a security for the peace of Europe. On two former occasions, in 1833 and in 1835, the policy of Lord Palmerston, who proposed to afford material aid to the Porte against the pasha of Egypt, was overruled by the cabinet; and again, in 1839, when Baron Brunnow first proposed the active interference of Russia and England, the offer was rejected. But in 1840 Lord Palmerston returned to the charge and prevailed. The moment was critical, for Mehemet Ali had occupied Syria and won the battle of Nezib against the Turkish forces, and on the 1st of July 1839 the sultan Mohammed expired. The Egyptian forces occupied Syria, and threatened Turkey; and Lord Ponsonby, then British ambassador at Constantinople, vehemently urged the necessity of crushing so formidable a rebellion against the Ottoman power. But France, though her ambassador had signed the collective note in the previous year, declined to be a party to measures of coercion against the pasha of Egypt. Palmerston, irritated at her Egyptian policy, flung himself into the arms of the northern powers, and the treaty of the 15th of July 1840 was signed in London without the knowledge or concurrence of France. This measure was not taken without great hesitation, and strong opposition on the part of several members of the British cabinet. Lord Palmerston himself declared in a letter to Lord Melbourne that he should quit the ministry if his policy was not adopted; and he carried his point. The bombardment of Beirut, the fall of Acre, and the total collapse of the boasted power of Mehemet Ali followed in rapid succession, and before the close of the year Lord Palmerston's policy, which had convulsed and terrified Europe, was triumphant, and the author of it was regarded as one of the most powerful statesmen of the age. At the same time, though acting with Russia in the Levant, the British government engaged in the affairs of Afghanistan to defeat her intrigues in Central Asia, and a contest with China was terminated by the conquest of Chusan, afterwards exchanged for the island of Hong Kong.

Within a few months Lord Melbourne's administration came to an end (1841), and Lord Palmerston remained for five years out of office. The crisis was past, but the change which took place by the substitution of François Guizot for Adolphe Thiers in France, and of Lord Aberdeen for Lord Palmerston in England, was a fortunate event for the peace of the world. Lord Palmerston had adopted the opinion that peace with France was not to be relied on, and indeed that war between the two countries was sooner or later inevitable. Lord Aberdeen and M. Guizot inaugurated a different policy; by mutual confidence and friendly offices they entirely succeeded in restoring the most cordial understanding between the two governments, and the irritation which Lord Palmerston had inflamed gradually subsided. During the administration of Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston led a retired life, but he attacked with characteristic bitterness the Ashburton treaty with the United States, which closed successfully some other queations he had long kept open. In all these transactions, whilst full justice must be done to the force and patriotic vigor which Lord Palmerston brought to bear on the questions he took in hand, it was but too apparent that he imported into them an amount of passion, of personal animosity, and imperious language which rendered him in the eyes of the queen and of his colleagues a dangerous minister. On this ground, when Lord John Russell attempted, in December 1845, to form a ministry, the combination failed because Lord Grey refused to join a government in which Lord Palmerston should resume the direction of foreign affairs. A few months later, however, this difficulty was surmounted; the Whigs returned to power, and Palmerston to the foreign office (July 1846), with a strong assurance that Lord John Russell should exercise a strict control over his proceedings. A few days sufficed to show how vain was this expectation. The French government regarded the appointment of Palmerston as a certain sign of renewed hostilities, and they availed themselves of a despatch in which Palmerston had put forward the name of a Coburg prince as a candidate for the hand of the young queen of Spain, as a justification for a departure from the engagements entered into between M. Guizot and Lord Aberdeen. However little the conduct of the French government in this transaction of the Spanish marriages can be vindicated, it is certain that it originated in the belief that in Palmerston France had a restless and subtle enemy. The efforts of the British minister to defeat the French marriages of the Spanish princesses, by an appeal to the treaty of Utrecht and the other powers of Europe, were wholly unsuccessful; France won the game, though with no small loss of honorable reputation.

The revolution of 1848 spread like a conflagration through Europe, and shook every throne on the Continent except those of Russia, Spain, and Belgium. Palmerston sympathized, or was supposed to sympathize, openly with the revolutionary party abroad. No state was regarded by him with more aversion than Austria. Yet his opposition to Austria was chiefly based upon her occupation of great part of Italy and her Italian policy, for Palmerston maintained that the existence of Austria as a great power north of the Alps was an essential element in the system of Europe. Antipathies and sympathies had a large share in the political views of Lord Palmerston, and his sympathies had ever been passionately awakened by the cause of Italian independence. He supported the Sicilians against the king of Naples, and even allowed arms to be sent them from the arsenal at Woolwich; and, although he had endeavored to restrain the king of Sardinia from his rash attack on the superior forces of Austria, he obtained for him a reduction of the penalty of defeat. Austria, weakened by the revolution, sent an envoy to London to request the mediation of England, based on a large cession of Italian territory; Lord Palmerston rejected the terms he might have obtained for Piedmont. Ere long the reaction came; this straw-fire of revolution burnt itself out in a couple of years. In Hungary the civil war, which had thundered at the gates of Vienna, was brought to a close by Russian intervention. Prince Schwarzenberg assumed the government of the empire with dictatorial power; and, in spite of what Palmerston termed his "judicious bottle-holding", the movement he had encouraged and applauded, but to which he could give no material aid, was everywhere subdued. The British government, or at least Palmerston as its representative, was regarded with suspicion and resentment by every power in Europe, except the French republic; and even that was shortly afterwards to be alienated by Palmerston's attack on Greece.

This state of things was regarded with the utmost annoyance by the British court and by most of the British ministers. Palmerston had on many occasions taken important steps without their knowledge, which they disapproved. Over the Foreign Office he asserted and exercised an arbitrary dominion, which the feeble efforts of the premier could not control. The queen and the prince consort did not conceal their indignation at the position in which he had placed them with all the other courts of Europe. When Kossuth, the Hungarian leader, landed in England, Palmerston proposed to receive him at Broadlands, a design which was only prevented by a peremptory vote of the cabinet; and in 1850 he took advantage of Don Pacifico's very questionable claims on the Hellenic government to organize an attack on the little kingdom of Greece. Greece being a state under the joint protection of three powers, Russia and France protested against its coercion by the British fleet, and the French ambassador temporarily left London, which promptly led to the termination of the affair. But it was taken up in parliament with great warmth. After a memorable debate (June 17), Palmerston's policy was condemned by a vote of the House of Lords. The House of Commons was moved by Roebuck to reverse the sentence, which it did (June 29) by a majority of 46, after having heard from Palmerston the most eloquent and powerful speech ever delivered by him, in which he sought to vindicate, not only his claims on the Greek government for Don Pacifico, but his entire administration of foreign affairs. It was in this speech, which lasted five hours, that Palmerston made the well-known declaration that a British subject -- "Civis Romanus sum" -- ought everywhere to be protected by the strong arm of the British government against injustice and wrong. Yet, notwithstanding this parliamentary triumph, there were not a few of his own colleagues and supporters who condemned the spirit in which the foreign relations of the Crown were carried on; and in that same year the queen addressed a minute to the prime minister in which she recorded her dissatisfaction at the manner in which Lord Palmerston evaded the obligation to submit his measures for the royal sanction as failing in sincerity to the Crown. This minute was communicated to Palmerston, who did not resign upon it. These various circumstances, and many more, had given rise to distrust and uneasiness in the cabinet, and these feelings reached their climax when Palmerston, on the occurrence of the coup d'état by which Louis Napoleon made himself master of France, expressed to the French ambassador in London, without the concurrence of his colleagues, his personal approval of that act. Upon this Lord John Russell advised his dismissal from office (December 1851). Palmerston speedily avenged himself by turning out the government on a militia bill; but although he survived for many years, and twice filled the highest office in the state, his career as foreign minister ended for ever, and he returned to the foreign office no more. Indeed, he assured Lord Aberdeen, in 1853, that he did not wish to resume the seals of that department. Notwithstanding the zeal and ability which he had invariably displayed as foreign minister, it had long been felt by his colleagues that his eager and frequent interference in the affairs of foreign countries, his imperious temper, the extreme acerbity of his language abroad, of which there are ample proofs in his published correspondence, and the evasions and artifices he employed to carry his points at home, rendered him a dangerous representative of the foreign interests of the country. But the lesson of his dismissal was not altogether lost on him. Although his great reputation was chiefly earned as a foreign minister, it may be said that the last ten years of his life, in which he filled other offices, were not the least useful or dignified portion of his career.

Upon the formation of the cabinet of 1853, which was composed by the junction of the surviving followers of Sir Robert Peel with the Whigs, under the Earl of Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston accepted with the best possible grace the office of secretary of state for the home office, nor was he ever chargeable with the slightest attempt to undermine that Government. At one moment he withdrew from it, because Lord John Russell persisted in presenting a project of reform which appeared to him entirely out of season; and he advocated, with reason, measures of greater energy on the approach of war, which might possibly, if they had been adopted, have averted the contest with Russia. As the difficulties of the Crimean campaign increased, it was not Lord Palmerston but Lord John Russell who broke up the government by refusing to meet Roebuck's motion of inquiry. Palmerston remained faithful and loyal to his colleagues in the hour of danger. Upon the resignation of Lord Aberdeen and the Duke of Newcastle, the general sentiment of the House of Commons and the country called Palmerston to the head of affairs, and he entered, on the 5th of February 1855, upon the high office, which he retained, with one short interval, to the day of his death. Palmerston was in the seventy-first year of his life when he became prime minister of England.

A series of fortunate events followed his accession to power. In March 1855 the death of the emperor Nicholas removed his chief antagonist. In September Sebastopol was taken. The administration of the British army was reformed by a consolidation of offices. In the following spring peace was signed in Paris. Never since Pitt had a minister enjoyed a greater share of popularity and power, and, unlike Pitt, Palmerston had the prestige of victory in war. He was assailed in parliament by the eloquence of Gladstone, the sarcasms of Disraeli, and the animosity of the Manchester Radicals, hut the country was with him. Defeated by a hostile combination of parties in the House of Commons on the question of the Chinese war in 1857 and the alleged insult to the British flag in the seizure of the lorcha "Arrow", he dissolved parliament and appealed to the nation. The result was the utter defeat of the extreme Radical party and the return of a more compact Liberal majority. The great events of the succeeding years, the Indian Mutiny, and the invasion of Italy by Napoleon III, belong rather to the general history of the times than to the life of Palmerston; but it was fortunate that a strong and able government was at the head of affairs. Lord Derby's second administration of 1858 lasted but a single year, Palmerston having casually been defeated on a measure for removing conspiracies to murder abroad from the class of misdemeanour to that of felony, which was introduced in consequence of Orsini's attempt on the life of the emperor of the French. But in June 1859 Palmerston returned to power, and it was on this occasion that he proposed to Cobden, one of his most constant opponents, to take office, and on the refusal of that gentleman Milner Gibson was appointed to the board of trade, although he had been the prime mover of the defeat of the government on the Conspiracy Bill. Palmerston had learned by experience that it was wiser to conciliate an opponent than to attempt to crush him, and that the imperious tone he had sometimes adopted in the House of Commons, and his supposed obsequiousness to the emperor of the French, were the causes of the temporary reverse he had sustained. Although Palmerston approved the objects of the French invasion of Italy in so far as they went to establish Italian independence, the annexation of Savoy and Nice to France was an incident which revived his old suspicions of the good faith of the French emperor. About this time he expressed to the Duke of Somerset his conviction that Napoleon III had at the bottom of his heart a deep and unextinguishable desire to humble and punish England, and that war with France was a contingency to be provided against. The unprotected condition of the principal British fortresses and arsenals had long attracted his attention, and he succeeded in inducing the House of Commons to vote nine millions for the fortification of those important points.

In 1856 the projects for cutting a navigable canal through the Isthmus of Suez was brought forward by Ferdinand de Lesseps, and resisted by Palmerston with all the weight he could bring to bear against it. He did not foresee the advantages to be derived by British commerce from this great work, and he was strongly opposed to the establishment of a powerful French company on the soil of Egypt. The concession of land to the company was reduced by his intervention, but in other respects the work proceeded and was accomplished. It may here be mentioned, as a remarkable instance of his foresight, that Palmerston told Lord Malmesbury on his accession to the foreign office in 1858, that the chief reason of his opposition to the canal was this: he believed that, if the canal was made and proved successful, Great Britain, as the first mercantile state, and that most closely connected with the East, would be the power most interested in it; that England would therefore be drawn irresistibly into a more direct interference in Egypt, which it was desirable to avoid because England had already enough upon her hands, and because intervention might lead to a rupture with France. He therefore preferred that no such line of communication should be opened.

Upon the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Lord Palmerston acknowledged that it was the duty of the British government to stand aloof from the fray; but his own opinion led him rather to desire than to avert the rupture of the Union, which might have been the result of a refusal on the part of England and France to recognize a blockade of the Southern ports, which was notoriously imperfect, and extremely prejudicial to the interests of Europe. The cabinet was not of this opinion, and, although the belligerent rights of the South were promptly recognized, the neutrality of the Government was strictly observed. When, however, the Southern envoys were taken by force from the "Trent", a British packet, Palmerston did not hesitate a moment to insist upon a full and complete reparation for so gross an infraction of international law. But the difficulty with the American government over the "Alabama" and other vessels, fitted out in British ports to help the Southern cause, was only settled at last by an award extremely onerous to England.

The last transaction in which Palmerston engaged arose out of the attack by the Germanic Confederation, and its leading states Austria and Prussia, on the kingdom of Denmark and the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. There was but one feeling in the British public and the nation as to the dishonest character of that unprovoked aggression, and it was foreseen that Austria would before long have reason to repent her share in it. Palmerston endeavored to induce France and Russia to concur with England in maintaining the Treaty of London, which had guaranteed the integrity of the Danish dominions. But those powers, for reasons of their own, stood aloof, and the conference held in London in 1864 was without effect. A proposal to send the British fleet into the Baltic was overruled, and the result was that Denmark was left to her own resources against her formidable opponents. In the following year, on the 18th of October 1865, Lord Palmerston expired at Brocket Hall, after a short illness, in the eighty-first year of his age. His remains were laid in Westminster Abbey.

Although there was much in the official life of Lord Palmerston which inspired distrust and alarm to men of a less ardent and contentious temperament, he had a lofty conception of the strength and the duties of England, he was the irreconcilable enemy of slavery, injustice and oppression, and he labored with inexhaustible energy for the dignity and security of the Empire. In private life his buoyancy, his high breeding, made even his political opponents forget their differences; and even the warmest altercations on public affairs were merged in his large hospitality and cordial social relations. In this respect he was aided with consummate ability by the tact and grace of Lady Palmerston, the widow of the 5th Earl Cowper, whom he married at the close of 1839. and who died in 1869. She devoted herself with enthusiasm to all her husband's interests and pursuits, and she made his house the most attractive center of society in London, if not in Europe. They had no children, and the title became extinct, the property descending to Lady Palmerston's second son by Earl Cowper, W. F. Cowper-Temple, afterwards Baron Mount Temple, and then to her grandson Evelyn Ashley (1836-1907) son of her daughter, who married the 7th earl of Shaftesbury, who was Lord Palmerston's private secretary from 1858 to 1865.

Without further ado:

The first president of the United States was born at Bridges Creek, Westmoreland County, Virginia, on the 22nd (Old Style 11th) of February 1732. The genealogical researches of Henry E. Waters seem to have established the connection of the family with the Washingtons of Sulgrave, Northamptonshire, England. The brothers John and Lawrence Washington appear in Virginia in 1658. John took up land at Bridges Creek, became a member of the House of Burgesses in 1666, and died in 1676. His eldest son, Lawrence, married Mildred Warner, by whom he had three children -- John, Augustine (1694-1743) and Mildred. Augustine Washington married twice. By the first marriage, with Jane Butler, there were four children, two of whom, Lawrence and Augustine, grew to manhood. By the second marriage, in 1730, with Mary Ball, descendant of a family which migrated to Virginia in 1657, there were six children -- George, Betty, Samuel, John, Charles and Mildred. Upon the death of the father, Lawrence inherited the estate at Hunting Creek, on the Potomac, later known as Mount Vernon, and George the estate on the Rappahannock, nearly opposite Fredericksburg, where his father usually lived.

Of Washington's early life little is known, probably because there was little unusual to tell. The story of the hatchet and the cherry tree, and similar tales, are undoubtedly apocryphal, having been coined by Washington's most popular biographer, Mason Weems (d. 1825). There is nothing to show that the boy's life was markedly different from that common to Virginia families in easy circumstances; plantation affairs, hunting, fishing, and a little reading making up its substance. From 1735 to 1739 he lived at what is now called Mount Vernon, and afterwards at the estate on the Rappahannock. His education was only elementary and very defective, except in mathematics, in which he was largely self-taught; and although at his death he left a considerable library, he was never an assiduous reader. Although he had throughout his life a good deal of official contact with the French, he never mastered their language. Some careful reading of good books there must have been, however, for in spite of pervading illiteracy, common in that age, in matters of grammar and spelling, he acquired a dignified and effective English style. The texts of his writings, as published by Jared Sparks, have been so "edited" in these respects as to destroy their value as evidence; but the edition of Mr. Worthington C. Ford restores the original texts. Washington left school in the autumn of 1747, and from this time we begin to know something of his life. He was then at Mount Vernon with his half-brother Lawrence, who was also his guardian. Lawrence was a son-in-law of William Fairfax, proprietor of the neighboring plantation of Belvoir, and agent for the extensive Fairfax lands in the colony. Lawrence had served with Fairfax at Cartagena, and had made the acquaintance of Admiral Edward Vernon, from whom Mount Vernon was named. The story that a commission as midshipman was obtained for George through the good offices of the admiral, but that the opposition of the boy's mother put an end to the scheme, seems to lack proof. In 1748, however, through the influence of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, the head of the family, who had come to America to live, Washington, then only sixteen years of age, was appointed surveyor of the Fairfax property; and an appointment as public surveyor soon followed. The next three years were spent in this service, most of the time on the frontier. He always retained a disposition to speculate in western lands, the ultimate value of which he early appreciated; many of his later investments of this character are treated in C. W. Butterfield's Washington-Crawford Letters (1877). He seems, too, to have impressed others already with his force of mind and character. In 1751 he accompanied his half-brother Lawrence, who was stricken with consumption. to the West Indies, where he had an attack of smallpox which left him marked for life. Lawrence died in the following year, making George executor under the will and residuary heir of Mount Vernon; and the latter estate became his in 1761.

In October 1753, on the eve of the last French and Indian war, Washington was chosen by Governor Robert Dinwiddie as the agent to warn the French away from their new posts on the Ohio, in western Pennsylvania. He accomplished the winter journey safely, though with considerable danger and hardship; and shortly after his return was appointed lieutenant-colonel of a Virginia regiment, under Colonel Joshua Fry. In April 1754 he set out with two companies for the Ohio, defeated (28th May) a force of French and Indians at Great Meadows (in the present Fayette County, Pennsylvania), but at Fort Necessity in this vicinity was forced to capitulate (3rd July), though only after a vigorous defence. For his services he received the thanks of the House of Burgesses. When General Edward Braddock arrived in Virginia in February 1755, Washington wrote him a diplomatically worded letter, and was presently made a member of the staff, with the rank of colonel. His personal relations with Braddock were friendly throughout, and in the calamitous defeat he showed for the first time that fiery energy which always lay hidden beneath his calm and unruffled exterior. He ranged the whole field on horseback, making himself the most conspicuous target for Indian bullets, and, in spite of what he called the "dastardly behaviour" of the regular troops, saved the expedition from annihilation, and brought the remnant of his Virginians out of action in fair order. In spite of his reckless exposure, he was one of the few unwounded officers. In August, after his return, he was commissioned commander of the Virginia forces, being then twenty-three years old. For about two years his task was that of "defending a frontier of more than 350 m. with 700 men", a task rendered the more difficult by the insubordination and irregular service of his soldiers, and by irritating controversies over official precedence. To settle the latter question he made a journey to Boston, in 1756, to confer with Governor William Shirley. In the winter of 1757 his health broke down, but in the next year he had the pleasure of commanding the advance guard of the expedition under General John Forbes which occupied Fort Duquesne and renamed it Fort Pitt. At the end of the year he resigned his commission, the war in Virginia being at an end, and in January 1759 married Martha Dandridge (1732-1802), widow of Daniel Parke Custis.

For the next fifteen years Washington's life at Mount Vernon, where he made his home after his marriage, was that of a typical Virginia planter of the more prosperous sort, a consistent member and vestryman of the Established (Episcopal) Church, a large slave-holder, a strict but considerate master, and a widely trusted man of affairs. His extraordinary escape in Braddock's defeat had led a colonial preacher to declare in a sermon his belief that the young man had been preserved "to be the saviour of his country"; but if there was any such impression it soon died away, and Washington gave his associates no reason to consider him a man of uncommon endowments. His marriage brought him an increase of about $100,000 in his property, making him one of the richest men in the colonies; and he was able to develop his plantation and enlarge its extent. His attitude towards slavery has been much discussed, but it does not seem to have been different from that of many other planters of that day; he did not think highly of the system, but had no invincible repugnance to it, and saw no way of getting rid of it. In his treatment of slaves he was exacting, but not harsh, and was averse to selling them save in case of necessity. His diaries show a minutely methodical conduct of business, generous indulgence in hunting, comparatively little reading and a wide acquaintance with the leading men of the colonies, but no marked indications of what is usually considered to be "greatness." As in the case of Lincoln, he was educated into greatness by the increasing weight of his responsibilities and the manner in which he met them. Like others of the dominant planter class in Virginia, he was repeatedly elected to the House of Burgesses, but the business which came before the colonial assembly was for some years of only local importance, and he is not known to have made any set speeches in the House, or to have said anything beyond a statement of his opinion and the reasons for it. He was present on the 29th of May 1765, when Patrick Henry introduced his famous resolutions against the Stamp Act. That he thought a great deal on public questions, and took full advantage of his legislative experience as a means of political education, is shown by his letter of the 5th of April 1769 to his neighbor, George Mason, communicating the Philadelphia non-importation resolutions, which had just reached him. In this he considers briefly the best means of peaceable resistance to the policy of the ministry, but even at that early date faces frankly and fully the probable final necessity of resisting by force, and endorses it, though only as a last resort. In May following, when the House of Burgesses was dissolved, he was among the members who met at the Raleigh tavern and adopted a non-importation agreement; and he himself kept the agreement when others did not. Though on friendly terms with Governor Norborne Berkeley, Baron Botetourt and his successor, John Murray, earl of Dunmore, he nevertheless took a prominent part, though without speechmaking, in the struggles of the Assembly against Dunmore, and his position was always a radical one. As the breach widened, he even opposed petitions to the king and parliament, on the ground that the claims to taxation and control had been put forward by the ministry on the basis of right, not of expediency, that the ministry could not abandon the claim of right and the colonies could not admit it, and that petitions must be, as they already had been, rejected. "Shall we", he writes in a letter, "after this whine and cry for relief?"

On the 5th of August 1774 the Virginia convention appointed Washington as one of seven delegates to the first Continental Congress, which met at Philadelphia on the 5th of September, and with this appointment his national career, which was to continue with but two brief intervals until his death, begins. His letters during his service in Congress show that he had fully grasped the questions at issue, that he was under no delusions as to the outcome of the struggle over taxation, and that he expected war. "More blood will be spilled on this occasion", he wrote, "if the ministry are determined to push matters to extremity, than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America." His associates in Congress at once recognized his military ability, and although he was not a member of any of the committees of the Congress, he seems to have aided materially in securing the endorsement by Congress of the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, resolves looking towards organized resistance. On the adjournment of the Congress he returned to Virginia, where he continued to be active, as a member of the House of Burgesses, in urging on the organization, equipment and training of troops, and even undertook in person to drill volunteers. His attitude towards the mother country at this time, however, must not be misunderstood. Much as he expected war, he was not yet ready to declare in favor of independence, and he did not ally himself with the party of independence until the course of events made the adoption of any other course impossible. In March 1775 he was appointed a delegate from Virginia to the second Continental Congress, where he served on committees for fortifying New York, collecting ammunition, raising money and formulating army rules. It seems to have been generally understood that, in case of war, Virginia would expect him to act as her commander-in-chief, and it was noticed that, in the second Congress, he was the only member who habitually appeared in uniform. History, however, was to settle the matter on broader lines. The two most powerful colonies were Virginia and Massachusetts. The war began in Massachusetts, troops from New England flocking to the neighborhood of Boston almost spontaneously; but the resistance, if it was to be effective, must have the support of the colonies to the southward, and the Virginia colonel who was serving on all the military committees of Congress, and whose experience in the Braddock campaign had made his name favorably known in England, was the obvious as well as the politic choice. When Congress, after the fights at Lexington and Concord, resolved that the colonies ought to be put in a position of defense, the first practical step was the unanimous selection (June 15), on motion of John Adams of Massachusetts, of Washington as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United Colonies. Refusing any salary and asking only the reimbursement of his expenses, he accepted the position, asking "every gentleman in the room", however, to remember his declaration that he did not believe himself to be equal to the command, and that he accepted it only as a duty made imperative by the unanimity of the call. He reiterated this belief in private letters even to his wife; and there seems to be no doubt that, to the day of his death, he was the most determined skeptic as to his fitness for the positions to which he was successively called. He was commissioned on the 17th of June 1775, set out at once for Cambridge, Mass., and on the 3rd of July took command of the levies there assembled for action against the British garrison in Boston. The battle of Bunker Hill had already taken place, news of it reaching him on the way north. Until the following March, Washington's work was to bring about some semblance of military organization and discipline, to collect ammunition and military stores, to correspond with Congress and the colonial authorities, to guide military operations in widely separate parts of the country, to create a military system for a people entirely unaccustomed to such a thing and impatient and suspicious under it, and to bend the course of events steadily towards driving the British out of Boston. He planned the expeditions against Canada under Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold, and sent out privateers to harass British commerce. It is not easy to see how Washington survived the year 1775; the colonial poverty, the exasperating annoyances, the outspoken criticism of those who demanded active operations, the personal and party dissensions in Congress, the selfishness or stupidity which cropped out again and again among some of the most patriotic of his coadjutors were enough to have broken down most men. They completed his training. The change in this one winter is very evident. If he was not a great man when he went to Cambridge, he was both a general and a statesman in the fullest sense when he drove the British out of Boston in March 1776. From that time until his death he was admittedly the foremost man of the continent.

The military operations of the remainder of the War of Independence are described elsewhere. Washington's retreat through New Jersey; the manner in which he turned and struck his pursuers at Trenton and Princeton, and then established himself at Morristown, so as to make the way to Philadelphia impassable; the vigour with which he handled his army at the Brandywine and Germantown; the persistence with which he held the strategic position of Valley Forge through the dreadful winter of 1777-78, in spite of the misery of his men, the clamours of the people and the impotence and meddling of the fugitive Congress -- all went to show that the fibre of his public character had been hardened to its permanent quality. "These are the times that try mens souls", wrote Thomas Paine at the beginning of 1776, and the words had added meaning in each year that followed; but Washington had no need to fear the test. The spirit which culminated in the treason of Benedict Arnold was a serious addition to his burdens; for what Arnold did others were almost ready to do. Many of the American officers, too, had taken offense at the close personal friendship which had sprung up between the Marquis de Lafayette and Washington, and at the diplomatic deference which the commander-in-chief felt compelled to show to other foreign officers. Some of the foreign volunteers were eventually dismissed politely by Congress, on the ground that suitable employment could not be found for them. The name of one of them, Thomas Conway, an Irish soldier of fortune from the French service, is attached to what is called "Conway's Cabal", a scheme for superseding Washington by General Horatio Gates, who in October 1777 succeeded in forcing Burgoyne to capitulate at Saratoga, and who had been persistent in his depreciation of the commander-in-chief and in intrigues with members of Congress. A number of officers, as well as of men in civil life, were mixed up in the plot, while the methods employed were the lowest forms of anonymous slander; but at the first breath of exposure every one concerned hurried to cover up his part in it, leaving Conway to shoulder both the responsibility and the disgrace. The treaty of alliance of 1778 with France, following the surrender of Burgoyne, put an end to all such plans. It was absurd to expect foreign nations to deal with a second-rate man as commander-in-chief while Washington was in the field, and he seems to have had no further trouble of this kind. The prompt and vigorous pursuit of Sir Henry Clinton across New Jersey towards New York, and the battle of Monmouth, in which the plan of battle was thwarted by Charles Lee, another foreign recruit of popular reputation, closed the military record of Washington, so far as active campaigning was concerned, until the end of the war. The British confined their operations to other parts of the continent, and Washington, alive as ever to the importance of keeping up connection with New England, devoted himself to watching the British in and about New York City. It was in every way fitting, however, that he who had been the mainspring of the war from the beginning, and had borne far more than his share of its burdens and discouragements, should end it with the campaign of Yorktown, conceived by himself, and the surrender of Cornwallis (October 1781). Although peace was not concluded until September 1783, there was no more important fighting. Washington retained his commission until the 23rd of December 1783, when, in a memorable scene, he returned it to Congress, then in session at Annapolis, MD, and retired to Mount Vernon. His expenses during the war, including secret service money, aggregated about $64,000; in addition he expended a considerable amount from his private fortune, for which he made no claim to reimbursement.

By this time the popular canonization of Washington had fairly begun. He occupied a position in American public life and in the American political system which no man could possibly hold again. He may be said to have become a political element quite apart from the Union, or the states, or the people of either. In a country in which newspapers had at best only a local circulation, and where communication was still slow and difficult, the knowledge that Washington favored anything superseded, with very many men, both argument and the necessity of information. His constant correspondence with the governors of the states gave him a quasi-paternal attitude towards government in general. On relinquishing his command, for example, he was able to do what no other man could have done with either propriety or safety: he addressed a circular letter to the governors, pointing out changes in the existing form of government which he believed to be necessary, and urging "an indissoluble union of the states under one federal head", "a regard to public justice", the adoption of a suitable military establishment for a time of peace, and the making of "those mutual concessions which are requisite to the general prosperity." His refusal to accept a salary, either as commander-in-chief or as president, might have been taken as affectation or impertinence in any one else; it seemed natural and proper enough in the case of Washington, but it was his peculiar privilege. It is even possible that he might have had a crown, had he been willing to accept it. The army, at the end of the war, was justly dissatisfied with its treatment. The officers were called to meet at Newburgh, and it was the avowed purpose of the leaders of the movement to march the army westward, appropriate vacant public lands as part compensation for arrears of pay, leave Congress to negotiate for peace without an army, and "mock at their calamity and laugh when their fear cometh." Less publicly avowed was the purpose to make their commander-in-chief king, if he could be persuaded to aid in establishing a monarchy. Washington put a summary stop to the whole proceeding. A letter written to him by Colonel Lewis Nicola, on behalf of this coterie, detailed the weakness of a republican form of government as they had experienced it, their desire for "mixed government", with him at its head, and their belief that "the title of king" would be objectionable to but few and of material advantage to the country. His reply was peremptory and indignant. In plain terms he stated his abhorrence of the proposal; he was at a loss to conceive what part of his conduct could have encouraged their address; they could not have found "a person to whom their schemes were more disagreeable"; and he charged them, "if you have any regard for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your mind, and never communicate, as from yourself or any one else, a sentiment of the like nature." His influence, and his alone, secured the quiet disbanding of the discontented army. That influence was as powerful after he had retired to Mount Vernon as before the resignation of his command. The Society of the Cincinnati, an organization composed of officers of the late war, chose him as its first president; but he insisted that the Society should abandon its plan of hereditary membership, and change other features of the organization against which there had been public clamour. When the legislature of Virginia gave him 150 shares of stock in companies formed for the improvement of the Potomac and James rivers, and he was unable to refuse them lest his action should be misinterpreted, he extricated himself by giving them to educational institutions. His voluminous correspondence shows his continued concern for a standing army and the immediate possession of the western military posts, and his interest in the development of the western territory. From public men in all parts of the country he received such a store of suggestions as came to no other man, digested it, and was enabled by means of it to speak with what seemed infallible wisdom. In the midst of a burden of letter-writing, the minute details in his diaries of tree-planting and rotation of crops, and his increasing reading on the political side of history, he found time to entertain a stream of visitors from all parts of the United States and from abroad. Among these, in March 1785, were the commissioners from Virginia and Maryland, who met at Alexandria to form a commercial code for Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac, and made an opportunity to visit Mount Vernon. From that moment the current of events, leading into the Annapolis Convention of 1786 and the Federal Convention of the following year, shows Washington's close supervision at every point.

When the Federal Convention met at Philadelphia in May 1787 to frame the present constitution, Washington was present as a delegate from Virginia, though much against his will; and a unanimous vote at once made him the presiding officer. Naturally, therefore, he did not participate in debate; and he seems to have spoken but once, and then to favor an amendment reducing from 40,000 to 30,000 the minimum population required as a basis of representation in the House. The mere suggestion, coming from him, was sufficient, and the change was at once agreed to. He approved the constitution which was decided upon, believing, as he said, "that it was the best constitution which could be obtained at that epoch, and that this or a dissolution awaits our choice, and is the only alternative." As president of the convention he signed the constitution, and kept the papers of the convention until the adoption of the new government, when they were deposited in the Department of State. All his vast influence was given to secure the ratification of the new instrument, and his influence was probably decisive. When enough states had ratified to assure the success of the new government, and the time came to elect a president, there was no hesitation. The office of president had been "cut to fit the measure of George Washington", and no one thought of any other person in connection with it. The unanimous vote of the electors made him the first president of the United States; their unanimous vote elected him for a second time in 1792-93; and even after he had positively refused to serve for a third term, two electors voted for him in 1796-97. The public events of his presidency are given elsewhere. While the success of the new government was the work of many men and many causes, one cannot resist the conviction that the factor of chief importance was the existence, at the head of the executive department, of such a character as Washington. It was he who gave to official intercourse formal dignity and distinction. It was he who secured for the president the power of removal from office without the intervention of the Senate. His support of Hamilton's financial plans not only insured a speedy restoration of public credit, but also, and even more important, gave the new government constitutional ground on which to stand; while his firmness in dealing with the "Whisky Insurrection" taught a much-needed and wholesome lesson of respect for the Federal power. His official visits to New England in 1789, to Rhode Island in 1790 and to the South in 1791 enabled him to test public opinion at the same time that they increased popular interest in the national government. Himself not a political partisan, he held the two natural parties apart, and prevented party contest, until the government had become too firmly established to be shaken by them. Perhaps the final result would not in any case have failed, even had "blood and iron" been necessary to bring it about; but the quiet attainment of the result was due to the personality of Washington, as well as to the political sense of the American people.

It would be a great mistake to suppose, however, that the influence of the president was fairly appreciated during his term of office, or that he himself was uniformly respected. Washington seems never to have understood fully either the nature, the significance, or the inevitable necessity of party government in a republic. Instead, he attempted to balance party against party, selected representatives of opposing political views to serve in his first cabinet, and sought in that way to neutralize the effects of parties. The consequence was that the two leading members of the cabinet, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, exponents for the most part of diametrically opposite political doctrines, soon occupied the position, to use the words of one of them, of "two game-cocks in a pit." The unconscious drift of Washington's mind was toward the Federalist party; his letters to LaFayette and to Patrick Henry, in December 1798 and January 1799, make that evident even without the record of his earlier career as president. It is inconceivable that, to a man with his type of mind and his extraordinary experience, the practical sagacity, farsightedness and aggressive courage of the Federalists should not have seemed to embody the best political wisdom, however little he may have been disposed to ally himself with any party group or subscribe to any comprehensive creed. Accordingly, when the Democratic-Republican party came to be formed, about 1793, it was not to be expected that its leaders would long submit with patience to the continual interposition of Washington's name and influence between themselves and their opponents; but they maintained a calm exterior. Some of their followers were less discreet. The president's proclamation of neutrality, in the war between England and France, excited them to anger; his support of Jay's treaty with Great Britain roused them to fury. His firmness in thwarting the activities of Edmond Charles Edouard Genet, minister from France, alienated the partisans of France; his suppression of the "Whisky Insurrection" aroused in some the fear of a military despotism. Forged letters, purporting to show his desire to abandon the revolutionary struggle, were published; he was accused of drawing more than his salary; his manners were ridiculed as "aping monarchy"; hints of the propriety of a guillotine for his benefit began to appear; he was spoken of as the "stepfather of his country." The brutal attacks, exceeding in virulence anything that would be tolerated today, embittered his presidency, especially during his second term: in 1793 he is reported to have declared, in a cabinet meeting, that "he would rather be in his grave than in his present situation", and that "he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office, and that was every moment since." The most unpleasant portions of Jefferson's Anas are those in which, with an air of psychological dissection, he details the storms of passion into which the president was driven by the newspaper attacks upon him. There is no reason to believe, however, that these attacks represented the feeling of any save a small minority of the politicians; the people never wavered in their devotion to the president, and his election would have been unanimous in 1796, as in 1792 and 1789, had he been willing to serve.

He retired from the presidency in 1797, and returned to Mount Vernon, his journey thither being marked by popular demonstrations of affection and esteem. At Mount Vernon, which had suffered from neglect during his absence, he resumed the plantation life which he loved, the society of his family, and the care of his slaves. He had resolved some time before never to obtain another slave, and "wished from his soul" that Virginia could be persuaded to abolish slavery; "it might prevent much future mischief"; but the unprecedented profitableness of the cotton industry, under the impetus of the recently invented cotton gin, had already begun to change public sentiment regarding slavery, and Washington was too old to attempt further innovations. Visitors continued to flock to him, and his correspondence, as always, took a wide range. In 1798 he was made commander-in-chief of the provisional army raised in anticipation of war with France, and was fretted almost beyond endurance by the quarrels of Federalist politicians over the distribution of commissions. In the midst of these military preparations he was struck down by sudden illness, which lasted but for a day, and died at Mount Vernon on the 14th of December 1799. His disorder was an oedematous affection of the windpipe, contracted by exposure during a long ride in a snowstorm, and aggravated by neglect and by such contemporary remedies as bleeding, gargles of "molasses, vinegar and butter" and "vinegar and sage tea", which "almost suffocated him", and a blister of cantharides on the throat. He died as simply as he had lived; his last words were only business directions, affectionate remembrances to relatives, and repeated apologies to the physicians and attendants for the trouble he was giving them. Just before he died, says his secretary, Tobias Lear, he felt his own pulse; his countenance changed; the attending physician placed his hands over the eyes of the dying man, "and he expired without a struggle or a sigh." The third of the series of resolutions introduced in the House of Representatives five days after his death, by John Marshall of Virginia, later chief-justice of the Supreme Court, states exactly, if somewhat rhetorically, the position of Washingtion in American history: "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." His will contained a provision freeing his slaves, and a request that no oration be pronounced at his funeral. His remains rest in the family vault at Mount Vernon, which since 1860 has been held by an association, practically as national property.

All contemporary accounts agree that Washington was of imposing presence. He measured just 6 ft. when prepared for burial; but his height in his prime, as given in his orders for clothes from London, was 3 in. more. LaFayette says that his hands were "the largest he ever saw on a man." Custis says that his complexion was "fair, but considerably florid." His weight was about 220 lb. Evidently it was his extraordinary dignity and poise, forbidding even the suggestion of familiarity, quite as much as his stature, that impressed those who knew him. The various and widely differing portraits of him find exhaustive treatment in the seventh volume of Justin Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America. Winsor thinks that "the favorite profile has been unquestionably Houdon's, with Gilbert Stuart's canvas for the full face and probably John Trumbull's for the figure." Stuart's face, however, with its calm and benign expression, has fixed the popular notion of Washington.

Washington was childless: the people of his time said he was the father only of his country. Collateral branches of the family have given the Lees, the Custises, and other families a claim to an infusion of the blood.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend,

There are so many, many bad things in the world, but for some weird visceral reason, cannibalism is considered just about the worst. Depending on your point of view, it rises above even such criminal abominations as pedophilia, rape and genocide, but in the final analysis, it's what's for dinner.

Then again, we live in a culture in which people would run vomiting to the bathroom if they saw what went into making their McDonald's hamburgers, in which a cow is brutally killed with blunt-force trauma, its innards are outered, and then the whole thing is ground up into a mealy paste, intestines, feces, bones and all.

With McDonald's, you can mentally blank out the process in favor of focusing on the tasty fat-and-gristle laden product. With cannibalism, there is a nearly unavoidable tendency to linger on the details of the process—removing the limbs, peeling the skin, roasting it over an open flame, etc., etc. And do we really taste like chicken?

Cannibalism is, of course, the eating of one's own species. It should be distinguished from vampirism, which is the drinking of human blood. If you cut a fellow human up into little pieces and puree him or her in a blender, that would technically be cannibalism and not vampirism.

There are two kinds of cannibalism—sociological and pathological. The former means living and eating in a culture where cannibalism is accepted, and the latter means practicing cannibalism within a culture where it's not accepted.

There is a lot of controversy over the idea of sociological cannibalism, mostly because reports of its existence have been greatly exaggerated. Ever since human society expanded past the tribal stage, the charge of cannibalism has served as a primary justification for one social collective (European nation, Western religion, Aztecs) to annihilate another, usually militarily inferior social collective (aborigines, pagans, Mayans).

In many cases, these charges were wholly fabricated. Reports of social cannibalism are mostly pointed at the Americas and Africa, since these were the primary continents subjected to European killing and conquest sprees from the Middle Ages through modern times. Despite the political convenience of these claims, there are documented examples of cannibalistic cultures and practices.

There's no evidence that the Native Americans encountered in North America by the first European settlers had any history of cannibalism, although the accusation was repeated often enough. But there are some isolated examples that have been confirmed by recent research. Most demonstrable cannibal practices in North America were in the distant past, far earlier than Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In South America and Africa, there are more recent reports, or at least allegations.

Unfortunately for the weak of heart, we're all descended from cannibals. Recent genetic studies revealed that almost all humans have genes designed to provide immunity to certain diseases which can only be transmitted by eating human brains.

Based on what we know of recent tribal practices, it's generally thought that cannibalism was not treated like a night out at "Red Lobster," at least not within the time frame of the last 4,000 to 6,000 years. Instead, it usually was a spiritual ritual. In some cases, the bodies of enemies were consumed in order to absorb the enemies' strength; in other cases, the bodies of ancestors and relatives were consumed so that they would live on in the diners.

One of the most recent discoveries of active cannibalism practice was the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, which was only discovered by Westerners in the 20th century. The Fores had turned to cannibalism only recently, to compensate for the meager sources of protein on the Pacific island where they lived. Woman and children ate brains for protein, while the men of the tribe caught their own small game. This was working out OK for them until a bizarre brain disease struck the tribe and created devastating casualties and eventually led to the abandonment of the practice.

Of course, social and recreational cannibalism is not just the province of non-white aborigines. In 15th century Scotland, a highlander named Sawney Beane and his wife lived in a remote mountain pass, where they subsisted on a steady diet of unfortunate travelers, which they also fed to their 14 children, and a number of incestuous grandchildren. Needless to say, when the civilized world found out about this, their outrage was so great that they executed the entire family, amputating the limbs of the men so that they bled to death, and burning the women and children at the stake. Now that's civilized!

Other famous alleged cannibals in anthropology include the Anasazi tribe in North America, the Aztecs in Central America, and on islands like Fiji, where the menu of choices was necessarily limited by geography. It should be noted that these claims are all extremely controversial because nobody likes to think about the topic.

Having noted the controversy, feel free to subsequently ignore it, since most of the people arguing against cannibalism have been scientifically proven to be either a) recently descended from cannibals (and thus oversensitive) or b) idiots. Anthropology as a science is in deep trouble because anthropologists often find themselves persecuted for saying things people don't want to hear. If the anthropologists themselves ate each other, they would be subjected to less abuse than they get for saying long-dead cultures were cannibals.

Cannibalism as a modern phenomenon is much more interesting and fucked-up than the historical record, at any rate. Modern cannibals are almost always really bizarre and unpleasant people, so consistently that when regular folks are driven to eat other by impending starvation, it invariably becomes the subject of a movie and at least 15 Discovery Channel sweeps-week specials. Examples of the latter include the soccer players whose plane crashed in the Andes and inspired the movie "Alive," and of course, the infamous Donner Party.

The Donner Party was an expedition to the West Coast that had the misfortune of becoming stranded in a weekslong blizzard in the Sierra Nevada area. Lost in the mountains of California for nearly two months, they ran out of food and began to die. The company drew lots to determine who would be dinner, but then "didn't have the heart" to kill him. Luckily, he died from illness anyway. They skinned him, cut the meat from his bones and roasted it. When that ran out, they discussed murdering their Indian guides for dinner (apparently, they had the heart for that). The guides wisely took their chances with the blizzard, however they didn't make it far enough and ended up au jus.

As this went on for some time, the members of the party became unbalanced. It was bad enough watching a spouse die; toasting him on a spit afterward didn't comfortably fit into the five stages of grieving. Some members went insane and killed other members. Normally this would be considered a tragedy, but for the Donner Party it meant a smorgasbord. The party was eventually rescued by spring; by the end half the party of 87 had died. One of the rescuers described the sight:

Among the cabins lay the fleshless bones and half-eaten bodies of the victims of the famine. There lay the limbs, the skulls and the hair of the poor beings who had died from want and whose flesh preserved the lives of their surviving comrades who, shivering beneath their filthy rags and surrounded by the remains of their unholy feast, looked more like demons than human beings. They had fallen from their high estate, though compelled by the fell hand of dire necessity.

Another wrote: They had consumed two children of Jacob Donner. Mrs. Graves's body was lying there with almost all the flesh cut away from her arms and limbs. Her breasts were cut off, her heart and liver taken out. Her little child, about 13 months old, sat at her side, one arm upon the body of its mangled mother, sobbing bitterly, crying, "Ma! Ma! Ma!"

Cannibalism isn't just about survival, though. There have been plenty of non-survival cases of cannibalism reported in recent years. Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the most famous: He seduced at least 15 young men and boys back to his Milwaukee apartment, then tortured, sodomized, murdered, sodomized and barreled them, then butchered and ate was was left.

The late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada cannibalized most of his predecessor's underlings after a coup; 19th-century cannibal Alfred Packer later inspired Cannibal! The Musical (1996), an early film by the creators of South Park. The German cannibal Arwan Meiwes, who used Internet personal ads to find a victim, provided the basis for the recent musical smash All You Need (2004), as described by the San Francisco Chronicle:

All You Need has an air of youthfulness, with its rollicking live music, fresh-faced performers and quirkily episodic sensibility. [T]he wry tone sometimes recalls the radio show "This American Life" ... Sweeney Todd redux this isn't; [Director Erika] Shuch uses the metaphor of consumption to investigate all forms of desire. Jesse Howell and Jennifer Chien retread the "eat me" exchange as a tentative sexual proposition: "It's gonna hurt. ... It's not safe," they warn. An ensemble dance to the old standard "All of Me" takes on sinister shadings with the lines "take my lips ... take my arms."

Outside the Western world, Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu made a name for himself by eating a dead baby on film. It's not clear what the artistic merit of this act was supposed to be, but we're sure there must be some. The photo shown here prompted a massive furor about the Internet and art, as well as inspiring a purported "investigation" by the FBI and Scotland Yard, which included baseless threats by the latter agency to shut down Rotten Dot Com. It's not at all clear whether Zhu Yu actually ate a baby for the sake of art, or just simulated eating a baby for the sake of art, or actually ate a baby for the sake of his sick fetish thrills while claiming it was for the sake of art.

The name of Ed Gein might be less well-known than Dahmer or Amin, but his work has taken on mythological proportions. Gein was the rural hick cannibal who inspired everything from Psycho (1960, 1998) to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, 2003), in addition to to their countless sequels, prequels, spinoffs, and video game tie-ins. Bones and All (2022) breathed life back into cannibalism as something to be shown in a movie and here we are.

There have been more movies about Ed Gein than Plato. For that matter, Ed Gein is serious competition for Jesus Christ as a top box-office draw.

And when you think about it, Jesus has some cannibalism issues of his own. Most Christians engaged in ritual cannibalism of Jesus on a regular basis, and the Catholic Church insists that their version is actual literal cannibalism, and not just a symbolic gesture.

We had better not close out this discussion without answering the most pressing question everyone has about cannibalism: What do people taste like? We're assuming the taste of a hangnail doesn't carry over to the more succulent regions. Legend has it that spam tastes remarkably like human flesh [see Soylent Green]. Another popular comparison is pork, and of course we know everything "tastes like chicken."

But let's go straight to a legit source. According to the Andean soccer team, "the slight browning of the flesh gave it an immeasurably better flavor, softer than beef but with much the same taste."

Or as Mr. Burns once described “the sweet, gamey tang of human flesh”

So there you have it. I don't want to hear anymore of that pork crap.

That being said, its up on Telegram, which can be found at the bottom

I made an earlier entry about this when my twitter account was in exile, the thread of which you can find here:

Anyways, hope your week is unfolding seamlessly. Subscribe to 718TV. Buy a shirt. Issue #7 of Cars & Women dropping soon.

https://t.me/stainedhanes

American diplomat, statesman and scientist, born on the 17th of January 1706 in a house in Milk Street, opposite the Old South Church, Boston, Massachusetts. He was the tenth son of Josiah Franklin, and the eighth child and youngest son of ten children borne by Abiah Folger, his father's second wife. The elder Franklin was born at Ecton in Northamptonshire, England, where the strongly Protestant Franklin family may be traced back for nearly four centuries. He had married young and had migrated from Banbury to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1685. Benjamin could not remember when he did not know how to read, and when eight years old he was sent to the Boston grammar school, being destined by his father for the church as a tithe of his sons. He spent a year there and a year in a school for writing and arithmetic, and then at the age of ten he was taken from school to assist his father in the business of a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler. In his thirteenth year he was apprenticed to his half-brother James, who was establishing himself in the printing business, and who in 1721 started the New England Courant, one of the earliest newspapers in America.

Benjamin's tastes had at first been for the sea rather than the pulpit; now they inclined rather to intellectual than to other pleasures. At an early age he had made himself familiar with The Pilgrim's Progress, with John Locke, On the Human Understanding, and with a volume of The Spectator. Thanks to his father's excellent advice, he gave up writing doggerel verse (much of which had been printed by his brother and sold on the streets) and turned to prose composition. His success in reproducing articles he had read in The Spectator led him to write an article for his brother's paper, which he slipped under the door of the printing shop with no name attached, and which was printed and attracted some attention. After repeated successes of the same sort Benjamin threw off his disguise and contributed regularly to the Courant. When, after various journalistic indiscretions, James Franklin in 1722 was forbidden to publish the Courant, it appeared with Benjamin's name as that of the publisher and was received with much favor, chiefly because of the cleverness of his articles signed "Dr. Janus", which, like those previously signed "Mistress Silence Dogood", gave promise of "Poor Richard." But Benjamin's management of the paper, and particularly his freethinking, displeased the authorities; the relations of the two brothers gradually grew unfriendly, possibly, as Benjamin thought, because of his brother's jealousy of his superior ability; and Benjamin determined to quit his brothers employ and to leave New England. He made his way first to New York City, and then (October 1723) to Philadelphia, where he got employment with a printer named Samuel Keimer.

A rapid composer and a workman full of resource, Franklin was soon recognized as the master spirit of the shop. Sir William Keith (1680-1749), governor of the province, urged him to start in business for himself, and when Franklin had unsuccessfully appealed to his father for the means to do so, Keith promised to furnish him with what he needed for the equipment of a new printing office and sent him to England to buy the materials. Keith had repeatedly promised to send a letter of credit by the ship on which Franklin sailed, but when the Channel was reached and the ship's mails were examined no such letter was found. Franklin reached London in December 1724, and found employment first at Palmer's, a famous printing house in Bartholomew Close, and afterwards at Watts's Printing House. At Palmer's he had set up a second edition of William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated. To refute this book and to prove that there could be no such thing as religion, he wrote and printed a small pamphlet, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, which brought him some curious acquaintances, and of which he soon became thoroughly ashamed. After a year and a half in London, Franklin was persuaded by a friend named Denham, a Quaker merchant, to return with him to America and engage in mercantile business; he accordingly gave up printing, but a few days before sailing he received a tempting offer to remain and give lessons in swimming -- his feats as a swimmer having given him considerable reputation -- and he says that he might have consented "had the overtures been sooner made." He reached Philadelphia in October 1726, but a few months later Denham died, and Franklin was induced by large wages to return to his old employer Keimer; with Keimer he quarreled repeatedly, thinking himself ill used and kept only to train apprentices until they could in some degree take his place. In 1728 Franklin and Hugh Meredith, a fellow worker at Keimer's, set up in business for themselves; the capital being furnished by Meredith's father. In 1730 the partnership was dissolved, and Franklin, through the financial assistance of two friends, secured the sole management of the printing house. In September 1729 he bought at a merely nominal price The Pennsylvania Gazette, a weekly newspaper which Keimer had started nine months before to defeat a similar project of Franklin's, and which Franklin conducted until 1765. Franklin's superior management of the paper, his new type, "some spirited remarks" on the controversy between the Massachusetts assembly and Governor Burnet, brought his paper into immediate notice, and his success both as a printer and as a journalist was assured and complete. In 1731 he established in Philadelphia one of the earliest circulating libraries in America (often said to have been the earliest), and in 1732 he published the first of his Almanacks, under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders. These "Poor Richard's Almanacks" were issued for the next twenty-five years with remarkable success, the annual sale averaging 10,000 copies, and far exceeding the sale of any other publication in the colonies.

Beginning in 1733 Franklin taught himself enough French, Italian, Spanish and Latin to read these languages with some ease. In 1736 he was chosen clerk of the General Assembly, and served in this capacity until 1751. In 1737 he had been appointed postmaster at Philadelphia, and about the same time he organized the first police force and fire company in the colonies; in 1749, after he had written Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, he and twenty-three other citizens of Philadelphia formed themselves into an association for the purpose of establishing an academy, which was opened in 1751, was chartered in 1753, and eventually became the University of Pennsylvania; in 1727 he organized a debating club, the "Junto", in Philadelphia, and later he was one of the founders of the American Philosophical Society (1743; incorporated 1780); he took the lead in the organization of a militia force, and in the paving of the city streets, improved the method of street lighting, and assisted in the founding of a city hospital (1751); in brief, he gave the impulse to nearly every measure or project for the welfare and prosperity of Philadelphia undertaken in his day. In 1751 he became a member of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, in which he served for thirteen years. In 1753 he and William Hunter were put in charge of the post service of the colonies, which he brought in the next ten years to a high state of efficiency and made a financial success; this position he held until 1774. He visited nearly every post office in the colonies and increased the mail service between New York and Philadelphia from once to three times a week in summer, and from twice a month to once a week in winter. When war with France appeared imminent in 1754, Franklin was sent to the Albany Convention, where he submitted his plan for colonial union. When the home government sent over General Edward Braddock with two regiments of British troops, Franklin undertook to secure the requisite number of horses and wagons for the march against Ft. Duquesne, and became personally responsible for payment to the Pennsylvanians who furnished them. Notwithstanding the alarm occasioned by Braddock's defeat, the old quarrel between the proprietors of Pennsylvania and the assembly prevented any adequate preparations for defense; "with incredible meanness" the proprietors had instructed their governors to approve no act for levying the necessary taxes, unless the vast estates of the proprietors were by the same act exempted. So great was the confidence in Franklin in this emergency that early in 1756 the governor of Pennsylvania placed him in charge of the northwestern frontier of the province, with power to raise troops issue commissions and erect blockhouses; and Franklin remained in the wilderness for over a month, superintending the building of forts and watching the Indians. In February 1757 the assembly, "finding the proprietary obstinately persisted in manacling their deputies with instructions inconsistent not only with the privileges of the people, but with the service of the crown, resolv'd to petition the king against them", and appointed Franklin as their agent to present the petition. He arrived in London on the 27th of July 1757, and shortly afterwards, when, at a conference with Earl Granville, president of the council, the latter declared that "the King is the legislator of the colonies", Franklin in reply declared that the laws of the colonies were to be made by their assemblies, to be passed upon by the king, and when once approved were no longer subject to repeal or amendment by the crown. As the assemblies, said he, could not make permanent laws without the king's consent, "neither could he make a law for them without theirs." This opposition of views distinctly raised the issue between the home government and the colonies. As to the proprietors Franklin succeeded in 1760 in securing an understanding that the assembly should pass an act exempting from taxation the unsurveyed waste lands of the Penn estate, the surveyed waste lands being assessed at the usual rate for other property of that description. Thus the proprietors finally acknowledged the right of the assembly to tax their estates.

The success of Franklin's first foreign mission was, therefore, substantial and satisfactory. During this sojourn of five years in England he had made many valuable friends outside of court and political circles, among whom David Hume, William Robertson and Adam Smith were conspicuous. In 1759, for his literary and more particularly his scientific attainments, he received the freedom of the city of Edinburgh and the degree of doctor of laws from the university of St. Andrews. He had been made a Master of Arts at Harvard and at Yale in 1753, and at the college of William and Mary in 1756; and in 1762 he received the degree of D.C.L. at Oxford. While in England he had made active use of his remarkable talent for pamphleteering. In the clamor for peace following the death of George II (25th of October 1760), he was for a vigorous prosecution of the war with France; he had written what purported to be a chapter from an old book written by a Spanish Jesuit, On the Meanes of Disposing the Enemie to Peace, which had a great effect; and in the spring of 1760 there had been published a more elaborate paper written by Franklin with the assistance of Richard Jackson, agent of Massachusetts and Connecticut in London, entitled The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies, and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadeloupe (1760). This pamphlet answered the argument that it would be unsafe to keep Canada because of the added strength that would thus be given to any possible movement for independence in the English colonies, by urging that so long as Canada remained French there could be no safety for the English colonies in North America, nor any permanent peace in Europe. Tradition reports that this pamphlet had considerable weight in determining the ministry to retain Canada.

Franklin sailed again for America in August 1762, hoping to be able to settle down in quiet and devote the remainder of his life to experiments in physics. This quiet was interrupted, however, by the "Paxton Massacre" (December 14, 1763) -- the slaughter of a score of Indians (children, women and old men) at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, by some young rowdies from the town of Paxton, who then marched upon Philadelphia to kill a few Christian Indians there. Franklin, appealed to by the governor, raised a troop sufficient to frighten away the "Paxton boys", and for the moment there seemed a possibility of an understanding between Franklin and the proprietors. But the question of taxing the estates of the proprietors came up in a new form, and a petition from the assembly was drawn by Franklin, requesting the king "to resume the government" of Pennsylvania. In the autumn election of 1764 the influence of the proprietors was exerted against Franklin, and by an adverse majority of 25 votes in 4000 he failed to be re-elected to the assembly. The new assembly sent Franklin again to England as its special agent to take charge of another petition for a change of government which, however, came to nothing. Matters of much greater consequence soon demanded Franklin's attention.

Early in 1764 Lord Grenville had informed the London agents of the American colonies that he proposed to lay a portion of the burden left by the war with France upon the shoulders of the colonists by means of a stamp duty, unless some other tax equally productive and less inconvenient were proposed. The natural objection of the colonies, as voiced, for example, by the assembly of Pennsylvania, was that it was a cruel thing to tax colonies already taxed beyond their strength, and surrounded by enemies and exposed to constant expenditures for defense, and that it was an indignity that they should be taxed by a parliament in which they were not represented; at the same time the Pennsylvania assembly recognized it as "their duty to grant aid to the crown, according to their abilities, whenever required of them in the usual manner." To prevent the introduction of the Stamp Act, which he characterized as "the mother of mischief", Franklin used every effort, but the bill was easily passed, and it was thought that the colonists would soon be reconciled to it. Because he, too, thought so, and because he recommended John Hughes, a merchant of Philadelphia, for the office of distributor of stamps, Franklin himself was denounced -- he was even accused of having planned the Stamp Act -- and his family in Philadelphia was in danger of being mobbed. Of Franklin's examination, in February 1766, by the House in Committee of the Whole, as to the effects of the Stamp Act, Edmund Burke said that the scene reminded him of a master examined by a parcel of schoolboys, and George Whitefield said: "Dr. Franklin has gained immortal honor by his behavior at the bar of the House. His answer was always found equal to the questioner. He stood unappalled, gave pleasure to his friends and did honor to his country." Franklin compared the position of the colonies to that of Scotland in the days before the union, and in the same year (1766) audaciously urged a similar union with the colonies before it was too late. The knowledge of colonial affairs gained from Franklin's testimony, probably more than all other causes combined, determined the immediate repeal of the Stamp Act. For Franklin this was a great triumph, and the news of it filled the colonists with delight and restored him to their confidence and affection. Another bill (the Declaratory Act), however, was almost immediately passed by the king's party, asserting absolute supremacy of parliament over the colonies, and in the succeeding parliament, by the Townshend Acts of 1767, duties were imposed on paper, paints and glass imported by the colonists; a tax was imposed on tea also. The imposition of these taxes was bitterly resented in the colonies, where it quickly crystallized public opinion around the principle of "No taxation without representation." In spite of the opposition in the colonies to the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Acts and the tea tax, Franklin continued to assure the British ministry and the British public of the loyalty of the colonists. He tried to find some middle ground of reconciliation, and kept up his quiet work of informing England as to the opinions and conditions of the colonies, and of moderating the attitude of the colonies toward the home government; so that, as he said, he was accused in America of being too much an Englishman, and in England of being too much an American. He was agent now, not only of Pennsylvania, but also of New Jersey, of Georgia and of Massachusetts. Hillsborough, who became secretary of state for the colonies in 1768, refused to recognize Franklin as agent of Massachusetts, because the governor of Massachusetts had not approved the appointment, which was by resolution of the assembly. Franklin contended that the governor, as a mere agent of the king, could have nothing to do with the assembly's appointment of its agent to the king; that "the King, and not the King, Lords, and Commons collectively, is their sovereign; and that the King, with their respective Parliaments, is their only legislator." Franklin's influence helped to oust Hillsborough, and Dartmouth, whose name Franklin suggested, was made secretary in 1772 and promptly recognized Franklin as the agent of Massachusetts.

In 1773 there appeared in the Public Advertiser one of Franklin's cleverest hoaxes, "An Edict of the King of Prussia", proclaiming that the island of Britain was a colony of Prussia, having been settled by Angles and Saxons, having been protected by Prussia, having been defended by Prussia against France in the war just past, and never having been definitely freed from Prussia's rule; and that, therefore, Great Britain should now submit to certain taxes laid by Prussia -- the taxes being identical with those laid upon the American colonies by Great Britain. In the same year occurred the famous episode of the Hutchinson Letters. These were written by Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of Massachusetts, Andrew Oliver (1706-1774), his lieutenant-governor, and others to William Whately, a member of Parliament, and private secretary to George Grenville, suggesting an increase of the power of the governor at the expense of the assembly, "an abridgement of what are called English liberties", and other measures more extreme than those undertaken by the government. The correspondence was shown to Franklin by a mysterious "member of parliament" to back up the contention that the quartering of troops in Boston was suggested, not by the British ministry, but by Americans and Bostonians. Upon his promise not to publish the letters Franklin received permission to send them to Massachusetts, where they were much passed about and were printed, and they were soon republished in English newspapers. The Massachusetts assembly on receiving the letters resolved to petition the crown for the removal of both Hutchinson and Oliver. The petition was refused and was condemned as scandalous, and Franklin, who took upon himself the responsibility for the publication of the letters, in the hearing before the privy council at the Cockpit on the 29th of January 1774 was insulted and was called a thief by Alexander Wedderburn (the solicitor-general, who appeared for Hutchinson and Oliver), and was removed from his position as head of the post office in the American colonies.

Satisfied that his usefulness in England was at an end, Franklin entrusted his agencies to the care of Arthur Lee, and on the 21st of March 1775 again set sail for Philadelphia. During the last years of his stay in England there had been repeated attempts to win him (probably with an under-secretaryship) to the British service, and in these same years he had done a great work for the colonies by gaining friends for them among the opposition, and by impressing France with his ability and the excellence of his case. Upon reaching America, he heard of the fighting at Lexington and Concord, and with the news of an actual outbreak of hostilities his feeling toward England seems to have changed completely. He was no longer a peacemaker, but an ardent warmaker. On the 6th of May, the day after his arrival in Philadelphia, he was elected by the assembly of Pennsylvania a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. In October he was elected a member of the Pennsylvania assembly, but, as members of this body were still required to take an oath of allegiance to the crown, he refused to serve. In the Congress he served on as many as ten committees, and upon the organization of a continental postal system, he was made postmaster-general, a position he held for one year, when (in 1776) he was succeeded by his son-in-law, Richard Bache, who had been his deputy. With Benjamin Harrison, John Dickinson, Thomas Johnson and John Jay he was appointed in November 1775 to a committee to carry on a secret correspondence with the friends of America "in Great Britain, Ireland and other parts of the world." He planned an appeal to the king of France for aid, and wrote the instructions of Silas Deane who was to convey it. In April 1776 he went to Montreal with Charles Carroll, Samuel Chase and John Carroll, as a member of the commission which conferred with General Benedict Arnold, and attempted without success to gain the cooperation of Canada. Immediately after his return from Montreal he was a member of the committee of five appointed to draw up the Declaration of Independence, but he took no actual part himself in drafting that instrument, aside from suggesting the change or insertion of a few words in Thomas Jefferson's draft. From July 16 to September 28 he acted as president of the Constitutional Convention of Pennsylvania.

With John Adams and Edward Rutledge he was selected by Congress to discuss with Admiral Howe (September 1776, at Staten Island) the terms of peace proposed by Howe, who had arrived in New York harbor in July 1776, and who had been an intimate friend of Franklin; but the discussion was fruitless, as the American commissioners refused to treat "back of this step of independency." On the 26th of September in the same year Franklin was chosen as commissioner to France to join Arthur Lee, who was in London, and Silas Deane, who had arrived in France in June 1776. He collected all the money he could command, between £3000 and £4000, lent it to Congress before he set sail, and arrived at Paris on the 22nd of December. He found quarters at Passy, then a suburb of Paris, in a house belonging to Le Ray de Chaumont, an active friend of the American cause, who had influential relations with the court, and through whom he was enabled to be in the fullest communication with the French government without compromising it in the eyes of Great Britain.

At the time of Franklin's arrival in Paris he was already one of the most talked about men in the world. He was a member of every important learned society in Europe; he was a member, and one of the managers, of the Royal Society, and was one of eight foreign members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Three editions of his scientific works had already appeared in Paris, and a new edition had recently appeared in London. To all these advantages he added a political purpose -- the dismemberment of the British empire -- which was entirely congenial to every citizen of France. "Franklin's reputation", wrote John Adams with characteristic extravagance, "was more universal than that of Leibniz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire; and his character more esteemed and beloved than all of them... If a collection could be made of all the gazettes of Europe, for the latter half of the 18th century, a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon le grand Franklin would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever lived." "Franklin's appearance in the French salons, even before he began to negotiate", says Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, "was an event of great importance to the whole of Europe... His dress, the simplicity of his external appearance, the friendly meekness of the old man, and the apparent humility of the Quaker, procured for Freedom a mass of votaries among the court circles who used to be alarmed at its coarseness and unsophisticated truths. Such was the number of portraits, busts and medallions of him in circulation before he left Paris that he would have been recognized from them by any adult citizen in any part of the civilized world."

Franklin's position in France was a difficult one from the start, because of the delicacy of the task of getting French aid at a time when France was unready openly to take sides against Great Britain. But on the 6th of February 1778, after the news of the defeat and surrender of Burgoyne had reached Europe, a treaty of alliance and a treaty of amity and commerce between France and the United States were signed at Paris by Franklin, Deane and Lee. On the 28th of October this commission was discharged and Franklin was appointed sole plenipotentiary to the French court. Lee, from the beginning of the mission to Paris, seems to have been possessed of a mania of jealousy toward Franklin, or of misunderstanding of his acts, and he tried to undermine his influence with the Continental Congress. John Adams, when he succeeded Deane (recalled from Paris through Lee's machinations) joined in the chorus of fault-finding against Franklin, dilated upon his social habits, his personal slothfulness and his complete lack of business-like system; but Adams soon came to see that, although careless of details, Franklin was doing what no other man could have done, and he ceased his harsher criticism. Even greater than his diplomatic difficulties were Franklin's financial straits. Drafts were being drawn on him by all the American agents in Europe, and by the Continental Congress at home. Acting as American naval agent for the many successful privateers who harried the English Channel, and for whom he skillfully got every bit of assistance possible, open and covert, from the French government, he was continually called upon for funds in these ventures. Of the vessels to be sent to Paris with American cargoes which were to be sold for the liquidation of French loans to the colonies made through Beaumarchais, few arrived; those that did come did not cover Beaumarchais's advances, and hardly a vessel came from America without word of fresh drafts on Franklin. After bold and repeated overtures for an exchange of prisoners -- an important matter, both because the American frigates had no place in which to stow away their prisoners, and because of the maltreatment of American captives in such prisons as Dartmoor -- exchanges began at the end of March 1779, although there were annoying delays, and immediately after November 1781 there was a long break in the agreement; and the Americans discharged from English prisons were constantly in need of money. Franklin, besides, was constantly called upon to meet the indebtedness of Lee and of Ralph Izard (1742-1804), and of John Jay, who in Madrid was being drawn on by the American Congress. In spite of the poor condition in Europe of the credit of the struggling colonies, and of the fact that France was almost bankrupt (and in the later years was at war), and although Necker strenuously resisted the making of any loans to the colonies, France, largely because of Franklin's appeals, expended, by loan or gift to the colonies, or in sustenance of the French arms in America, a sum estimated at $60,000,000.

In 1781 Franklin, with John Adams, John Jay, Jefferson, who remained in America, and Henry Laurens, then a prisoner in England, was appointed on a commission to make peace with Great Britain. In the spring of 1782 Franklin had been informally negotiating with Shelburne, secretary of state for the home department, through the medium of Richard Oswald, a Scotch merchant, and had suggested that England should cede Canada to the United States in return for the recognition of loyalist claims by the states. When the formal negotiations began Franklin held closely to the instructions of Congress to its commissioners, that they should maintain confidential relations with the French ministers and that they were "to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without their knowledge and concurrence", and were ultimately to be governed by "their advice and opinion." Jay and Adams disagreed with him on this point, believing that France intended to curtail the territorial aspirations of the Americans for her own benefit and for that of her ally, Spain. At last, after the British government had authorized its agents to treat with the commissioners as representatives of an independent power, thus recognizing American independence before the treaty was made, Franklin acquiesced in the policy of Jay. The preliminary treaty was signed by the commissioners on the 30th of November 1782, the final treaty on the 3rd of September 1783. Franklin had repeatedly petitioned Congress for his recall, but his letters were unanswered or his appeals refused until the 7th of March 1785, when Congress resolved that he be allowed to return to America; on the 10th of March Thomas Jefferson, who had joined him in August of the year before, was appointed to his place. Jefferson, when asked, if he replaced Franklin, replied, "No one can replace him, sir; I am only his successor." Before Franklin left Paris on the 12th of July 1785 he had made commercial treaties with Sweden (1783) and Prussia (1785; signed after Franklin's departure by Jefferson and John Adams). Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on the 13th of September, disembarking at the same wharf as when he had first entered the city. He was immediately elected a member of the municipal council of Philadelphia, becoming its chairman; and was chosen president of the Supreme Executive Council (the chief executive officer) of Pennsylvania, and was re-elected in 1786 and 1787, serving from October 1785 to October 1788. In May 1787 he was elected a delegate to the Convention which drew up the Federal Constitution, this body thus having a member upon whom all could agree as chairman, should George Washington be absent. He opposed over-centralization of government and favored the Connecticut Compromise, and after the work of the Convention was done used his influence to secure the adoption of the Constitution. As president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Franklin signed a petition to Congress (12th February 1790) for immediate abolition of slavery, and six weeks later in his most brilliant manner parodied the attack on the petition made by James Jackson (1757-1806) of Georgia, taking off Jackson's quotations of Scripture with pretended texts from the Koran cited by a member of the Divan of Algiers in opposition to a petition asking for the prohibition of holding Christians in slavery. These were his last public acts. His last days were marked by a fine serenity and calm; he died in his own house in Philadelphia on the 17th of April 1790, the immediate cause being an abscess in the lungs. He was buried with his wife in the graveyard (Fifth and Arch Streets) of Christ Church, Philadelphia.

Physically Franklin was large, about 5 feet 10 inches tall, with a well-rounded, powerful figure; he inherited an excellent constitution from his parents -- "I never knew", says he, "either my father or mother to have any sickness but that of which they dy'd, he at 89, and she at 85 years of age" -- but injured it somewhat by excesses; in early life he had severe attacks of pleurisy, from one of which, in 1727, it was not expected that he would recover, and in his later years he was the victim of stone and gout. When he was sixteen he became a vegetarian for a time, rather to save money for books than for any other reason, and he always preached moderation in eating, though he was less consistent in his practice in this particular than as regards moderate drinking. He was always enthusiastically fond of swimming, and was a great believer in fresh air, taking a cold air bath regularly in the morning, when he sat naked in his bedroom beguiling himself with a book or with writing for a half-hour or more. He insisted that fresh, cold air was not the cause of colds, and preached zealously the "gospel of ventilation." He was a charming talker, with a gay humor and a quiet sarcasm and a telling use of anecdote for argument. Henri Martin, the French historian, speaks of him as "of a mind altogether French in its grace and elasticity." In 1730 he married Deborah Read, in whose father's house he had lived when he had first come to Philadelphia, to whom he had been engaged before his first departure from Philadelphia for London, and who in his absence had married a ne'er-do-well, one Rogers, who had deserted her. The marriage to Franklin is presumed to have been a common law marriage, for there was no proof that Miss Read's former husband was dead, nor that, as was suspected, a former wife, alive when Rogers married Miss Read, was still alive, and that therefore his marriage to Deborah was void. His "Debby", or his "dear child", as Franklin usually addressed her in his letters, received into the family, soon after her marriage, Franklin's illegitimate son, William Franklin, with whom she afterwards quarreled, and whose mother, tradition says, was Barbara, a servant in the Franklin household. Another illegitimate child became the wife of John Foxcroft of Philadelphia. Deborah, who was "as much dispos'd to industry and frugality as" her husband, was illiterate and shared none of her husband's tastes for literature and science; her dread of an ocean voyage kept her in Philadelphia during Franklin's missions to England, and she died in 1774, while Franklin was in London. She bore him two children, one a son, Francis Folger, "whom I have seldom since seen equal'd in everything, and whom to this day [thirty-six years after the child's death] I cannot think of without a sigh", who died (1736) when four years old of smallpox, not having been inoculated; the other was Sarah (1744-1808), who married Richard Bache (1737-1811), Franklin's successor in 1776-82 as postmaster-general. Franklin's gallant relations with women after his wife's death were probably innocent enough. Best known of his French amies were Mme. Helvetius, widow of the philosopher, and the young Mme. Brillon, who corrected her "Papa's" French and tried to bring him safely into the Roman Catholic Church. With him in France were his grandsons, William Temple Franklin, William Franklin's natural son, who acted as private secretary to his grandfather, and Benjamin Franklin Bache (1769-1798), Sarah's son, whom he sent to Geneva to be educated, for whom he later asked public office of Washington, and who became editor of the Aurora, one of the leading journals in the Republican attacks on Washington.

Franklin early rebelled against New England Puritanism and spent his Sundays in reading and in study instead of attending church. His freethinking ran its extreme course at the time of his publication in London of A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), which he recognized as one of the great errata of his life. He later called himself a deist, or theist, not discriminating between the terms. To his favorite sister he wrote: "There are some things in your New England doctrine and worship which I do not agree with; but I do not therefore condemn them, or desire to shake your belief or practice of them." Such was his general attitude. He did not believe in the divinity of Christ, but thought "his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is like to see." His intense practical-mindedness drew him away from religion, but drove him to a morality of his own (the "art of virtue," he called it), based on thirteen virtues each accompanied by a short precept; the virtues were Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity and Humility, the precept accompanying the last-named virtue being "Imitate Jesus and Socrates." He made a business-like little notebook, ruled off spaces for the thirteen virtues and the seven days of the week, "determined to give a week's strict attention to each of the virtues successively... [going] thro' a course compleate in thirteen weeks and four courses in a year", marking for each day a record of his adherence to each of the precepts. "And conceiving God to be the fountain of wisdom", he "thought it right and necessary to solicit His assistance for obtaining it", and drew up the following prayer for daily use: "O powerful Goodness! bountiful Father! merciful Guide! Increase in me that wisdom which discovers my truest interest. Strengthen my resolution to perform what that wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to Thy other children, as the only return in my power for Thy continual favors to me." He was by no means prone to overmuch introspection, his great interest in the conduct of others being shown in the wise maxims of Poor Richard, which were possibly too utilitarian but were wonderfully successful in instructing American morals. His Art of Virtue on which he worked for years was never completed or published in any form.

"Benjamin Franklin, Printer", was Franklin's own favorite description of himself. He was an excellent compositor and pressman; his workmanship, clear impressions, black ink and comparative freedom from errata did much to get him the public printing in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the printing of the paper money and other public matters in Delaware. The first book with his imprint is The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament and apply'd to the Christian State and Worship. By I. Watts..., Philadelphia: Printed by B. F. and H. M. for Thomas Godfrey, and Sold at his Shop, 1729. The first novel printed in America was Franklin's reprint in 1744 of Samuel Richardson's Pamela; and the first American translation from the classics which was printed in America was a version by James Logan (1674-1751) of Dionysius Cato's Moral Distichs (1735). In 1744 he published another translation of Logan's, Cicero On Old Age, which Franklin thought typographically the finest book he had ever printed. In 1733 he had established a press in Charleston, South Carolina, and soon after did the same in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in New Haven, Connecticut, in New York, in Antigua, in Kingston, Jamaica, and in other places. Personally he had little connection with the Philadelphia printing office after 1748, when David Hall became his partner and took charge of it. But in 1753 he was eagerly engaged in having several of his improvements incorporated in a new press, and more than twenty years after was actively interested in John Walter's scheme of "logography." In France he had a private press in his house in Passy, on which he printed "bagatelles." Franklin's work as a publisher is for the most part closely connected with his work in issuing the Gazette and Poor Richard's Almanack (a summary of the proverbs from which appeared in the number for 1758, and has often been reprinted -- under such titles as Father Abraham's Speech, and The Way to Wealth).

Of much of Franklin's work as an author something has already been said. Judged as literature, the first place belongs to his Autobiography, which unquestionably ranks among the few great autobiographies ever written. His style in its simplicity, facility and clearness owed something to Daniel Defoe, something to Cotton Mather, something to Plutarch, more to John Bunyan and to his early attempts to reproduce the manner of the third volume of the Spectator; and not the least to his own careful study of word usage. From Xenophon's Memorabilia he learned when a boy the Socratic method of argument. Jonathan Swift he resembled in the occasional broadness of his humor, in his brilliantly successful use of sarcasm and irony, and in his mastery of the hoax. Honoré de Balzac said of him that he "invented the lightning-rod, the hoax ('le canard') and the republic." Among his more famous hoaxes were the "Edict of the King of Prussia" (1773), already described; the fictitious supplement to the Boston Chronicle, printed on his private press at Passy in 1782, and containing a letter with an invoice of eight packs of 954 cured, dried, hooped and painted scalps of rebels, men, women and children, taken by Indians in the British employ; and another fictitious Letter from the Count de Schaumberg to the Baron Hohendorf commanding the Hessian Troops in America (1777) -- the count's only anxiety is that not enough men will be killed to bring him in moneys he needs, and he urges his officer in command in America "to prolong the war... for I have made arrangements for a grand Italian opera, and I do not wish to be obliged to give it up."

Closely related to Franklin's political pamphlets are his writings on economics, which, though undertaken with a political or practical purpose and not in a purely scientific spirit, rank him as the first American economist. He wrote in 1729 A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, which argued that a plentiful currency will make rates of interest low and will promote immigration and home manufactures, and which did much to secure the further issue of paper money in Pennsylvania. After the British Act of 1750 forbidding the erection or the operating of iron or steel mills in the colonies, Franklin wrote Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries (1751); its thesis was that manufactures come to be common only with a high degree of social development and with great density of population, and that Great Britain need not, therefore, fear the industrial competition of the colonies, but it is better known for the estimate (adopted by Adam Smith) that the population of the colonies would double every quarter-century; and for the likeness to Thomas Malthus's "preventive check" of its statement: "The greater the common fashionable expense of any rank of people the more cautious they are of marriage." His Positions to be examined concerning National Wealth (1769) shows that he was greatly influenced by the French physiocrats after his visit to France in 1767. His Wail of a Protected Manufacturer voices a protest against protection as raising the cost of living; and he held that free trade was based on a natural right. He knew Kames, Hume and Adam Smith, and corresponded with Mirabeau, "the friend of Man." Some of the more important of his economic theses, as summarized by W. A. Wetzel, are: that money as coin may have more than its bullion value; that natural interest is determined by the rent of land valued at the sum of money loaned -- an anticipation of Turgot; that high wages are not inconsistent with a large foreign trade; that the value of an article is determined by the amount of labor necessary to produce the food consumed in making the article; that manufactures are advantageous but agriculture only is truly productive; and that when practicable (as he did not think it practicable at the end of the War of Independence) state revenue should be raised by direct tax.

Franklin as a scientist and as an inventor has been decried by experts as an amateur and a dabbler; but it should be remembered that it was always his hope to retire from public life and devote himself to science. In the American Philosophical Society (founded 1743) scientific subjects were much discussed. Franklin wrote a paper on the causes of earthquakes for his Gazette of the 15th of December 1737; and he eagerly collected material to uphold his theory that waterspouts and whirlwinds resulted from the same causes. In 1743, from the circumstance that an eclipse not visible in Philadelphia because of a storm had been observed in Boston, where the storm although northeasterly did not occur until an hour after the eclipse, he surmised that storms move against the wind along the Atlantic coast. In the year before (1742) he had planned the "Pennsylvania fire-place", better known as the "Franklin stove", which saved fuel, heated all the room, and had the same principle as the hot-air furnace; the stove was never patented by Franklin, but was described in his pamphlet dated 1744. He was much engaged at the same time in remedying smoking chimneys, and as late as 1785 wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, physician to the emperor of Austria, on chimneys and draughts; smoking street lamps he remedied by a simple contrivance. The study of electricity he took up in 1746 when he first saw a Leyden jar, in the manipulation of which he became expert and which he improved by the use of granulated lead in the place of water for the interior armatures; he recognized that condensation is due to the dielectric and not to the metal coatings. A note in his diary, dated the 7th of November 1749, shows that he had then conjectured that thunder and lightning were electrical manifestations; in the same year he planned the lightning-rod (long known as "Franklin's rod"), which he described and recommended to the public in 1752, when the Copley medal of the Royal Society was awarded him for his discoveries. The famous experiment with the kite, proving lightning an electrical phenomenon, was performed by Franklin in June 1752. He overthrew entirely the "friction" theory of electricity and conceived the idea of plus and minus charges (1753); he thought the sea the source of electricity. On light Franklin wrote to David Rittenhouse in June 1784; the sum of his own conjectures was that the corpuscular theory of Isaac Newton was wrong, and that light was due to the vibration of an elastic aether. He studied with some care the temperature of the Gulf Stream. In navigation he suggested many new contrivances, such as watertight compartments, floating anchors to lay a ship to in a storm, and dishes that would not upset during a gale; and beginning in 1757 made repeated experiments with oil on stormy waters. As a mathematician he devised various elaborate magic squares and novel magic circles, of which he speaks apologetically, because they are of no practical use. Always much interested in agriculture, he made a special effort (like Robert R. Livingston) to promote the use of plaster of Paris as a fertilizer. He took a prominent part in aeronautical experiments during his stay in France. He made an excellent clock, which because of a slight improvement introduced by James Ferguson in 1757 was long known as Ferguson's clock. In medicine Franklin was considered important enough to be elected to the Royal Medical Society of Paris in 1777, and an honorary member of the Medical Society of London in 1787. In 1784 he was on the committee which investigated Franz Anton Mesmer, and the report is a document of lasting scientific value. Franklin's advocacy of vegetarianism, of sparing and simple diet, and of temperance in the use of liquors, and of proper ventilation has already been referred to. His most direct contribution to medicine was the invention for his own use of bifocal eyeglasses.

A summary of so versatile a genius is impossible. His services to America in England and France rank him as one of the heroes of the American War of Independence and as the greatest of American diplomats. Almost the only American scientist of his day, he displayed remarkably deep as well as remarkably varied abilities in science and deserved the honors enthusiastically given him by the savants of Europe.

Franklin's works were not collected in his own lifetime, and he made no effort to publish his writings. Experiments and Observations on Electricity (London, 1769) was translated into French by Barbeu Dubourg (Paris, 1773); Vaughan attempted a more complete edition, Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces (London, 1779); an edition in three volumes appeared after Franklin's death (London, 1806); what seemed the authentic Works, as it was under the care of Temple Franklin, was published at London (6 vols., 1817-19; 3 vols., 1818) and with some additional matter at Philadelphia (6 vols., 1818). Sparks's edition (10 vols., Boston, 1836-42; revised, Philadelphia, 1858) also contained fresh matter; and there are further additions in the edition of John Bigelow (Philadelphia, 1887-88; 5th ed., 1905) and in that by Albert Henry Smyth (10 vols., New York, 1905-07). There are important Frankliniana, about 13,000 papers, in the possession of the American Philosophical Society, to which they were conveyed by the son of Temple Franklin's executor, George Fox. Other papers which had been left to Fox lay for years in barrels in a stable garret; they were finally cleared out, their owner, Mary Fox, intending to send them to a paper mill. One barrel went to the mill. The others, it was found, contained papers belonging to Franklin, and this important collection was bought and presented to the University of Pennsylvania. The valuable Frankliniana collected by Henry Stevens were purchased by Congress in 1885. These manuscript collections were first carefully gone over for the edition of the Works by A. H. Smyth. Franklin's Autobiography was begun in 1771 as a private chronicle for his son, Governor William Franklin; the papers, bringing the story of his father's life down to 1730, were lost by the governor during the War of Independence, and in 1783 came into the possession of Abel James, who restored them to Franklin and urged him to complete the sketch. He wrote a little in 1784, more in 1788, when he furnished a copy to his friend le Veillard, and a little more in 1790. The original manuscript was long in the possession of Temple Franklin, who spent years rearranging the matter in it and making over into politer English his grandfather's plain-spokenness. So long was the publication delayed that it was generally believed that Temple Franklin had sold all the papers to the British government; a French version, Mémoires de la vie Privée (Paris, 1791), was retranslated into English twice in 1793 (London), and from one of these versions (by Robinson) still another French version was made (Paris, 1798). Temple Franklin, deciding to print, got from le Veillard the copy sent to him in 1788 (sending in return the original with autograph alterations and the final addition), and from the copy published (London, 1817) an edition supposed to be authentic and complete. The complete autograph of the biography, acquired by John Bigelow in 1867 from its French owners, upon collation with Temple Franklin's edition showed that the latter contained 1200 emasculations and that it omitted entirely what had been written in 1790. Bigelow published the complete Autobiography with additions from Franklin's correspondence and other writings in 1868; a second edition (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1888) was published under the title, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself.

A hillbilly from Tupelo, Elvis Aaron Presley was the first musical megastar of the rock and roll era, as well as being the most dramatic example of a celebrity transformed into a cult deity by premature death. Quite a bit could be learned about the nature of celebrity worship from the Cult of Elvis phenomenon that has emerged -- even more so than from the hysteria surrounding The Beatles -- but it generally tends to be regarded as no more than a freakish anomaly rather than an extreme form of what is actually a common human impulse; in fact, the fanaticism of Elvis' fans has now become as deeply rooted in Western (and other) popular culture as Presley and his music -- take a look at films such as True Romance (1993) or even Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) for two very different representations of this phenomenon. People have always displayed a need to create a larger-than life figure with which to associate themselves -- the shift to entertainment figures from political figures has been gradually taking place since the invention of the motion picture -- and Elvis has now become the patron saint of this tendency, sometimes even expressed as "fill-in-the-blank" is my Elvis, such as cartoonist Matt Groening's comment in a 1992 interview that "Frank Zappa is my Elvis."

Elvis Presley was brought into the world in 1935 by truck driver Vernon Presley and his seamstress wife Gladys Smith. His twin brother Jesse Garon Presley arrived at the same time but was stillborn, leaving Elvis to grow up as an only child. Raised in poverty, Elvis developed his singing talents at the famiy's Pentecostal church, and by the age of ten managed to win second prize at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show with a version of the song Old Shep (a performance broadcast by local station WELO); this accomplishment motivated his parents to buy him an acoustic guitar, after which the young Elvis spent as much of his free time as possible teaching himself to play. In 1948 his family moved him to Memphis, and it was here that Elvis fell under the influence of black R&B performers such as B. B. King by way of the thriving music scene centered around the city's Beale Street clubs.

In Memphis, Presley's musical abilities continued to gain recognition, and in his next talent show the shy teen earned first place through the enthusiasm of his classmates. Blue-collar work at a machinist's shop was taken immediately after graduation in 1953, but Elvis' ambitions to become a professional musician were not abandoned: that same year he paid $4 to record himself singing My Happiness and That's When Your Heartaches Begin at Sam Phillip's Memphis Recording Service, but he was disappointed by the results. After a short-lived job with the Precision Tool Company, Elvis spent a period in his father's vocation, driving a truck for Crown Electric while also attending night classes to become an electrician. A second attempt at recording (A Casual Love Affair and I'll Never Stand In Your Way) was made at the start of 1954, but this time with Phillips himself in attendance; intrigued by the young singer's performance, the Sun Records owner invited him back to create further recordings later in the year.

Despite Phillip's dissatisfaction with his first session with Presley, he remained convinced that the singer's version of black R&B had considerable potential. A backing band featuring guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black was assembled, and after a few months of rehearsal the tracks I Love You Because, Blue Moon Of Kentucky and That's All Right were recorded in July of 1954. The last of these three tracks (backed by Blue Moon Of Kentucky was then released by the Sun label as Presley's first single, causing an immediate stir in the local music scene: listener response to the song's airplay was enthusiastic, as was the audience response to the trio's subsequent club performances. Moore took on the role of manager for the group, and appearances at various Southern radio stations (and one at the Grand Ole Opry in September) continued to build on the initial success brought about by the single.

Later in the year, Elvis began to make regular appearances on the popular live radio program Louisiana Hayride, which continued throughout 1955. After releasing his second single Good Rockin' Tonight b/w I Don't Care If The Sun Don't Shine, he made his first televised performance on the local television version of Hayride in March of '55; by this time Moore had passed on management duties to disc jockey Bob Neal, who soon afterwards would be responsible for involving the dubious character Colonel Tom Parker in Presley's career. Public response continued to grow with each new release, the single Baby, Let's Play House b/w I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone climbing to #10 on the country charts in July of '55, followed by Presley's first #1 Mystery Train b/w I Forgot To Remember To Forget in September. This success increased the interest of Parker, who quickly pushed both Neal and Phillips out of the picture by arranging a lucrative contract for the singer with the RCA label.

With the re-release of his Sun singles on RCA, Presley's popularity quickly expanded from being a Southern to a nation-wide phenomenon. A series of performances on the national TV program Stage Show led to high-profile appearances on variety shows such as The Milton Berle Show, The Steve Allen Show and The Ed Sullivan Show throughout 1956 -- instigating a level of hype that would frequently result in riots at the singer's public appearances, and carried the first RCA-recorded single Heartbreak Hotel b/w I Was the One to the top of the mainstream pop charts. Parker took full advantage of the situation by arranging a seven-year contract for his client with Paramount Pictures, moving the focus of the next stage of Elvis' career from records to films. The first of these films, the Civil War drama Love Me Tender (1956) was met with enormous box-office success and even reasonably positive critical reviews.

Having been established as an international celebrity and the center of a multi-million dollar merchandising business, in 1957 Presley purchased Graceland Mansion as a home for himself and his family, where he would reside for the remainder of his life. His film career proceeded at full steam throughout '57 and '58, the feature Loving You (1957) once again providing him with the dual box office/record album success of Love Me Tender -- an achievement again repeated by his next two films Jailhouse Rock (1957) and King Creole (1958). Live performances also continued to be received with hysterical enthusiasm by crowds of teenagers throughout the U.S. (and, on a few occasions, in Canada). A widely-publicized interruption to this new lifestyle arrived in March of 1958, however, when Elvis reported to Fort Hood to begin basic training for the US Army, having received his draft notice in December of the previous year.

During the next two years the Army remained the focus of Presley's life, the singer only managing one recording session (scheduled after the completion of his training) before his discharge in 1960. The majority of his service was spent at Wiesbaden Air Force Base in Germany, and it was here that he met Priscilla Ann Beaulieu -- only 14 at the time, but whom he would eventually marry in 1967. The hype surrounding Presley was scrupulously maintained by Parker throughout his client's absence, and recording, television and film work was immediately resumed upon his re-entry into civilian life: the album Elvis is Back!, a television special called Frank Sinatra's Welcome Home, Elvis and the motion picture GI Blues were all completed and released before the end of 1960.

For the first few years of the 1960s, Presley's popularity remained unrivaled in his home country -- although response to the endless succession of the singer's films (his 21st (!) being released by the middle of 1965) went through unavoidable fluctuations. The arrival of the so-called British Invasion in the mid-60s (and particularly the impact of The Beatles) ultimately deflected the public taste in a different direction (despite the ironic fact many of these bands, Beatles included, would cite Presley as a major influence on their own creative output), and the social changes accompanying this shift in popular music also put the conservative-minded Presley out of step with the young people that used to stampede to his live performances. By 1966 attendance to his films began to decline, and his albums and singles ceased to enter the top 10; by his 28th film Live a Little, Love a Little (1968) his career was in an undeniable slump, the soundtrack album climbing only as high as #82 on the charts.

In an attempt to breathe some life into his stagnating career (and to restore his own enthusiasm for performing), in mid-1968 Presley staged a television special simply called Elvis, broadcast by NBC on December 3rd. This was his first performance in front of a live audience since a pair of concerts at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis in February of 1961, and featured a cross-section of his hit songs and musical styles, as well as reuniting him with Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana from his original band. The program did briefly restore some of Elvis' previous glory, receiving both high ratings and strong critical notices. Presley then followed up with what would prove to be his last #1 single, Suspicious Minds, in the latter half of 1969 -- although the fortunes of his excessive film output (his 31st feature, Change of Habit, limping it's way in and out of theaters in Novemeber of '69) continued to decline.

Upon the arrival of the 1970s, the focus of Presley's activities moved away from film projects and returned to live performances. Most of these shows took place at resort-oriented venues such the Las Vegas Hilton and the Sahara Hotel in Tahoe, with the singer staging extended engagements at the Hilton every year between 1970 and 1976. The single Burning Love placed Elvis at #2 on the mainstream charts in 1972, and during the first half of the 70s several other of his singles would top the charts in Germany and the UK, as well as the country charts in the States. By 1973, however, physical problems ranging between his addiction to prescription drugs, pneumonia, hepatitis and various complications brought about by his weight gain began to interfere with his performance schedule, and in 1975 he would be forced to spend periods in the hospital on two different occasions. His unhealthy lifestyle inevitably caught up with him, and while taking a break after several months of touring, Presley was found dead of heart failure in his Graceland home on August 16, 1977 at the age of 42.