It's Brooklyn.... But Something's Missing: Vintage Photos Show How The New York City Borough Looked Before Hipsters (Photo Essay)

Bustle: Cars and trolleys fill the roads around Flushing Avenue, Graham and Broadway

By Jessica Jerreat 

For years it has been a mecca for hipsters, with their music, art and sustainable living ethos, but Brooklyn has long been attracting creative types willing to travel across the world in search of a better life. 

A series of photos taken by Life magazine's photographer Ed Clark after the Second World War shows how New York City's most populous borough has supported a thriving community for decades. 

Many of the scenes reflect life in Kings Country today. Couples embrace on the beach with the bright lights of Coney Island behind them, roof tops provide the perfect place to chat with friends in the summer, and families gather in Bed-Stuy.

However, the vintage photos show a more family orientated feel compared to today, where an influx of hipsters with their trendy clothes and remarkable facial hair has led to a rash of organic cafes, vintage boutiques, record shops and micro breweries.

'Models, writers, actors, and artists have been flocking to 
New York’s Left Bank for its destination restaurants, bustling farmers’ markets, Parisian-style parks, and passionate dedication to l’art de vie,' a recent post on vogue.com stated.

However, as this collection of photos from Life and other 1940s photographers shows, the love affair with Brooklyn is nothing new and the borough still has the same power to sustain free-thinking, creative communities.

Rooftop living: Two women make the most of the top of their building as they gossip in the sun

Baby boom: Families fill the street in Sumner Avenue, now Marcus Garvey Boulevard in Bed-Stuy, which is still popular with families

Pop up community: Neighbors chat outside one of the metal huts put up in Canarsie after the Second World War to house about 8,000 veterans and their families

Unchanged: A couple embrace on the beach under the bright lights of Coney Island

The real thing: A gang of boys huddle in front of an advert for Coca-Cola in 1946

Skyline: Manhattan's skyscrapers and buildings can be seen across the water in 1946

City view: Brooklyn Bridge still offers a perfect place to view the city from

Cool off: Members of Brooklyn's Norwegian community escape the July heat with a dip in a Bay Ridge pool

Fun of the fair: Children play on the whirling discs at Coney Island

Well stocked: A storekeeper puts up a sign among the canned goods at Al's Food Market in Dean Street

Trend: Brooklyn has become a mecca for young hipsters in recent years

Arty: Young couples are now drawn to the borough for the music and creative lifestyle it offers

http://tinyurl.com/lxk9dgp

Ben Stein & The Definition of Insanity

Chart of the Day: Sticker Shock: Obamacare's Effect On Premiums - By State

From the Wall Street Journal:

We compared the average premiums in states that already have ObamaCare-like provisions in their laws and found that consumers in New Jersey, New York and Vermont already pay well over twice what citizens in many other states pay. Consumers in Maine and Massachusetts aren't far behind. Those states will likely see a small increase.

By contrast, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wyoming and Virginia will likely see the largest increases—somewhere between 65% and 100%. Another 18 states, including Texas and Michigan, could see their rates rise between 35% and 65%. 

http://tinyurl.com/lm6tonb

The Newest In Government Oppression...

By Simon Black

It. Just. Never. Stops. 

Here on the European continent, the bureaucrats who run the EU have recently proven to the world how much a ‘government guarantee’ is really worth. 

We’ve been discussing in this column lately how the modern banking system is a total fraud– that dictatorial control of 70% of the world’s money supply has been awarded to just four central bankers.

And that the vast majority of banks, especially in the western world, are laughably illiquid… and very thinly capitalized.

But most people never really worry too much about their banks. We’re told, pratically since birth, that banks are safe, responsible, conservative financial stewards. This belief is universally held as truth across society.

And to cap it all off, we’re told that the government will step up to backstop any bank losses and ensure depositors don’t lose a single penny. 

The numbers obviously tell a very different story. In the US, for example, many banks hold less than 3% of their customer deposits in cash, and they have to use clever accounting tricks and off-balance sheet vehicles to mask the true health of their balance sheets.

And the FDIC, which is supposed to bail out US depositors in the event of a crisis, has a mere 1.35% of total US deposits in cash. This isn’t safe. This isn’t conservative. It doesn’t even register as a drop in the bucket.

In Europe, though, they’ve just decided that they’re -not really- going to insure deposits at full value after all (see the article in its original German here). 

Now, if a bank goes under, governments will make very, very basic payments to depositors, and restrict withdrawals to just 100-200 euros per day. 

There’s a term for this. It’s called capital controls. And it’s something that almost every bankrupt government in history has resorted to using.

Capital controls are essentially a restriction on the free-flow of capital. It can take a number of different forms– gold criminalization, bank account confiscation, foreign exchange restrictions, etc.

But at the end of the day, the effect is the same - capital controls are just another way of transferring wealth from citizens to the government, like dairy cows to a farmer. 

Meanwhile, across the water, I am sad to report that a number of secure email platforms like Lavabit and Silent Circle, have now folded under intense pressure from the United States government. 

Lavabit was an email service used by Edward Snowden. From the very cryptic message that CEO Ladar Levison left on his website, it appears that he has been approached by the NSA to turn over email records.

Rather than work with the NSA, Levison has shuttered his operations.

And to boot, Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke announced that his organization was pre-emptively discontinuing its email platform ‘Silent Mail’. 

Janke says he sees the writing on the wall and knows “USG [US government] would come after us.”

It’s incredible that two businesses essentially have to commit suicide in order to keep from violating their promises to their customers. 

Just another week in the free world. Have you hit your breaking point yet?

Know Thine Enemy

Major Hasan is honest about himself; why aren’t we?

By Mark Steyn

On December 7, 1941, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked. Three years, eight months, and eight days later, the Japanese surrendered. These days, America’s military moves at a more leisurely pace. On November 5, 2009, another U.S. base, Fort Hood, was attacked — by one man standing on a table, screaming “Allahu akbar!” and opening fire. Three years, nine months, and one day later, his court-martial finally got under way.

The intervening third-of-a-decade-and-more has apparently been taken up by such vital legal questions as the fullness of beard Major Hasan is permitted to sport in court. This is not a joke: See “Judge Ousted in Fort Hood Shooting Case amid Beard Debacle” (CBS News). Army regulations require soldiers to be clean-shaven. The judge, Colonel Gregory Gross, ruled Hasan’s beard in contempt, fined him $1,000, and said he would be forcibly shaved if he showed up that hirsute next time. At which point Hasan went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, which ruled that Colonel Gross’s pogonophobia raised questions about his impartiality, and removed him. He’s the first judge in the history of American jurisprudence to be kicked off a trial because of a “beard debacle.” The new judge, Colonel Tara Osborn, agreed that Hasan’s beard was a violation of regulations, but “said she won’t hold it against him.”

The U.S. Army seems disinclined to hold anything against him, especially the 13 corpses plus an unborn baby. Major Hasan fired his lawyers, presumably because they were trying to get him off — on the grounds that he’d had a Twinkie beforehand, or his beard don’t fit so you must acquit, or some such. As a self-respecting jihadist, Major Hasan quite reasonably resented being portrayed as just another all-American loon gone postal. So he sacked his defense team, only to have the court appoint a standby defense team just in case there were any arcane precedents and obscure case law he needed clarification on. I know that’s the way your big-time F. Lee Bailey types would play it, but it doesn’t seem to be Major Hasan’s style. On the very first day of the trial, he stood up and told the jury that “the evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter.” Later, in one of his few courtroom interventions, he insisted that it be put on the record that “the alleged murder weapon” was, in fact, his. The trial then came to a halt when the standby defense team objected to the judge that Major Hasan’s defense strategy (yes, I did it; gimme a blindfold, cigarette, and tell the virgins here I come) would result in his conviction and execution.

Major Hasan is a Virginia-born army psychiatrist and a recipient of the Pentagon’s Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, which seems fair enough, since he certainly served in it, albeit for the other side. Most Americans think he’s nuts. He thinks Americans are nuts. It’s a closer call than you’d think. In the immediate aftermath of his attack, the U.S. media, following their iron-clad rule that “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here,” did their best to pass off Major Hasan as the first known victim of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers,” fretted Andrew Bast in a report the now defunct Newsweek headlined, “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”

Major Hasan has never been in combat. He is not, in fact, a soldier. He is a shrink. The soldiers in this story are the victims, some 45 of them. And the only reason a doctor can gun down nearly four dozen trained warriors (he was eventually interrupted by a civilian police officer, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, with a 9mm Beretta) is that soldiers on base are forbidden from carrying weapons. That’s to say, under a 1993 directive a U.S. military base is effectively a gun-free zone, just like a Connecticut grade school. That’s a useful tip: If you’re mentally ill and looking to shoot up a movie theater at the next Batman premiere, try the local barracks — there’s less chance of anyone firing back.

Maybe this Clinton-era directive merits reconsideration in the wake of Fort Hood? Don’t be ridiculous. Instead, nine months after Major Hasan’s killing spree, the Department of Defense put into place “a series of procedural and policy changes that focus on identifying, responding to, and preventing potential workplace violence.”

Major Hasan says he’s a soldier for the Taliban. Maybe if the Pentagon were to reclassify the entire Afghan theater as an unusually prolonged outburst of “workplace violence,” we wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescent concepts such as “victory” and “defeat.” The important thing is that the U.S. Army’s “workplace violence” is diverse. After Major Hasan’s pre-post-traumatic workplace wobbly, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, was at pains to assure us that it could have been a whole lot worse: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.” And you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on.

Like I said, we think he’s nuts; he thinks we’re nuts. Right now, there’s a petition on the Internet seeking to persuade the United States government to reclassify Hasan’s “workplace violence” as an act of terror. There are practical consequences to this: The victims, shot by an avowed enemy combatant in an act of war, are currently ineligible for Purple Hearts. The Pentagon insists the dead and wounded must be dishonored in death because to give them any awards for their sacrifice would prejudice Major Hasan’s trial and make it less likely that he could be convicted.

Hence, the Internet petition. Linking to it from their homepage, my colleagues at National Review Online promoted it with the tag: “Thirteen people lost their lives with dozens of others wounded. And now the man responsible wants to claim it was workplace violence.”

That’s not true — and actually it’s grossly unfair to Major Hasan. He’s admirably upfront about who and what he is — a “Soldier of Allah,” as he put on his business card. On Tuesday, he admitted he was a traitor who had crossed over from “the bad side” (America’s) to “the good side” (Islam’s). He has renounced his U.S. citizenship and its effete protections such as workplace-violence disability leave. He professes loyalty to America’s enemies. He says, “I am the shooter.” He helpfully informs us that that’s his gun. In this week’s one-minute statement, he spoke more honestly and made more sense than Obama, Gates, Casey, the Armed Forces Court of Appeals, two judges, the prosecution and defense lawyers, and mountains of bureaucratic reports and media coverage put together.

But poor old Hasan can say “Yup, I did it” all he wants; what does he know?

Unlike the Zimmerman trial, Major Hasan’s has not excited the attention of the media. Yet it is far more symbolic of the state of America than the Trayvon Martin case, in which superannuated race hucksters attempted to impose a half-century-old moth-eaten Klan hood on a guy who’s a virtual one-man melting pot. The response to Nidal Hasan helps explain why, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, this war is being lost — because it cannot be won because, increasingly, it cannot even be acknowledged. Which helps explain why it now takes the U.S. military longer to prosecute a case of “workplace violence” than it did to win World War Two.

Boycotting The Olympics: Would The World Have Been Better Off Without Jesse Owens Proving Hitler Wrong?

'It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler... You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn't be a plating on the twenty-four karat friendship that I felt for Luz Long at that moment.'

- Jesse Owens

There's been a lot of talk recently regarding the 2014 Olympics, Russia's codification of hatred of homosexuals, and whether the United States should boycott.  Apart from the obvious punishment boycotts do to the athletes (see the US' 1980 Moscow boycott and the Soviets' 1984 boycott of the games in Los Angeles), there is another lesson from the past that should be heeded:  The 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

According to JewishVirtualLibrary.org, 'after concerns about the safety of black athletes in Nazi Germany were put to rest by the International Olympic Committee, most African American newspapers opposed a boycott of the 1936 Olympics. Black journalists often underscored the hypocrisy of pro-boycotters, who did not first address the problem of discrimination against black athletes in the United States. Writers for such papers as The Philadelphia Tribune and The Chicago Defender argued that athletic victories by blacks would undermine Nazi racial views of 'Aryan' supremacy and foster a new sense of black pride at home. In the end, 18 African Americans — 16 men and 2 women — went to Berlin, triple the number who had competed for the United States in the 1932 Los Angeles Games.'

As Andre Austin has documented in his 'Hitler's Views on Blacks':

'Hitler skips the first recorded sin in the bible of Eve taking a bite out of some fruit tree to declare race mixing between blacks and his pure Aryan white blood was 'The original sin of humanity,' (Mein Kampf, p 624).  Hitler was appalled at society allowing blacks to become a lawyer, teacher, even a pastor. He thought it is 'criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape ..while members of the highest culture-race must remain in unworthy positions,' ( MK, p430).  Hitler thought that the Blackman shouldn’t be allowed to keep his so called 'nigger nation.  Hitler also stated: 'This world belongs only to the forceful whole man and not to the weak half man,' ( MK, p 257).

Hitler viewed the Blackman like Hollywood viewed the Blackman in The Birth of a Nation. In that woman, the Blackman eyes grows big in lust for a white woman. Hitler thought of us like a big King Kong gorilla. 'Systematically these black parasites of the nation defile our inexperienced young blond girls and thereby destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world, (MK, p562).'

Very obviously, Adolf Hitler did not respect black people and, most assuredly, thought them incapable of competing with his Aryans.

 

 Jesse Owens running in the streets of Berlin, 1936

Would the world have been better off if nations had boycotted or refused to allow their black athletes to compete?  Would not the world have lost the sweetness of a Jesse Owens proving him so wrong?  Would not the world have lost the moment where Adolf Hitler was forced to acknowledge a legendary athlete?

An older Jesse Owens pointing to where Adolf Hitler waved to him. (According to Owens, there was no handshake despite claims to the contrary in the decades since).

According to Albert Speer, the Nazi architect and chief armament procurement officer, Adolf Hitler was none too happy about Owens success in private:

'Each of the German victories, and there were a surprising number of these, made him happy, but he was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. 'People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive,' Hitler said with a shrug; 'their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games.'

Jesse Owens not only proved how extraordinary he was, but did so in front of the racist Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, which must have made him sick inside considering his pontifications on the supremacy of the Aryan people.  Proving Hitler wrong, making him acknowledge a man he considered beneath him, and making him miserably uncomfortable was worth sending our team to the Olympics in Berlin.

Boycotting the 1936 Olympics would have also deprived two men of a very meaningful friendship... 

In the 1936 Olympics, Luz Long and Jessie Owens directly competed against one another in the long jump competition held in the were direct competitors in the long jump at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin in the Olympiastadion.

Since he had 'home field advantage,' Long gave Owens some advice.  Owens won gold.  Long won silver. 

Before the entire stadium, including Adolf Hitler, Luz Long embraced Jessie Owens in congratulations on his victory and world record.

Both men became friends and maintained a correspondence for years until the outbreak of hostilities between Germany and the United States made that impossible.  

Owens continued a relationship with the Long family long after Luz's death in the War.

 

The story of Jesse Owens and the 1936 Berlin Olympics also is worth remembering for another reason.  Despite the lionisation of one President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Democrats and race-hustlers are apparently ignorant of one fact.  According to Jesse Owens himself:

'I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.  Hitler didn't snub me.  It was FDR who snubbed me. The President didn't even send me a telegram.'

http://tinyurl.com/k2freo2