NATHAN HALE ~ June 6, 1755 ~ September 22, 1776

Nathan Hale (June 6, 1755 – September 22, 1776) was a soldier for the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Widely considered America's first spy, he volunteered for an intelligence-gathering mission, but was captured by the British. He is best remembered for his speech before being hanged following the Battle of Long Island, in which he said, "I only regret that I have but one life to give my country." Hale has long been considered an American hero and, in 1985, he was officially designated the state hero of Connecticut. A statue of Nathan Hale is located at the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Fairfax County, Virginia.

Image &Text:wikipedia.com

Nathan Hale had gone to Yale College. There's a handsome life-size bronze statue of him outside Connecticut Hall, the sole surviving brick building from the original campus in New Haven.

VIRGIL ~ October 15, 70 BCE ~ September 21, 19 BCE

Publius Vergilius Maro (also known by the Anglicised forms of his name as Virgil or Vergil) (October 15, 70 BCE – September 21, 19 BCE) was a classical Roman poet, best known for three major works—the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics and the Aeneid—although several minor poems are also attributed to him. The son of a farmer, Virgil came to be regarded as one of Rome's greatest poets. His Aeneid can be considered a national epic of Rome and has been extremely popular from its publication to the present day.

Image & Text:Wikipedia.com

JEAN SIBELIUS ~ December 8, 1865 ~ September 20, 1957

Jean Sibelius (8 December 1865 – 20 September 1957) was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period whose music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity.

The core of Sibelius's oeuvre is his set of seven symphonies. Like Beethoven, Sibelius used each one to develop further his own personal compositional style. Unlike Beethoven who used the symphonies to make public statements, and who reserved his more intimate feelings for his smaller works, Sibelius released his personal feelings in the symphonies. These works continue to be performed frequently in the concert hall and are often recorded.

In addition to the symphonies, Sibelius's best-known compositions include Finlandia, Valse Triste, the violin concerto, the Karelia Suite and The Swan of Tuonela (one of the four movements of the Lemminkäinen Suite). Other works include pieces inspired by the Kalevala, over 100 songs for voice and piano, incidental music for 13 plays, the opera Jungfrun i tornet (The Maiden in the Tower), chamber music, piano music, 21 separate publications of choral music, and Masonic ritual music.

Sibelius composed prolifically until the mid-1920s. However, soon after completing his Seventh Symphony (1924), the incidental music to The Tempest (1926), and the tone poem Tapiola (1926), he produced no large scale works for the remaining thirty years of his life. Although he is reputed to have stopped composing, he did attempt to continue writing, including abortive attempts to compose an eighth symphony. He wrote some Masonic music and re-edited some earlier works during this last period of his life, and retained an active interest in new developments in music, although he did not always view modern music favorably.

Image & Text:wikipedia.com

The BATTLE of POITIERS ~ September 19, 1356

The Battle of Poitiers was fought between the Kingdoms of England and France on 19 September 1356 near Poitiers, resulting in the second of the three great English victories of the Hundred Years' War: Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt.

Background

On 8 August 1356, Edward, the Black Prince began a great chevauchée (raid) north from the English base in Aquitaine, in an effort to relieve allied garrisons in central France, as well as to raid and ravage the countryside. His sortie met little resistance, his Anglo-Gascon forces burning numerous towns to the ground and living off the land, until they reached the Loire River at Tours. His army was unable to take the castle nor could they burn the town, due to a heavy downpour. His delay there allowed John II, King of France, to attempt to catch Edward's army and eliminate it. The King, who had been confronting Henry of Grosmont in Normandy, arranged the bulk of his army at Chartres to the north of the besieged Tours, dismissing around 15,000–20,000 of his low-grade infantry to increase the speed of his forces.

Upon receiving reports of the French army on the move, Edward decided a retreat was in order. He marched south pursued in earnest by John. The French caught up to the English a few miles southwest of Poitiers. A veteran of the battle of Crécy, at which he had fought when he was only sixteen years old, the Black Prince decided on the same tactical scheme employed at that earlier battle. He positioned his troops in a strongly defensive position, in a plain surrounded by natural obstacles, such as a creek on the left and a wood on the back. The luggage wagons, with a great amount of plunder, remained along the old Roman road, the main route from Poitiers to Bordeaux, to give protection to his weak right side. All his men dismounted and were organized in two, or perhaps three units, with longbowmen placed in a V-formation on both flanks. The Black Prince kept a small cavalry unit, commanded by Jean de Grailly, the Captal de Buch, hidden in the woods at the rear.

The attacking French forces were divided in four parts. At the front were around 300 elite knights, commanded by general Clermont and accompanied by German mercenary pikemen. The purpose of this group was to charge the archers and eliminate the threat they posed. These were followed by three groups of infantry (dismounted cavalry) commanded by the Dauphin (later Charles V of France), the Duke of Orléans and King John.

The Battle

At the beginning of the battle, the English simulated flight on their left wing. This provoked a hasty charge by the French knights against the archers. However, the English were expecting this and quickly attacked the enemy, especially the horses, with a shower of arrows. Belgian chronicler Jean Froissart writes that the French armour was invulnerable to the English arrows, that the arrowheads either skidded off the armor or shattered on impact. English history of the battle disputes this, as some claim that the narrow bodkin point arrows they used have been proven capable of penetrating most plate armour of that time period. While tests have been done to support this with fixed pieces of flat metal, armour was curved, so the point is debatable. Given the following actions of the archers, it seems likely Froissart was correct. The armour on the horses was weaker on the sides and back, so the archers moved to the sides of the cavalry and shot the horses in the flanks. This was a popular method of stopping a cavalry charge, as a falling horse often destroyed the cohesion of the enemy's line. The results were devastating.

This attack was followed by the Dauphin's infantry, who engaged in heavy fighting, but withdrew to regroup. The next wave of infantry under Orléans, seeing that the Dauphin's men were not attacking, turned back and panicked. This stranded the forces led by the King himself. This was a formidable fighting force, and the English archers were out of arrows: the archers joined the infantry in the fight and some of both groups mounted horses to form an improvised cavalry. Combat was hard, but the Black Prince still had a mobile reserve hidden in the woods, which were able to circle around and attack the French in the flank and rear. The French were fearful of encirclement and attempted to flee. King John was captured with his immediate entourage.

Aftermath

John II, the Good, being captured.The result was a decisive French defeat, not only in military terms, but also economically: France would be asked to pay a ransom equivalent to twice the country's yearly income to have the king returned. John, who was accorded royal privileges whilst being a prisoner, was permitted to return to France to try to raise the required funds. He subsequently handed himself back to the English, claiming to be unable to pay the ransom, and died a few months later. In many ways, Poitiers was a repeat of the battle of Crécy showing once again that tactics and strategy can overcome a disadvantage in numbers. As the Black Prince wrote shortly afterward in a letter to the people of London:

“ …it was agreed that we should take our way, flanking them, in such a manner that if they wished for battle or to draw towards us, in a place not very much to our disadvantage, we should be the first… the enemy was discomfited, and the king was taken, and his son; and a great number of other great people were both taken and slain…"

Image & Text:wikipedia.com

TRAJAN ~ September 18, 53 CE ~ August 8, 117 CE

Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus, commonly known as Trajan (18 September 53 – 8 August 117), was a Roman Emperor who reigned from A. D. 98 until his death in A. D. 117. Born Marcus Ulpius Traianus into a nonpatrician family in the Hispania Baetica province (modern day Spain), Trajan rose to prominence during the reign of emperor Domitian, serving as a general in the Roman army along the German frontier, and successfully crushing the revolt of Antonius Saturninus in 89. On September 18, 96, Domitian was succeeded by Marcus Cocceius Nerva, an old and childless senator who proved to be unpopular with the army. After a brief and tumultuous year in power, a revolt by members of the Praetorian Guard compelled him to adopt the more popular Trajan as his heir and successor. Nerva died on January 27, 98, and was succeeded by his adopted son without incident.

As a civilian administrator, Trajan is best known for his extensive public building program, which reshaped the city of Rome and left multiple enduring landmarks such as Trajan's Forum, Trajan's Market and Trajan's Column. It was as a military commander however that Trajan celebrated his greatest triumphs. In 101, he launched a punitive expedition into the kingdom of Dacia against king Decebalus, defeating the Dacian army near Tapae in 102, and finally conquering Dacia completely in 106. In 107, Trajan pushed further east and annexed the Nabataean kingdom, establishing the province of Arabia Petraea. After a period of relative peace within the Empire, he launched his final campaign in 113 against Parthia, advancing as far as the city of Susa in 116, and expanding the Roman Empire to its greatest extent. During this campaign Trajan was struck by illness, and late in 117, while sailing back to Rome, he died of a stroke on August 9, in the city of Selinus. He was deified by the Senate and his ashes were laid to rest under Trajan's Column. He was succeeded by his adopted son (not having a biological heir) Publius Aelius Hadrianus—commonly known as Hadrian.

As an emperor, Trajan's reputation has endured - he is one of the few rulers whose reputation has survived the scrutiny of nineteen centuries of history. Every new emperor after him was honoured by the Senate with the prayer felicior Augusto, melior Traiano, meaning "may he be luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan". Among medieval Christian theologians, Trajan was considered a virtuous pagan, while the 18th century historian Edward Gibbon popularized the notion of the Five Good Emperors, of which Trajan was the second.

Image & text:wikipedia.com

DAVID HACKETT SOUTER ~ September 17, 1939

David Hackett Souter (born September 17, 1939) served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1990 until his retirement from the Court on June 29, 2009. He filled the seat vacated by William J. Brennan, Jr.

Appointed by Republican President George H. W. Bush, Souter served on both the Rehnquist and current Roberts courts, and was often considered a member of the court's traditional liberal wing.

At the time of Souter's appointment, John Sununu assured President Bush and conservatives that Souter would be a "home run" for conservatism. In his testimony before the Senate, Souter espoused the concepts of originalism (as Bork had done) and was thus thought by conservatives to be a strict constructionist on constitutional matters. However, in the state attorney general's office and as a state Supreme Court judge, he had never been tested on matters of federal law.

Initially, from 1990 to 1993, Souter tended to be a conservative-leaning justice, although not as conservative as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas or William Rehnquist. In Souter's first year, Souter and Scalia voted alike close to 85 percent of the time; Souter voted with Kennedy and O'Connor about 97 percent of the time. The symbolic turning point came in two cases in 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court reaffirmed the essential holding in Roe v. Wade, and Lee v. Weisman, in which Souter voted against allowing prayer at a high school graduation ceremony. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Anthony Kennedy considered overturning Roe and upholding all the restrictions at issue in Casey. Souter considered upholding all the restrictions but still was uneasy about overturning Roe. After consulting with O'Connor, however, the three (who came to be known as the "troika") developed a joint opinion that upheld all the restrictions in the Casey case except for the mandatory notification of a husband while asserting the essential holding of Roe, that a right to an abortion is protected by the Constitution.

After the appointment of Clarence Thomas, Souter moved to the middle. By the late 1990s, Souter began to align himself more with Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on rulings, although as of 1995, he sided on more occasions with the more liberal justice, John Paul Stevens, than either Breyer or Ginsburg, both Clinton appointees. O'Connor began to move to the center. On the abortion issue, Souter began to vote to override restrictions he believed in back in 1992. On death penalty cases, worker rights cases, criminal rights cases, and other issues, Souter began voting with the liberals in the court. So while appointed by a Republican president and thus expected to be conservative, Souter came to be considered part of the liberal wing of the court. Because of this, many conservatives view the Souter appointment as a major error on the part of the Bush administration and have gone on to intensely scrutinize future potential Republican appointees on the standard of whether they would be reliable conservatives.

In April 2009, Souter announced that he would be retiring at the end of the current Supreme Court term in June. On May 26, 2009, President Obama announced that he was nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice Souter on the Court. Sotomayor was confirmed by by a 61 to 31 vote in the Senate on August 6, 2009.

Image & text:wikipedia.com

Today is also the birthday of my first cousin Claora Styron. Clae grew up in Lincoln, Mass.-- not far from David Souter's New Hampshire-- and now lives just a few blocks from me in the Mission District of San Francisco.

And appropriately-- considering Justice Souter's birthday -- it is the 226th Anniversary of the United States Constitution.

Small Business, Big Fable

(Courtesy of The Washington Post)

By Steven Pearlstein
Wednesday, July 8, 2009


One of the most enduring lies in American politics is the myth of small-business job creation.

You probably know it by heart: Small businesses create 60, 70, even 80 percent of all the new jobs in the United States.

Back in the 1980s, I was a senior editor at Inc. magazine, where I worked on some of the articles in which some of the seeds of this myth were planted. Up to that point, there was a widespread tendency to conflate the success of the economy with the fortunes of big business, so it was rather useful to have some data highlighting the importance of small firms.

By now, however, that analysis of net job creation has been repeated and embellished and oversimplified by so many lobbyists and politicians that it is only a matter of time before the magic number swells to 100 percent of job creation and small businesses will be demanding to be exempted from all taxes, all regulation and the Ten Commandments.

This is not the time or place for a long statistical explanation. Suffice it to say that, in terms of new job creation, the data show that most of it happens in a small number of very fast-growing companies that are no longer what most of us would consider small. There are lots of reasons for the success of these fast-growing firms, among them the ingenuity and hard work of their founders, the availability of capital and a culture that celebrates risk-taking.

But the dirty little secret is that a lot of small-business job growth has also been driven by the decision of big businesses to outsource many tasks that they used to do in-house. In an economic sense, jobs haven't been so much "destroyed" and "created" as they have been shifted from one company to another.

All of which brings us to the issue du jour: health-care reform.

From the beginning, President Obama and congressional leaders have said they want to pursue a reform agenda that builds on the existing employer-based health insurance system. One glaring problem with that employer-based system, however, is that every year more employers -- mostly small and mid-size businesses -- offer no health insurance. The result is that about 35 million American workers and their family members have no health insurance at all.

To fix that problem, most health reform proposals envision a new government-sponsored insurance "exchange" in each region through which all insurers would offer a basic health policy at the same price to all employers, regardless of size, and all workers, regardless of preexisting health conditions. For the exchanges to succeed in lowering the cost of insurance, all employers must be required to offer coverage and all employees must be required to purchase it.

The small-business lobby, however, remains just as stubbornly opposed to an "employer mandate" as it was 15 years ago when President Bill Clinton proposed it. Requiring small firms to offer health insurance, they warn, will drive millions of them out of business while sapping from all the others the profits they need to invest and grow. And since small business, as we all know, accounts for virtually all job creation, an employer mandate will stop the U.S. economy dead in its tracks.

This argument, of course, is 100 percent Grade A hooey, beginning with the myth of small-business job creation.

After all, one reason small businesses "created" all those jobs in the first place is that they enabled big companies with generous health plans to outsource work to small companies that had lower cost structures because they offered no insurance at all. If simply requiring those small businesses to offer health insurance would wipe out that cost advantage and drive them out of business, then maybe those companies weren't the great engines of innovation and efficiency that they always claimed they were.

Most likely, those small businesses today are no longer competing with big companies, but with other small firms with similar cost structures. Requiring all of them to offer health insurance wouldn't put any firm at a competitive disadvantage -- it would simply raise costs for all of them, forcing them to pass those costs on to someone else.

In the short run, that someone else would be customers. Business owners are always quick to claim that they can't raise prices because of competitive pressures, but if that were true, prices would never rise.

If a price increase is steep enough, some customers will probably decide to buy less of whatever the small businesses are selling, which could result in some job loss. But in the case of the cost of health insurance, a typical small company would be passing on a total cost increase of a couple of percentage points -- hardly the stuff of economic calamity.

Economists agree that in the long run, however, the increased cost for employee health benefits would be passed on to the employees themselves in the form of lower wages and salaries. That's what happened economy-wide in recent decades, as average wages stagnated while the cost of health insurance skyrocketed. If the same holds true for small businesses, then requiring them to provide health insurance should result in no job loss at all.

In the coming weeks, we'll find out if political mythology will continue to trump sound economic logic. After all, small businesses would be the big winners from those new health insurance exchanges, and Democrats in both the House and Senate have agreed to sweeten the proposal even further by offering tax breaks and exempting the smallest firms from any health insurance mandate. Still, most of the small-business lobby remains reluctant to sign on.

It gets you to thinking: Maybe there's a reason why these are small businesses.