Saturday, January 07, 2023

 The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson


Come for the serial killer; stay for the fair.

I will be absolutely honest and admit that I purchased the book because I was interested in the weird story of H.H.Holmes, American con-man, psychopath and serial killer. In fact, I will add to my confession, and shame, by saying that my interest was sparked by watching the episode of Timeless - a series unlikely to be renewed - where our trio of intrepid time-travelers goes back to the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition and have a misadventure in the "murder castle." I've never read anything by Erik Larsen before, but I know that he has a good number of books on the history section shelves and I’ve seen this book in passing for years.

I listened to this as an audiobook, and my initial reaction was that there was an awful lot more about the 1893 World’s Fair, especially the architecture of the World’s Fair than I was expecting or interested in. Frankly, my initial reaction was that all the detail about the planning of the Fair was getting in the way of the interesting bits about H.H. Holmes.

However, about halfway through the book, I found my interest shifting as I was sucked into the world of the Fair and the strangeness of the world right on the cusp of becoming the world we know, with lights and Cracker Jacks and Ferris wheels, but still possessing the instincts and customs of a more genteel and trusting age. I found that people like Frederick Law Olmsted and Daniel Burnham were becoming my heroes.

Larsen structures his book as alternating narratives. One narrative follows the twisted path of Holmes; the other follows the life of the fair. There is no doubt that the Holmes’ narrative starts out in the lead because of the natural human interest in evil, and Holmes was evil. Larsen describes Holmes as America’s first serial killer in an age when the language did not have the term “serial killer” to describe Holmes. Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett in 1861, studied medicine, married and abandoned his first wife, and then, took the test for a pharmacy license under the name of H.H. Holmes and made his way to Chicago. In Chicago, he bought a pharmacy from a widow, who he probably conned, married a second wife, deposited the wife and his child in a suburb of Chicago, and then came up with the idea of transforming land he had purchased into a hotel in time for the upcoming Fair.

Concerning the Holmes’ arc, two thoughts come to mind: first, he was psychopathic, and, second, he didn’t seem to understand how ridiculous his ideas were. For example, after scamming a brother-in-law, his plan to avoid discovery was to push the brother-in-law off of a roof. Who today would think such a thing would not be immediately seen for what it was? Likewise, Holmes built a hotel with secret rooms and gas lines to those rooms so that he could gas patrons, kill them and rob them. Women were constantly disappearing from his hotel, leaving their things behind. When the widow he bought his first pharmacy from simply disappeared, Holmes explained that she was visiting California. He courted and wed multiple wives simultaneously. His method for making bodies disappear was to have the bodies rendered into skeletons and then he would sell the skeletons to medical colleges.

Today, who could be so naive as to expect that any of this would not be discovered or noticed?

And that is partly the point. The era was a moment of transition. In the small towns that most people had lived in prior to the 1890s, everyone was under everyone else’s observation. In Chicago, however, the rules changed. People were anonymous and alone in a crowd. People were easy to lose in a world without phones or extensive police agencies. If someone went to California, it would take more than idle curiosity to locate them. It was a psychopath’s utopia.

Also, the casualness of death becomes apparent in Larsen’s book. For example, Burnham’s partner plunges into the October night and dies of pneumonia within a week. Larsen also describes how the sister of one of Holmes’ victims suddenly took sick and died within a week. She was probably poisoned, but in that age, it was not hard to believe that a healthy woman in her twenties could die of sickness so quickly. I was working on a train accident fatality lawsuit during the time I listened to this book, so this passage had some significance to me:

// Anonymous death came early and often. Each of the thousand trains that entered and left the city did so at grade level. You could step from a curb and be killed by the Chicago Limited. Every day on average two people were destroyed at the city’s rail crossings. Their injuries were grotesque. Pedestrians retrieved severed heads. There were other hazards. Streetcars fell from drawbridges. Horses bolted and dragged carriages into crowds. Fires took a dozen lives a day. In describing the fire dead, the term the newspapers most liked to use was “roasted.”//

In Fresno County where I live, which is a mostly rural county with a large urban population, there are only two unprotected crossings – without signals – in the entire county. The three people killed in this one accident was probably higher than the annual average for the last fifty years. Violent death was simply more common in the past.

On the other hand, Larsen presents the “White City” of the Fair as the world that was dawning. The Fair brought millions of visitors to a location with lights and cultural diversity and sanitation and police protection. The idea that the architects are the heroes of the book seems strange since architects rarely play the role of hero, but Larsen manages to invest tension throughout the story arc about the Fair. Thus, there is tension in whether the architects will get the Fair built in time, and then there is tension about whether the Fair will turn a profit in the face of the economic depression gripping the country. There is also the heroism of George Washington Gale Ferris and his eccentric idea of building a huge wheel that would carry “Pullman Car-sized” boxes for passengers, although the most heroic act of the book, I thought, was the willingness of Mrs. Ferris to ride the thing on its maiden voyage as a rain of extra bolts cascaded down from the structure.

I came to know and develop a liking for Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York’s Central Park. Burnham is forgotten today but contributed to many American cities.

My first term paper in history was one I wrote as a Junior in High School about Eugene V. Debbs and the Pullman Strike of 1894, so it was something of a homecoming for me to read about the events that were occurring just before that strike, and to think that Debs and Darrow probably visited the Fair, maybe they ran across Holmes and Burnham. It occurs to me now that the Pullman Strike of 1894 was in 1894 because the closing of the Fair in 1893 exacerbated the economic crisis. Larsen writes:

// Ten thousand construction workers also left the fair’s employ and returned to a world without jobs, already crowded with unemployed men. Once the fair closed, many thousands more would join them on Chicago’s streets. The threat of violence was as palpable as the deepening cold of autumn. Mayor Harrison was sympathetic and did what he could. He hired thousands of men to clean streets and ordered police stations opened at night for men seeking a place to sleep. Chicago’s Commercial and Financial Chronicle reported, “Never before has there been such a sudden and striking cessation of industrial activity.” Pig iron production fell by half, and new rail construction shrank almost to nothing. Demand for railcars to carry visitors to the exposition had spared the Pullman Works, but by the end of the fair George Pullman too began cutting wages and workers. He did not, however, reduce the rents in his company town. The White City had drawn men and protected them; the Black City now welcomed them back, on the eve of winter, with filth, starvation, and violence.//

Holmes’ story closes out with Holmes finally getting tripped up in an insurance swindle and an intrepid Pinkerton detective following the clues to prove that Holmes was a child killer among his other sins. In that way, Holmes’ story arc concludes as a true crime story about a true crime story.

Although I enjoyed and learned from this book, I would have to pick a nit with the “fictionalization” of some of the narrative. Larsen tells us that everything in his book is supported by documentary evidence, but he also acknowledges that he has made reasonable inferences about what happened at times. I think his inferences are reasonable, and I credit him for acknowledging what he has done, but I think that there are times when he offers his insights into what various people were thinking or feeling that he has gone too far and stepped outside of history proper into fiction. Obviously, this book is intended for the mass market and must keep readers interested. Also, we are a long way into non-fiction novels at this point, but there are moments when I as a history reader, was woken up by Larsen describing what a character felt (when I would probably never have objected to the same information being couched as something the person “might have thought,” so if you interpolate those words, the book is in the genre of history.)

In sum, don’t be confused; this is not a true crime story. It is a sociological history/novel about a particular time in American history. Your interest in this book will vary depending on whether you are buying it as a “true crime” or as history.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Roll left and crash...

...in this case, it is free speech itself.

//Walmart is pulling Cosmopolitan Magazine from its checkout lines. The magazine that made its name with provocative covers will no longer be found in Walmart on sale at the checkout lines, a move that the company is calling a "business decision" but which one advocacy group is touting as a victory against sexual exploitation.

Cosmopolitan, owned by Hearst Communications, describes itself as a "bible for fun, fearless females that reaches more than 18 million readers a month." In its early days, it made a splash with its provocative covers and sex advice for readers. It has been critiqued for marrying its racier content with young starlets on its covers.

In an emailed statement to CNBC on Tuesday night, Walmart said it "will continue to offer Cosmopolitan to customers that wish to purchase the magazine, but it will no longer be located in the checkout aisles." "While this was primarily a business decision, the concerns raised were heard," it said.//

Not long ago, Walmart pulling Cosmopolitan would have generated outrage by leftists who would mock Walmart for its censorship and prudishness.

Except that the left has been celebrating censorship and prudishness for the last decade and outright suppressing "distasteful" and "offensive' speech that offends the left.

So, how does the Left turn out to protest a conservative entity censoring "distasteful" and "offensive" speech without giving away its project?

Crazy times.


Sunday, March 04, 2018

Could Homo Erectus speak?

I just picked up Daniel Everett's book, "How Language Began", which argues that language goes back hundreds of thousands of years.  

On the other hand, there is another school of thought that says language and a fully functioning, self-aware mind was something that developed in the last 40,000 years, maybe the last 10,000.

Interesting.


Tough break for the "Spiritual but not Religious" community...

The CDF weighs in on the "neo-Gnostic" and "neo-Pelagian" strain in modern culture:

//12. The place where we receive the salvation brought by Jesus is the Church, the community of those who have been incorporated into this new kind of relationship begun by Christ (cf. Rom 8:9). Understanding this salvific mediation of the Church is an essential help in overcoming all reductionist tendencies. The salvation that God offers us is not achieved with our own individual efforts alone, as neo-Pelagianism would contend. Rather, salvation is found in the relationships that are born from the incarnate Son of God and that form the communion of the Church. Because the grace that Christ gives us is not a merely interior salvation, as the neo-Gnostic vision claims, and introduces us into concrete relationships that He himself has lived, the Church is a visible community. In her we touch the flesh of Jesus, especially in our poorest and most suffering brothers and sisters. Hence, the salvific mediation of the Church, “the universal sacrament of salvation”,[19] assures us that salvation does not consist in the self-realization of the isolated individual, nor in an interior fusion of the individual with the divine. Rather, salvation consists in being incorporated into a communion of persons that participates in the communion of the Trinity.

13. Both the individualistic and the merely interior visions of salvation contradict the sacramental economy through which God wants to save the human person. The participation in the new kind of relationships begun by Jesus occurs in the Church by means of the sacraments, of which Baptism is the door,[20] and the Eucharist is the source and the summit.[21] In this, the inconsistency of the claims to self-salvation that depend on human efforts alone can be seen. Faith confesses that we are saved by means of Baptism, which seals upon us the indelible mark of belonging to Christ and to the Church. The transformation of the way of living our relationships with God, with humanity, and with creation derives from Baptism (cf. Mt 28:19). Thus, purified from original, and all other sins, we are called to a new existence conforming to Christ (cf. Rom 6:4). With the grace of the seven sacraments, believers continually grow and are spiritually renewed, especially when the journey becomes more difficult. When they abandon their love for Christ by sinning, believers can be re-introduced into the kind of relationships begun by Christ in the sacrament of Penance, allowing them to again walk as He did (cf. 1 Jn 2:6). In this way, we look with hope toward the Last Judgement, in which each person will be judged on the authenticity of one’s love (cf. Rom 13:8-10), especially regarding the weakest (cf. Mt 25:31-46).//


Saturday, March 03, 2018

Being a Catholic is weird to non-Catholics.

It's even weird to Catholics.

We live in a Protestant world, and sometimes taking Christian doctrine seriously involves a disorienting shift in perspective.

For example, we believe in the resurrection, but do we really?

I'm totally schizophrenic about relics, like this guy:

//I’d brought my pilgrims to this shrine. I’m the one who put it on the schedule. It was all my doing. But I’m not sure I expected this. As I walked in the long line, waiting to come and venerate his relics I had quite the conversation with myself. I knew that the veneration of relics was an ancient practice. But this just seemed weird – I was going to get to the front and then kneel in front of a body to pray.

The Catholic Church
But this wasn’t just a body. This body belongs to a saint. He is part of the universal Church. Yes, his congregation is gathered around the throne of God and not in a parish, but he is still part of the one Church. He, together with all the saints, prays for those of us who are still sojourning on this earth.

I didn’t have an emotional experience before his body, but I came to a new understanding of the Communion of the Saints and the Resurrection of the Body. At the end of time, St. John Neumann’s body will be resurrected. He won’t get a new body. He’ll get this body made new. The same goes for me and you and our bodies. His body is no less his even though his spirit does not currently inhabit it. His body is no mere shell, it is an integral part of him, and will be returned to him.//



Sunday, February 25, 2018

Bad Week for the FBI, Continued.

Add to the FBI's failure to follow up on the Florida school shooter, the continued attention to the FBI's corruption in becoming an arm of the Hillary for President campaign.

Here is the Republicans response to the Democrat's efforts to paint the use of  politically funded campaign material to spy on Americans involved in the opposition political campaign as "perfectly normal."

If it is "perfectly normal", we are screwed as a country.


Another Chick-Fill-A moment.

This last week has been revealing.

//I just joined the National Rifle Association.

Although I’ve always been somewhat open-minded about gun control, especially high-powered weapons, the current mob mentality of the Left—incited by propagandists in the media—has closed my mind. The spectacle over the Florida school shooting proves the Left will exploit any tragedy, manipulate any victim, and demonize any detractor in their scorched-earth strategy to regain power. Further, its purported solution seeks to empower the public authorities who utterly and despicably failed to stop this massacre at every chance.

Unhinged elites + corrupt government = my gun.

The ruling class cannot be trusted. The revelation yesterday that a deputy sheriff stood down while helpless teenagers were slaughtered by a disturbed young man goes beyond a dereliction of duty. It reflects the lack of common decency pervasive among our protected institutions and their bureaucratic lackeys, whether they be positioned at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Veterans Administration hospitals, the top brass at the FBI, or in your local police force. In addition to their incompetence and inhumanity, we are further humiliated as they lie to us, place blame on others, and then get to “retire” with full benefits. (It’s only a matter of time before we find out Scot Peterson, the deputy who cowardly crouched outside Stoneman Douglas High School, listening to bullets and screams, will still get his taxpayer-funded pension and collect a sizable portion of his six-figure salary package.)//

A theme of this blog has been that we have incompetent elites. Initially, I was willing to cut some slack for the FBI and local sheriff who received multiple warnings about the most recent Florida shooters threats and actions, but every day we get another revelation about how detailed the information was, and then the revelation that the sheriff knew that at least one but maybe four of his deputies were waiting outside the building while unarmed, unprotected coaches and students ran in to do something to help, and that the sheriff went on CNN to blame the NRA knowing this, just underscores the toxic cocktail of arrogance and incompetence that we have come to expect.


Friday, February 09, 2018

Global Cooling and now this...

...Island nations are growing.


Does the Patriarchy compel women to drive slower and not work at peak times?

What else can be the reason for the pay gap between male and female drivers?

/Uber, which pays its drivers not on an inherently subjective individual basis but via a formula that takes into account time and mileage driven, still has a 7 percent pay gap between male and female drivers. That’s right: a company that allocates salary in a way that is necessarily blind to an employee’s sex has still generated a pay gap, because men and women make different choices.

It turns out that female Uber drivers work shorter hours, are less likely to work during peak times, and drive more slowly. Because the compensation structure is automatic, Stanford researchers were able to pin down the three factors that caused the gap: experience on the platform, willingness to work at peak times and in busy areas, and driving speed preferences.

We can safely assume that similar choices — for example, more flexible fields of study and employment, shorter hours, and desire for more time with family and friends — are largely responsible for the continued differences between average male and female salaries in other fields.

Analyzing Uber’s compensation sex differential in a structure that leaves no room for subjective decision-making from the employer should finally put to bed the lie that workplace discrimination is causing a significant wage gap between men and women.

Uber’s wage gap is just one more demonstration that discrimination is not a major factor holding women back in the workplace today. The so-called pay gap exists because men and women are not identical, and because we are free. That’s not cause for handwringing and quotas. Instead, our diversity is something we should celebrate.//


Thursday, February 08, 2018

Whoa!

Freakin' What?????

//Heinemeier’s method, they found that the smallest of the sharks they caught—those around seven feet long—were born after the bomb pulse, while the largest animals were born well before it. With the help of a mathematical model that linked size with age, they estimated that one sixteen-foot female was at least two hundred and seventy-two years old, and possibly as much as five hundred and twelve years old. Because it is difficult to establish background carbon-14 levels in the ocean, and because Nielsen and his colleagues didn’t know which part of the ocean the sharks had been born in, the figure was inexact. Still, it firmly established Greenland sharks as the longest-living vertebrates on Earth. In theory, the biggest ones could be nearly six centuries old.

The question now is how the sharks do it. Increasingly, scientists are searching the natural world for the genetic and behavioral mechanisms that endow creatures with their special abilities—that make elephants virtually immune to cancer, say, or axolotls capable of regenerating a lost limb. There may be Greenland sharks alive today that were born before Christopher Columbus; the species is not even thought to reach sexual maturity until around a hundred and fifty years of age. Why? The answer likely has to do with a very slow metabolism and the cold waters that they inhabit. But for now, Nielsen said, it’s yet another mystery. “I’m just the messenger on this,” he told me. “I have no idea.”//

I did not see that coming.
Millions thrown into the street by evil capitalists bloated with tax savings.

Actually, CVS is providing pay raises and paid parental leave.

It's hard to believe that a tax cut is having this kind of immediate effect.


Not comfortably fitting the accepted narrative.

Ignored by the liberal media; exposed by Fox News; free speech supported by conservatives.

Weird, right?

//On May 26, Friday morning, Fox News called. It was Tucker Carlson’s producer. The show was going to run a segment on Evergreen that night. Did Bret want to be part of it? No, he didn’t want to. But he felt he needed to. Fox was, at that point, the only member of the national news media that had shown up. YouTube was on fire with videos that protesters had posted, but most journalists were staying away, presumably because the story didn’t fit comfortable, mainstream narratives.

Two notable things happened after Bret went on Fox. One was that a substantial minority of our colleagues at Evergreen called for a “disciplinary investigation” against him. Why? Apparently, people on the Left aren’t allowed to talk to those on the Right. It is against the rules. Prohibitions against talking to “the other side” widens the intellectual fissure opening up in our society. It creates the very silos we are warned against. By speaking to others, Bret was breaking rank, and so treated like a deserter, or traitor. One thing we know is that when you’re being told by your antagonists who you’re not supposed to talk to, it’s probably a good indicator of who you should be talking to.

The other thing that happened after Bret went on Fox was that well over 1,000 viewers wrote to him. A couple of emails came from white nationalists, people perhaps similar to the New Jersey man who later phoned in a threat to the college, which shut the campus down for two days. Another email was a nasty piece of anti-Semitic hatred. But the overwhelming majority were supportive and eloquent. The writers were from across all known fault lines — socioeconomic class, race, national origin, location on the political spectrum. There were letters from First Nations people, high school students and university faculty, Evergreen students and alums, a man building a school in Uganda. And the thing that unites them is their call to stand strong. They say: Do not back down. And: At this moment, I am so glad to have respect for someone with whom I might politically disagree.

Doesn’t that sound like an antidote to the polarization that has gripped the body politic? An ability to reach out across prejudice and talk to people? To respect those with whom we do not share identical core beliefs?//


Apparently, 50 years of actual global cooling will "blunt" global warming.

Also, the sun has something to do with the Earth's temperature.

Other than that "the science is settled" and "PANIC!!! Because we are all going to die from rising ocean levels."

*Sheesh*

//Reduced sunspot activity has been observed and indicates the sun is heading into a 50 year reduced solar activity similar to what happened in the mid-17th century.

Comparison to similar stars indicates the reduced activity will cause 0.25% less UV for 50 years.

Modeling indicates that this will cause a few tenths of a degree of cooling.//

I like the sneer at "a few tenths of a degree of cooling."

When the Earth gets "a few tenths of a degree warmer," such as over the last 100 years, we are told that it presages a catastrophe.


https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/02/longer-winters-are-coming-in-reality-and-will-partially-blunt-global-warming-for-50-years.html
When did the premier law enforcement agency become so incompetent?

And why does that incompetence always work in Hillary's favor?

//The FBI didn’t flag that some emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server were marked classified with a “(C)” when they were sent — something that seemingly would have been one of the first and most obvious checks in an investigation, and one that FBI agents instantly recognized put the facts at odds with Clinton’s public statements.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General noticed it after the FBI missed it, texts between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, reveal. “Holy cow,” Strzok wrote, “if the FBI missed this, what else was missed?”

“Remind me to tell you to flag for Andy [redacted] emails we (actually ICIG) found that have portion marks (C) on a couple of paras. DoJ was Very Concerned about this,” he wrote.

“Found on the 30k [emails] provided to State originally. No one noticed. It cuts against ‘I never sent or received anything marked classified,'” he wrote, referring to statements by Clinton downplaying the danger of her email practices.

Much of the more in-depth investigation considered whether Clinton and her aides emailed materials that were classified but were not marked as such, a harder determination to make.

The exchange occurred on June 12, 2016. FBI Director Jim Comey disclosed the findings of marked-classified emails to the House on July 7.

On May 10, 2016, Strzok had suggested that in his mind, the investigation was closer to being finished than to just getting started — suggesting that if it weren’t for the inspector general, it might have closed down and cleared her despite missing the most obvious first step.

“I cannot overstate to you the sense of urgency about wanting to logically and effectively conclude this investigation,” he said.

The ommission allowed Clinton to repeatedly and prominently state that she had “never received nor sent any material that was marked classified” on her private email server while secretary of state.

She even said so at major debates, and because the FBI hadn’t caught the letter (C), and therefore never stated its findings, PolitiFact rated the claim “Half True.”

When the FBI belatedly noticed and relayed the truth, the fact-checking site said “Now we know it’s just plain wrong.”//


 
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