(Roughly) Daily

Posts Tagged ‘Watergate

“Thou art a monument without a tomb, / And art alive still while thy book doth live / And we have wits to read and praise to give”*…

400 years ago this month, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, his friends John Heminge and Henry Condell published The First Folio, containing 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, (an endeavor which they financed with a bequest that he had left them).

Although 19 of Shakespeare’s plays had been published in quarto before 1623, the First Folio is arguably the only reliable text for about 20 of the plays, and a valuable source text for many of those previously published. Eighteen of the plays in the First Folio, including The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure among others, are not known to have been previously printed.

It is considered one of the most influential books ever published. Of perhaps 750 copies printed, 235 are known to remain, most of which are kept in either public archives or private collections. More than one third of the extant copies are housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which is home to a total of 82 First Folios.

It is also, as Alicia Andrzejewski and Carole Levin explain, one of the most stolen…

Late at night on July 13th, 1972, an unknown person entered the University of Manchester’s Library and violently smashed the plate glass top of an exhibition case, stealing the contents. Inside was one of the most famous, most valuable books in existence: the library’s near-perfect edition of one of Shakespeare’s First Folios. This theft is the most mysterious of all the stolen First Folios. More than fifty years have passed, and this First Folio—one of the 750 printed in 1623 and of the estimated 232 known copies across the globe today—is still missing.

This year, 2023, marks the 400th year anniversary of the printing of Shakespeare’s First Folio, deemed one of the most significant books in the English language, “a coveted treasure,” to quote Eric Rasmussen, an expert on the First Folios and author of The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios. Without the First Folio, we would not have many of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, the half that were not printed in his lifetime, including The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest. In collecting and printing these plays, Shakespeare’s two close friends and fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, validated that plays are more than entertainment—they have literary value.

The First Folios still in existence are mainly housed in public institutions—their significance is underscored by their rarity, as copies are almost never available for sale, and the most recent one sold in 2020 for almost ten-million dollars. Even in the seventeenth century, when the First Folios were first printed, they were only available to elite members of society: earls, lords, knights, admirals, and the occasional lawyer. To this day, ownership is limited to, and a fetish among, the super wealthy. Because of their elite status, Rasmussen speculates that, of the copies that cannot be located, most “have probably been stolen.”

For some, as Rasmussen suggests, the First Folio is coveted because of its monetary value, an object to steal and eventually attempt to sell. Three First Folios were stolen in the 20th century alone, including the Manchester Library’s copy, and the thieves in the latter two cases are characters as strange as some of those in Shakespeare’s plays, the heists as thrilling as some of his plots. The thefts we describe, and the desires that inspire them, speak to Shakespeare’s foothold in Western civilization—the reverence and awe so many people have for him, that imbue the First Folio with an almost religious power…

Some of the most brazen heists of a historic volume: “Shakespeare’s First Folio has been Stolen Many, Many Times,” in @CrimeReads.

* Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare” (in the First Folio)

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As we linger on literary larceny, we might recall that it was on this date fifty years ago that then-President Richard Nixon made his famous declaration of character:

On Nov. 17, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon held a news conference before Associated Press managing editors in Orlando, Fla., in which he defended himself against a number of allegations. Most of the questions related to the Watergate break-in, which had become even more of a scandal a month earlier with the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Other questions focused on reports that he had cheated on his tax returns.

The Nov. 18 New York Times outlined President Nixon’s many assertions, concluding that the president had acquitted himself well: “The president seemed composed and on top of the subject throughout the session, faltering perceptibly only during the discussion of his taxes. In contrast with some of his recent appearances he did not berate his critics or his political enemies.”

The best-remembered part of the news conference came as the president defended himself against claims that he had illicitly profited from his years in public service. “I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service — I earned every cent,” he said. “And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.”

The news conference did little to end questions over Mr. Nixon’s honesty. His declaration “I’m not a crook” was used against him — and the line would forever be associated with the Watergate era.

In April 1974, the Internal Revenue Service ordered that the president pay more than $400,000 in back taxes for making improper deductions. And the Watergate investigation continued to uncover misconduct. In August 1974, with the House Judiciary Committee having recommended impeachment and the release of a “smoking gun” tape showing that he had approved a cover-up, the president resigned…

“Nixon Declares ‘I Am Not a Crook’”

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“Knowledge of means without knowledge of ends is animal training”*…

Spy vs.Spy

According to a March 1967 report entitled “Views on Trained Cats [Redacted] for [Redacted] Use,” the CIA stuffed a real, live cat with electronic spying equipment and attempted to train it to spy on America’s Cold War rivals.  The report states that Acoustic Kitty (as the project is commonly known) was a “remarkable scientific achievement.” Unfortunately, the report also states that the continued use of live cats as eavesdropping devices “would not be practical.”

According to Victor Marchetti [an ex-Deputy Director of the CIA]: “A lot of money was spent. They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that. Finally they’re ready. They took it out to a park and pointed it at a park bench and said, ‘Listen to those two guys…’ They put him out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over. There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead!”…

Acoustic Kitty

For more on animal training adventures in the security services, see “The CIA’s Most Highly-Trained Spies Weren’t Even Human.”

Steve Martin

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As we study subterfuge, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that transcripts of the audiotaped White House conversations between President Richard Nixon and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman were released to the public. Considered at the time a “smoking gun,” the transcripts confirmed Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up– and precipitated Nixon’s resignation three days later.

Transcripts of the Watergate tapes arriving on Capitol Hill to be turned over to the House Judiciary Committee.

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“The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue”*…

 

Nytimes_hq-2

 

Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription  to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.

But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free…

The political economy of bullshit– and thoughts on a remedy: “The Truth is Paywalled But the Lies are Free.”

On a related (and somewhat complicating) note, see also “It is possible to compete with the New York Times. Here’s how,” the source of the image above.

* Edward R. Murrow

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As we do like Diogenes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that President Richard M. Nixon resigned, as a result of the Watergate scandal— which was itself, of course, in large measure the result of (expensive) investigatory journalism of the highest quality.

 

Nixon departing the White House after his resignation (source)

 

Written by (Roughly) Daily

August 9, 2020 at 1:01 am

“Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersection, no fish, and no ducks. OK?”*…

 

Regulation

 

After a characteristically-clear explanation of the ways in which the “monopoly practice” concerns around Google, Amazon, and the other on-line giants are different from those the U.S. has traditionally tried to manage– they limit/manage choice– the ever-illuminating Tim O’Reilly argues for a fresh approach to anti-trust:

So how are we therefore best to decide if these Big Tech platforms need to be regulated?

In one famous exchange, Bill Gates, the founder and former CEO of Microsoft, told Chamath Palihapitiya, the one-time head of the Facebook platform:

“This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”

Given this understanding of the role of a platform, regulators should be looking to measure whether companies like Amazon or Google are continuing to provide opportunity for their ecosystem of suppliers, or if they’re increasing their own returns at the expense of that ecosystem.

Rather than just asking whether consumers benefit in the short term from the companies’ actions, regulators should be looking at the long-term health of the marketplace of suppliers—they are the real source of that consumer benefit, not the platforms alone. Have Amazon, Apple, or Google

earned

their profits, or are they coming from monopolistic rents?

How might we know whether a company operating an algorithmically managed marketplace is extracting rents rather than simply taking a reasonable cut for the services it provides? The first sign may not be that it is raising prices for consumers, but that it is taking a larger percentage from its suppliers, or competing unfairly with them.

Before antitrust authorities look to remedies like breaking up these companies, a good first step would be to require disclosure of information about the growth and health of the supply side of their marketplaces. The statistics about the growth of its third-party marketplace that Bezos trumpeted in his shareholder letter tell only half the story. The questions to ask are who profits, by how much, and how that allocation of rewards is changing over time…

Data is the currency of these companies. It should also be the currency of those looking to regulate them. You cannot regulate what you don’t understand. The algorithms that these companies use may be defended as trade secrets, but their outcomes should be open to inspection.

An important read: “Antitrust regulators are using the wrong tools to break up Big Tech.”

* Molly Ivins

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As we bust trusts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in United States v. Nixon, ordering him to deliver tape recordings and other subpoenaed materials to a federal district court.  Special prosecutor Leon Jaworski had subpoenaed the tapes as part of on-going impeachment proceedings; the White House had sued to quash; and the decision is widely viewed as a crucial precedent limiting the power of any U.S. president to claim executive privilege.

nixon_sony source

 

 

Written by (Roughly) Daily

July 24, 2019 at 1:01 am

“Where there is power, there is resistance”*…

 

Farage

 

There’s a long history of incorporating food into political protest (Boston Tea Party, anyone?), with written record dating all the way back to the early-’60s CE, when Vespasian, a proconsulate in Africa and a future emperor of Rome, was apparently so unpopular for his economic policies that he was pelted with turnips by the local populace. Although this time-honored tradition has never truly fallen out of fashion, recent years have seen a resurgence in the hurling of foodstuff — particularly eggs, like the one wielded by the teenager known as “Egg Boy,” who cracked one on the head of an Australian politician who blamed immigration for the Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand — and now we’ve arrived at milkshakes.

So how exactly does a person choose the perfect food for a protest? Mind you, this isn’t something we recommend you do — lobbing food at someone could constitute battery or assault — but it’s worth considering what makes a good food projectile, whether you’re on the giving or receiving end. Or maybe you’re like us and what you really want is simply to learn

[Following is] a list of historic protest foods, ranked  using the following criteria:

Convenience: How easy is it to acquire and carry this object without suspicion?

Cost: Will hurling this object be the real-life equivalent of the “money with wings” emoji?

Accuracy: How precise of a projectile does this object make, taking into consideration properties like drag, gravity, thrust, and lift?

Messiness: Does the object splatter, stain, or otherwise necessitate cleanup that’s a pain in the ass?

Smell: How much will the physical memory of the act linger in the nostrils, following the target the rest of the day like an unfriendly ghost?

Symbolic or historical resonance: Does the object represent something greater, or reference a long tradition of throwing said object?

Humiliation: While admittedly ambiguous, this last attribute can be summed up as: “You know it when you see it.”…

The ultimate act of dissent? “Milkshakes, Eggs, and Other Throwable Protest Foods, Ranked

See also: “Milkshaking.”

* Michel Foucault

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As we shop with care, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that an 18½-minute gap appeared in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.

According to President Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, on September 29, 1973, she was reviewing a tape of the June 20, 1972, recordings when she made “a terrible mistake” during transcription. While playing the tape on a Uher 5000, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she said that she mistakenly hit the button next to it, the record button. For the duration of the phone call, about 5 minutes, she kept her foot on the device’s pedal, causing a five-minute portion of the tape to be rerecorded. When she listened to the tape, the gap had grown to ​18 12 minutes. She later insisted that she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz.

The contents missing from the recording remain unknown, though the gap occurs during a conversation between Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, three days after the Watergate break in. Nixon claimed not to know the topic or topics discussed during the gap.[19] Haldeman’s notes from the meeting show that among the topics of discussion were the arrests at the Watergate Hotel…

Woods was asked to replicate the position she took to cause that accident. Seated at a desk, she reached far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot applied pressure to the pedal controlling the transcription machine. Her posture during the demonstration, dubbed the “Rose Mary Stretch”, resulted in many political commentators questioning the validity of the explanation…  [source]

Rose_Mary_Woods

Rosemary Woods, attempting to illustrate “The Rosemary Stretch”

 

 

Written by (Roughly) Daily

June 20, 2019 at 1:01 am

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