Category: History

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Thursday/ consequences ⚖️

Stealing top secret documents from the White House (‘willful retention of national defense secrets’ is the charge, reportedly) and lying about it, bring consequences.
As simple as that.
This guy is continuing to making history— in a very bad way.

Friday Jun. 9  The DOJ unsealed its indictment of Trump today.
Prosecutors are charging Trump with 37 felonies, including 31 counts under the Espionage Act of ‘willful retention’ of classified records.
The charging docket also says that on at least two occasions, Trump showed classified records to visitors without security clearances at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey — including the map of a military operation to a representative of his political action committee.
[Information from Politico.com]

Reporting from the online Washington Post tonight.
Every little thing is not ‘Breaking News’ as the cable news networks like to call it, but this certainly is. Trump himself broke the news, actually, writing on social media that he has been summoned to federal court on Tuesday in Miami.
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Memorial Day

It’s Memorial Day here in the United States of America— the day for honoring and mourning the soldiers and personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.

Red poppies from a Capitol Hill garden here in Seattle.
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Wednesday/ stamps from Denmark 🇩🇰

My seller in Denmark sends me my stamps in envelopes decked out with beautiful stamps from yesteryear.

The descriptions are from the Scott 2012 Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, Vol 2 Countries C-F.

Highway Engineering, Engraved, Perf. 13
Issued 1972, Oct. 19
509 A150 40 Øre, Dark green, Bridge Across Little Belt
510 A150 60 Øre, Dark brown, Hanstholm Harbor
511 A150 70 Øre, Dark red, Lim Fjord Tunnel
512 A150 90 Øre, Dark bluegreen, Kundshoved Harbor
Queen Margrethe, Engraved, Perf. 13
Issued 1977
544 A161 100 Øre, Brown

Small State Seal, Engraved, Perf. 13
Issued 1972-1978
502 A55 4.5 Krone, Olive

Protected Animals, Engraved, Perf. 13
Issued 1975, Oct. 23
583 A174 130 Øre, Avocets

Souvenir Sheet for HAFNIA Intl. Stamp Exhibition in Copenhagen Aug. 20-29, 1976. Perf. 13½ x 13.
Ferslew’s Essays, 1849 and 1852
Issued 1975, Feb. 27
565 A168 Sheet of 4
a. 70 Øre, Gray, Coat of Arms
b. 80 Øre, Gray, King Frederik VII
c. 90 Øre, Brown, King Frederik VII
d. 100 Øre, Brown, Mercury
Booklet pane for Rosenborg Castle, 400th Anniversary
Issued 2006, Mar. 29
1351 A457 4.75 Krone, Multi-color, Rosenborg Castle exterior
1352 A457 5.50, Krone, Multi-color, Silver lion, thrones of king & queen
1353 A457 13 Krone, Multi-color, Royal coat of arms ceiling decoration

 

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Tuesday/ the long arm of the law👮

More than two years out, convictions and sentences are still getting handed out for the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Eduardo Medina writes for the New York Times:
Mr. Grider, who operates a vineyard in Central Texas, pleaded guilty last year to entering a restricted area and unlawfully parading at the Capitol, his lawyer said. He went to trial on seven other charges, including civil disorder and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., convicted him on all counts.
On Tuesday, Judge Kollar-Kotelly sentenced Mr. Grider to six years and 11 months in prison and ordered him to pay $5,055 in restitution and an $812 fine.
In March, Judge Kollar-Kotelly said in court that videos of the episode had clearly demonstrated “how Mr. Grider put himself at the center of this conflict, steps away from some of the most violent, lawless and reprehensible acts that occurred in the Capitol on that day.”
She then asked: “How close can a person be to unquestionably violent and completely unacceptable lynch-mob-like acts of others, and still claim to be a nondangerous, truly innocent bystander?”
Mr. Grider’s lawyer, Brent Mayr, said in an interview on Tuesday that his client “truly regrets his actions on Jan. 6 and apologizes to his family, his community and, most importantly, his country.”
But he added that they were “deeply disappointed that his sentence is significantly longer than others who did so much worse than him.”
“He did not assault any officers, much less threaten anyone with any violence before, during or after that day,” Mr. Mayr said. “The disparity in this sentence is very, very disappointing to us.”

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Saturday/ long live the King 👑

“I’m not particularly bothered. I’m not out here raging, angry about it, protesting. But I’m not the biggest fan.”
– Nicholas Sowemimo, 36, who spent part of his Saturday afternoon at The Hawley Arms, a well-known pub in North London, but he did not watch the coronation (reported by Derrick Bryson Taylor in the NYT).

The coronation depicted in a new set of stamps issued today by the Royal Mail.
(1st on the stamp means First Class Mail. And why the ‘Royal Mail’? The postal service was created in 1516 when Henry VIII knighted the first Master of the Posts, Sir Brian Tuke.
At first, the postal system was exclusively for use by the king and the royal court. Ordinary people were only allowed to use it more than a century later).

LONDON — Britain’s Charles III was crowned king on Saturday, during an eighth-century ritual in a 21st-century metropolis with a handful of concessions to the modern age but the unabashed pageantry of a fairy tale, unseen since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, his mother, in 1953.

“I come not to be served, but to serve,” Charles said in his first remarks of the ceremony, setting the theme for the intimate yet grand proceedings. The king, 74, was anointed with holy oil, symbolizing the sacred nature of his rule. He was vested with an imperial mantle, and the archbishop of Canterbury placed the ancient crown of St. Edward onto his head.
– As reported by Mark Landler in the New York Times

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Thursday/ a lot of trouble 😵

What is unbelievable is that this man, this immoral creature, still has sway over so many Americans. It would be comforting to imagine that a verdict in Carroll’s favor could break that spell, but we have learned the hard way: nothing will.
-Ruth Marcus, Associate Editor for the Washington Post

Trump’s trial for the rape & defamation of E. Jean Carroll started today.
Also— Last month Trump was charged in a New York State Supreme Court indictment with 34 counts of Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree, following a probe into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniel.
Also— Just today, Trump’s VP Mike Pence testified before a grand jury as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s probe of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn 2020 the election results.
Also— The culmination of a more than two-year investigation into Trump’s election interference in Georgia is expected this summer, led by a local prosecutor, Fani T. Willis of Fulton County.

We are told by the pollsters that this guy will likely be the Republican Party’s candidate for President of the United States for the 2024 general election.
Really?

E. Jean Carroll arrives to federal court in New York on Thursday. Carroll testified today that Trump had raped her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in New York three decades ago.
[Picture by Seth Wenig/AP]
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Tuesday/ a poem for a dinosaur 🦕

I found a poem in one of my books that came yesterday— one that is apt for the dinosaur from German toymaker Scheich that I had brought home in my suitcase.

Fossiel
Versteende geheime skuil
in jou primordiale hart.
Hier waar die jakkals nou huil
het oerdier vir oermens getart.

Fossil
Petrified secrets hide away
in your primordial heart.
Here where the jackal howls today,
primeval beast gave caveman a start.

Original Afrikaans poem by Isaac David du Plessis, published 1965.
The rough translation into English is my own.

Once this dinosaur had its teeth in you and shut its movable jaws, there was no escape. Monolophosaurus was a genus of tetanuran (stiff-tailed) theropod (hollow bones, three toes & a claw on each limb) dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic Shishugou Formation in what is now Xinjiang, China.
It was named for the single crest on top of its skull. They lived about 165 million years ago. Weight about 1,000 pounds (425 kg) and length about 18 ft (5 m).
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Friday/ a cold rain and coffee ☕️

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the 1930s— a photo from a store window display across from the church on Kurfürstenstraße.
[Photo by Ewald Gnilka]
It was only 7°C  (45 °F) today, with light rain— not enough to stop me from going out, though.

I was checking out the beautiful Wittenbergplatz U-bahn station when I realized the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church* is down the street, and I walked down in the rain to it to take a closer look.
(When I was here eight years ago, I just caught a glimpse of it on the way out to the airport).

Then it was time for coffee and a slice of banana bread at Starbucks nearby. Starbucks might be a little passé for many Americans, but not so for South Africans and for Germans. There were no seats left inside, so I sat outside on the only dry chair I could find. A little sparrow came for my bread crumbs that had fallen on the ground.

*During World War II, on the night of 23 November 1943, the church was extensively damaged in an air raid.

 

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Monday/ the Voortrekker Monument

The Voortrekker Monument is located just south of Pretoria in South Africa. The granite structure is located on a hilltop, and was raised to commemorate the Voortrekkers (pioneers) who left the Cape Colony between 1835 and 1854. It was designed by the architect Gerard Moerdijk.
Construction started on 13 July 1937 and the monument was inaugurated on 16 December 1949 by Prime Minister D. F. Malan.
[Information from Wikipedia entry for Voortrekker Monument].

I walked around the monument today, before going inside. I climbed the 299 granite steps from the carpark to the top (at the inside), in the process. From the ceiling balcony one looks down at a cenotaph* that says ‘Ons Vir Jou Suid-Afrika’ (‘We For You South Africa’). 

*A cenotaph is an empty tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person or group of people whose remains are elsewhere.

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Thursday/ stamps from the USA 🗽

All right— how about a smattering of vintage stamps from the United States, courtesy of a seller in Houston, Texas?
Amazingly, he used a stamp from 1934 on the envelope!

(Pro tip: Click on the picture. It’s fun to look at stamps with a magnifying glass).

1970 (5 Nov.) Christmas Perf.10½ x 11
#1410 837 6c Multicoloured, National Art Gallery ‘The Nativity’ by L. Lotto

1970 (21 Nov.) 350th Anniversary of Landing of Pilgrim Fathers in America
#1416 837 6c Multicoloured

1934 (8 Oct.) National Parks Year
#748 245 10c Grey, Mount Le Conte, Great Smoky Mountains

2001 (3 Aug.) Pre-sorted First Class Card Coil Stamp. Self-adhesive gum. Imperf x p11½
#3991 2590 (15c) Multicoloured, Woody Wagon

1973 (28 Sept.) American Revolution Bicentennial. Colonial Communications.
#1484 903 8c Multicoloured, Drummer
[Source: Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogue 2005, Part 22, United States]

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Wednesday/ about the Abrams tanks ⚙️

President Biden announced today that the U.S. will send 31 Abrams tanks to push back against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

From the New York Times:
But by promising Abrams tanks — which John F. Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said would take “many months” to be built by General Dynamics — Mr. Biden was able to give Mr. Scholz political cover to send Leopard tanks by early spring. And Germany’s decision opened the way for Spain, Poland and Finland to do the same, with Norway likely next to announce a similar contribution.

The latest versions of the Abrams and the Leopard tanks. These are models are both the third generation of tanks that were first designed and built in the 1970s.
The Abrams tank is named after WWII tank commander Creighton Williams Abrams, Jr. (1914-1974). It has a massive 500 gallon fuel tank for its 1,500-horsepower gas turbine engine that runs on jet fuel, gasoline or diesel. The engine is very reliable, but the high fuel consumption could present a serious logistic problem in places such as Ukraine.
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Tuesday/ mail from Malaga, Spain 📨

Very nice: the stamps I had purchased just 11 days ago from my seller in Spain, landed in my mailbox tonight. The mailman should be commended for still doing the rounds at 8 at night.

This time the mailing envelope has the dreaded computer-processed postage label on. (Some philatelists don’t mind: they collect even these machine-generated labels).

Correos (the name printed on the postage paid label) is a state-owned company responsible for providing postal service in Spain.
SWA on the stamps: South West Africa, Namibia’s name until independence in 1990.
RSA on the stamps: Republic of South Africa, South Africa’s official name since 1961 (before 1961 the country went by the Union of South Africa, and like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it was a self-governing dominion of the British Empire).
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Saturday/ a Great Britain stamp enigma

A little side benefit from buying stamps from sellers all over the world is that the senders sometimes paste whole sheets of stamps onto the envelope, instead of using a dreaded computer-generated black-and-white ‘stamp’ .

Why would the seller use these stamps from 30, 40 years ago, though?
He had an oversupply of stock?

Greetings Stamps. ‘Memories’ Set of 10
1992 (28 Jan.) Two phosphor bands
1592 (1st) multicoloured Flower Spray
1593 (1st) multicoloured Double Locket
1592 (1st) multicoloured Key
1592 (1st) multicoloured Model Car and Cigarette Cards
1592 (1st) multicoloured Compass and Map
1592 (1st) multicoloured Pocket Watch
1592 (1st) multicoloured 1854 1d. Red Stamp and Pen
1592 (1st) multicoloured Pearl Necklace
1592 (1st) multicoloured Marbles
1592 (1st) multicoloured Bucket, Spade and Starfish

Greetings Stamps. ‘Smiles’ Set of 10
1991 (26 Mar.) Two phosphor bands. Perf 15×14
1550-1559 (1st) multicoloured

British Anniversaries.
1971 (25 Aug.) Two phosphor bands
891 5p multicoloured Faraday Building, Southampton University

British Trees (2nd Issue)
1974 (27 Feb.) ‘All-over’ phosphor
949 10p multicoloured Horse Chestnut

‘Occasions’ Greetings Stamps
2003 (4 Feb.) Two phosphor bands, Perf 14½x14
2337 (1st) lemon and new blue ‘Gold star, See me, Playtime’
2338 (1st) red and deep ultramarine ‘I♥U, XXXX, S.W.A.L.K.*’
*XXXX is a beer and Sealed With A Loving Kiss, a World-War II postal acronym
2339 (1st) purple and bright yellow-green ‘Angel, Poppet, Little terror’
2340 (1st) bright yellow-green and red ‘Yes, No, Maybe’
2341 (1st) deep ultramarine and lemon ‘Oops! Sorry, Will try harder’
2342 (1st) new blue and purple ‘I did it! You did it! We did it!’
[From the 2011 ‘Collect British Stamps’ Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue]

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Thursday/ good news and bad news

Wow, great news that basketball star Brittney Griner will be home soon.
The Biden Administration could not (yet) secure the release of former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan who was detained in Moscow in 2018.

There are many other Americans being wrongfully detained by foreign governments as well. A State Department official remarked recently that the number is between 40 and 50.

Basketball player Brittney Griner (32) was swapped for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout (55). The Kremlin had pushed for more than a decade to get him released from prison in the United States.
P.S. I would have loved to travel to Russia, but I am inclined to agree with those that say the US State Dept should lump Russia with Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen (countries on the travel ban list for Americans).
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Friday/ honoring all who served 🤝

It was Veterans Day in the United States today, the day to honor the the veterans that had served in our nation’s armed forces.

Wars end, but their costs— in blood and treasure— go on for a very, very long time.

The estimated amount of direct Afghanistan and Iraq war costs that the United States has debt-financed as of 2020: $2 trillion.
The estimated interest costs by 2050 to pay for health care, disability, burial and other costs for roughly 4 million Afghanistan and Iraq veterans: Up to $6.5 trillion.
[Data reported in the Boston Globe in Aug. 2021 from a study by Linda Bilmes of Harvard University’s Kennedy School and from the Brown University Costs of War project].

US serviceman waves American flag during Veterans Day Parade in New York.
[Picture from history.com]
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Friday/ a king-sized rebranding is underway

The Wall Street Journal reports that the wheels have been set in motion in the United Kingdom for a vast effort to (eventually) replace the 29 billion coins and 4.7 billion bank notes in circulation that are carrying the likeness of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

The same will be true for stamps. The current definitive series first class mail stamps for the Royal Mail in the United Kingdom all feature the queen.
The Royal Mail has been around forever— well, almost. It was founded 506 years ago in 1516.
Stamps are a more recent invention: the first ones were printed in 1840.

A young Queen Elizabeth II features on the definitive stamps used in the United Kingdom. By 31 January 2023, all definitive stamps will require the barcode strip that it was sold with as well, to be valid. It’s an anti-counterfeiting measure, and the barcode will connect a piece of mail with features on the Royal Mail app (such as indicating to the sender if the mail had been delivered).
[Image from royalmail.com]
A little history: here is the famous Penny Black, the world’s first adhesive postage stamp used in a public postal system. It was issued in the United Kingdom on May 1, 1840, and featured Queen Victoria. The letters in the bottom corners indicate the stamp’s row and column in a printed sheet of stamps. The sheets had 20 rows of 12 columns. One full sheet cost 240 pence (one pound); one row of 12 stamps cost a shilling.
[From wikipedia.com]