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Sound Bites of the 1908 Presidential Candidates
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Oct 03, 2008 11:19 AM
from the hundred-years-of-blah-blah-blah dept.
from the hundred-years-of-blah-blah-blah dept.
roncosmos writes "Science News has up a feature on the first use of sound recording in a presidential campaign. In 1908, for the first time, presidential candidates recorded their voices on wax cylinders. Their voices could be brought into the home for 35 cents, equivalent to about $8 now. In that pre-radio era, this was the only way, short of hearing a speech at a whistle stop, that you could hear the candidates. The story includes audio recordings from the 1908 candidates, William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft. Bryan's speech, on bank failures, seems sadly prescient now. Taft's, on the progress of the Negro, sounds condescending to modern ears but was progressive at the time. There are great images from the campaign; lots of fun."
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Sounds condescending to modern ears (Score:4, Insightful)
sounds condescending to modern ears but was progressive at the time
As opposed to the non-condescending progressives of today.
Re:Sounds condescending to modern ears (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
DiFi is NOT a progressive, she's an (R) in (D) clothing, like Lieberman.
Feinstein's a conservative on economics (Score:3, Informative)
She's only really in the Democratic Party at all because she has liberal views on social issues (abortion, gay rights, etc.), but she's quite conservative on business/economic issues.
She also happens to be married to Richard C. Blum, chairman of Blum Capital Partners, who as you might suspect rather like the idea of a financial-industry bailout.
Re:Sounds condescending to modern ears (Score:5, Insightful)
It's come to a point where simply being elite is considered elitism. John Kerry was considered out of touch with the common man because he liked wind surfing and went to Yale.
How many times during the last few years have you heard people say something along the lines of "Just because you're a respected (climatologist | biologist | economist | theologian | lawyer | diplomat) doesn't mean you know more than me (global warming | evolution | economics | religion | law | foreign affairs) than I do"?
I don't approve of intellectuals being condescending, but it's just as bad when people dismiss an idea as "elitism" simply because they disagree with it and it came from someone with a PhD.
Parent
conservatives are anti-elitism? (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Phil Gramm, McCain's economic advisor, who calls people "whiners" if they think the economy is doing badly?
Heck, conservatives are most of the elite---Bush beat Kerry by huge margins among people making $200k+, even in states that Kerry otherwise won handily (he won 64-35% among that demographic in California). Rich liberals are a fairly small subset of overall rich people---even in California, conservative aerospace/defense industry, real-estate, and import/export businessmen far outnumber Hollywood actors and tech bosses.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit, William Buckley was an elitist motherfucker and he deserved to be in a few respects, even though he was really just a "personality" more than a real player. Do you think Paul Wolfowitz and Henry Kissinger aren't elitist? Why don't you call one of them up and ask if next time you're in Washington or around Harvard, maybe you could pick up a beer and chat about politics, maybe you could even offer, as an equal, some of your insights into military and economic strategies. (Here's a hint though, if yo
Re:Sounds condescending to modern ears (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you seen the furor over Palin's belief in creationism? What about people who oppose all religion? All of these things show that they think they know better than the people that they're talking about.
People think that conservatives are anti-intellectual, which isn't necessarily the case. It's that they're anti-elitism.
If you believe in creationism, then yes, you are anti-intellectual by definition. There is no reason guiding a belief in creationism; only faith.
And "elite" means "above average" or "excellent". If you're anti-elite, then you're pro-mediocrity, and that's certainly not a quality I look for in a leader. But it is a belief that got us George Bush.
I'm pro-elite and proud of it. We should be demanding more from our leaders, not less. If I want somebody I can drink a beer with, I'll call up a friend. That's not what I'm expecting from a President (or Vice President, for that matter).
When it comes down to it, there are people in this country and in the world who think that if you hold a certain belief, you are instantly a moron and someone who isn't to be given respect.
When your beliefs have been disproven by science many, many times in many, many ways, and those scientific results have been published in very public ways over a period of a century or more, then they're probably right to think that.
Do you also believe the world is flat? And should I not think you a moron for that belief?
Parent
Re:Sounds condescending to modern ears (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Sounds condescending to modern ears (Score:4, Funny)
... Pro-Life, etc....
I think pro-life is about as indefensible of a position as anyone can come up with. I'm anti-life. Kill 'em all, I say! ;)
Parent
Can't listen, Flash only (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a shame too, because I'm sure the recordings would be interesting to hear.
It just goes to show why Flash must die [slashdot.org].
Re:Can't listen, Flash only (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Can't listen, Flash only (Score:4, Funny)
What are you talking 'bout, you young whippersnapper? Tarnation, in MY day we didn't have no dad blamed newfangled wax cylinders. We had to trudge hundreds of miles through the snow, uphill (both ways) to find a whistle stop where we could hear the varmints. Before shootin' at 'em, of course. Gotta make sure ya ain't shootin' at the wrong one. Then we'd tar and feather 'em and run 'em outta town on a rail.
I'd tell ya to git offen my lawn, but we didn't even have no durned lawns back then.
Parent
Re:Can't listen, Flash only (Score:5, Informative)
They are MP3s. Listen to them directly
http://www.sciencenews.org/sounds/files/bryan_guarantee_of_deposits.mp3 [sciencenews.org]
http://www.sciencenews.org/sounds/files/taft_rights_and_progress_of_the_negro.mp3 [sciencenews.org]
Parent
Re:Can't listen, Flash only (Score:4, Insightful)
That's nice, but why the hell couldn't they just link to them directly? Why do they go out of their way to make their site completely unusable to those of us who don't use flash? It's so easy to do it right, why do so many places get it wrong?
Parent
Re:Can't listen, Flash only (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and some day my "why can't all sites work the same without javascript" campaign will catch on, too.
Why can't all sites work the same without javascript! I shouldn't have to use that trash!
Parent
Re:Can't listen, Flash only (Score:4, Insightful)
why can't all sites work the same without javascript
Because people don't know how to code. Some javascript is needed and useful, but 99% of it isn't. My old Quake site used javascript, but if you didn't have javascript it degraded gracefully. The Stroggs still danced, but mousing over the one on the right didn't have Sonic the Hedgehog running past and getting squished. With javascript the nav buttons were animated when you moused over them, without they just sat there with the arrow cursor turning into a hand pointer.
"Dopey Smurf" was a medical student who had a rat he was dissecting wake up and bite him once. When he decided to close his site, I "sent him a box of invisible rats". Actually we set it up with a news item on his site that I'd sent a box of invisible rats, so whatever you do FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T CLICK THIS LINK!!! or the invisible rats would escape and eat his site. If you clicked the link, invisible rats actually did come out and eat his site; there was a GIF animation of teeth marks, yellow rat shapes covering the page, which left it just like Joost Shuur's Slipgate Central after it closed. We didn't use a single line of javascript, just an HTML link and an animated GIF.
You young folks missed it, the internet was lots of fun back then. Now it's all javascript, flash, and advertising.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? Flash is pretty easy to use, too. You just install the plugin, and bam, it works. Amazingly enough, this is relevant to Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Wow. Technology.
It's amazing. A few years ago, people would whine about using RealAudio to distribute. Then they'd whine about WMA, because it wasn't cross platform. Then they'd whine about MP3 because of licensing. Now, sites are using a cross platform, semi open distribution method that is nearly ubiquitous, and now people want to make things up to w
You must be able to see to hear this Flash audio (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Flash is pretty easy to use, too.
How easy? Can you use it with your eyes closed? For sake of argument, I'll allow you to have a braille display.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's ignorance on the part of flash developers, just like HTML designers who don't use ALT tags on images. Adobe provides the technology, developers just don't care.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Palin does a fine job of making herself look stupid, she doesn't need our help. Though surprisingly she did manage to use complete English sentences in the debate.
I mean, those interviews were more than embarrassing, they were frightening. Doesn't read, or can't name specific publications. Can't name a single supreme court decision besides Roe v. Wade. Says McCain is for regulation, but can't name one specific instance. Thinks sharing a maritime border with the most desolate, uninhabited part of Russia give
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Biden does a fine job of making himself look stupid, he doesn't need our help. Though surprisingly he did manage to cry in the debate...
He was speaking of his wife and daughter who were killed as I understand it.
What sort of heartless fuck are you? Will you laugh when your family is killed, or will you just not care?"
banking (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't the whole reason you got the greenback dollar because Lincoln didn't want to get the US govt into hock with the banks?
I was under the impression that there was always a significant distrust of banks in the US, until recently that is. I am astonished that a country which refuses to pay for a national 'free at point of provision' health service, supported by taxes, yet they happily hand over the entire country's income tax to the banking system, and now 700 billion because they stayed greedy for a bit too long.
That also puzzles me. Why not, just to throw a wild idea out, take a portion of the bad dept on for the people who are getting kicked out. I mean like buy 1/2 or 2/3 of the dept from the citizens affected, so they aren't evicted.
Surely that would work just as well.
Re:banking (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, either option seems silly. First, we're rewarding foolishness on the part of both the buyer and seller, which only encourages further such action in the future. Second, unemployment is still at reasonable levels, there may not be as much credit on the market, but the market is definitely not dry, and won't be as long as the fed keeps money available which it's done all along.
It looks like fear mongering on behalf of wall street is about to put 700 billion dollars into the pockets of the upper 90% via stock increases as banks unload these securities which they should have never created in the first place.
Parent
Banking and Democrat Change (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that the people who were supposed to oversee Fannie Mae are the same people that are now supporting a certain Democrat candidate for president, and it would not be beneficial for the media to expose those relationships to the public-at-large until after the election.
I don't understand how the Enron Trial is on the tip of everyone's tongue, but the media isn't calling to put these banking executive in jail for a fraud that is 10x worse!
Parent
Re:Banking and Democrat Change (Score:5, Informative)
You're so full of misinformation. Barney Frank was the one who passed regulations on Freddie & Fannie. In July 2007 Frank became chairman and he and the Democrats passed regulations within two months. These regulations had been blocked by the house Republicans since 1994.
It's incredible that the Republicans claim the big mean Democrats prevented them from instituting a proper regulatory framework despite over a decade of Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
Parent
Re:banking (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not, just to throw a wild idea out, take a portion of the bad dept on for the people who are getting kicked out. I mean like buy 1/2 or 2/3 of the dept from the citizens affected, so they aren't evicted.
So, my taxes, that came out of my pocket, should pay off the loan of another person? Why stop there? Use my money to pay people's rent, utilities, etc.
People seem to think that a person losing their home is the end of the world. Rent an apartment (people do it all the time), and make sure you save wisely enough to be able to pay for your house next time.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That also puzzles me. Why not, just to throw a wild idea out, take a portion of the bad dept on for the people who are getting kicked out. I mean like buy 1/2 or 2/3 of the dept from the citizens affected, so they aren't evicted.
Surely that would work just as well.
The best reason not to do that is because it would REALLY piss off those of us who are responsible and pay their mortgage. I'm not exactly getting rich here, but I didn't get an interest only loan with an adjustable rate, and I'm paying my mortgage every month. Why should we bail out a bunch of people who bought houses they shouldn't have, gambling on the idea that real estate would increase in value at a linear rate forever, and now can't pay for them.
I have great compassion for people who have had ci
Re:banking (Score:4, Insightful)
It is unclear to me if helping pay housing debt will fix the problem, and it would be incredibly expensive to give everyone in the country who is (currently) upside down in their mortgage enough money to make the notes they hold worth something - more expensive than helping the banks out.
We have two suggestions on how to solve this:
1. Government buys securities from banks, giving the banks a shot in the arm, and getting the "bad" securities out of the way so that investors will be more willing to purchase new ones.
2. Government helps pay housing debt from individuals, preventing their foreclosure. Knowing that the foreclosure rate isn't going to spike up (because gov't is preventing exactly that), the securities start being purchased again (as they are no longer perceived to be a bad investment, since a massive foreclosure spike isn't on the horizon anymore). The difference is that a bunch of people get thrown out of their homes on option 1, and they likely have very different costs (not sure how different, offhand). It seems like either gets you to the same place in the end, however.
No, the difference here, is that in solution 1 banks and other financial institutions that have made bad decisions get a pass. This is only acceptable because a failing bank, insurance company, brokerage firm, etc... impacts EVERYONE. This staves off another great depression.
Solution 2 results in a bunch of individuals who made bad decisions getting a pass, plus a lot of profiteers jumping on the bandwagon (heck, if they passed something like this I might get real delinquent on my mortgage really fast). IMHO if you made a bad decision you should get thrown out of your home. One of my pet peeves in this whole situation is the 'thrown out of your home' argument. MOST people who are in trouble have only owned their home a few years. It's not like this property has been in the family for generations and now they are losing it. It's not like the kids grew up there. They purchased a home on a bad loan, couldn't afford it, and will have to move out. Most of them have no equity in the home (otherwise we wouldn't have a problem), so if the lender allows them to make a short sale, they really aren't out too much. It's not like we are going to have millions of people living under bridges - they just won't OWN their house anymore.
Parent
Re:banking (Score:5, Insightful)
which to many Americans (who are, let's be honest, people and therefore stupid)
Fixed that minor point for you. It's not like the good people of the rest of the world are magically resistant to propaghanda or sufficiently knowledgeable about economic systems.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> There isn't anyone worth $35 million (or whatever it was) for 19 days of work.
Weeeellllll... that's often (if not usually) true, but not *quite* 100%. People tend to forget that the most important job of a large corporation's CEO *ISN'T* running the company... it's finding people willing to lend large sums of money to the company, or buy lots of its stock (not just 100 shares). When a small business needs to buy a new computer, the owner probably puts it on a credit card he personally had to guarantee,
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> If a company though that a CEO or whoever was not worth $35 million they wouldn't pay them that much.
Nonsense! The company doesn't set the CEO remuneration, the Board does.
Every year I and 30,000 other shareholders vote against the remuneration package of my mortgagee and every year we are defeated by the Board's one million nominal votes. ONE MILLION.
Why? Because members of the Board are themselves CEOs and Directors in other companies...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This overlooks the recent enemy shift, and while may have likely formed the personalities of the Americans making their decisions today, isn't the root of it anymore.
If you're talking pre-fall-of-the-USSR, then 'Communism' is in fact the '-ism' that drives decisions.
Today, however, one should only fear the Terrorist. Occasionally Communists are Terrorists as well, but often times they are not. All non-Terrorists are presently 'cool' with the United States...
In short: 'sed -e "s/Communism/Terrorism/g"'
So,
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now we allow private companies to make those same life-and-death choices, and they have upside-down incentives.
Once you start collecting health problems you no longer have any choices for private insurance. If your insurance decides not to cover some necessary care there is no recourse. There is no way to shop for insurance since
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a huge loss of freedom if government controls healthcare.
The freedom to chose alternate, or non mainstream healthcare.
The freedom to not buy healthcare so that your children can afford get the best care possible.
The freedom to chose your treatments.
The freedom to *not* have healthcare.*
The freedom to keep the fruits of your labor.
The freedom to not be part of a insurance-lottery.*
The freedom to care for yourself.
* some religions proscribe these freedoms - Christian Scientists and the Amish respectiv
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, we should stand up and be proud and bold like we used to be. Let's stard by abolishing the FDA and CDC and disbanding every state medical and nursing board. We'll have so much freedom we won't know what to do with ourselves!
Your argument might have made sense, oh, about 100 years ago. But we've had government regulated healthcare in this country of ours for quite some time already. Most current proposals are either a federal safety-net for those who don't have access to insurance, or basic universal i
Surprised, Am I (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm surprised that the inflation rate is so low for what had to be cutting edge technology of the era. Considering that a modern music CD that costs literal pennies to press sells (or attempts to sell, considering recent sales figures) for up to twice that price I wonder what figure was used for the amount of inflation over the last century.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd be willing to bet that 35 cents was pretty close to cost for these things. After all, it's an ad, they want you to listen.
Panic of 1873 (Score:4, Interesting)
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=477k3d8mh2wmtpc4b6h07p4hy9z83x18 [chronicle.com]
Re:Panic of 1873 (Score:5, Funny)
People didn't have the same concept of time in the olden days, two events in the same century seemed practically simultaneous to them. They also walked very quickly, talked in funny voices, and could only see in black and white.
Parent
Todays Presidental Race (Score:5, Funny)
McCain must be excited to hear his old wax cylinder recordings again.
Bit-torrenting like its 1908 (Score:5, Funny)
Of course what they don't tell you is that most people just ripped the wax cylinders into an oral history form and passed it on that way via a peer to peer approach.
People complained that the problem with the P2P network was that you couldn't tell what was the original and what was either a bad copy or just some virus put in there by someone else to mislead people, but people in South Texas claimed it was the only way they could do it as the Wax cylinders were not available in their area due to them melting.
Bryan's not exactly electifying, is he? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bryan was supposed to be the premier orator of his era -- his "Cross of Gold" speech brought the house down at the Democratic convention in 1896. But that recording is just a snoozefest -- admittedly, it's about banking, which is important but boring (which is no doubt one of the reasons we're in trouble today), but the rhythm is just stately and bland and blah. Maybe the experience of being in a studio rather than in front of a live, reacting crowd was so foreign that it didn't occur to him that he should be using the same oratorical techniques, and instead was just reading prepared remarks.
My... How Times Change (Score:3, Informative)
William Jenning Bryan... a Democrat. Strong supporter of prohibition, fought darwinism and was a racist.
Taft... a Republican. And the Republican Party of 1906 REMEMBERED ITS ROOTS! The party of the Abolitionists.
I wish the Republican's would acknowledge their heritage. The heritage of abolition and the abolishment of slavery. They should be proud of Lincoln!
Re:Tag failures (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a purpose to having tags?
Parent
Re:Prescient? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument seems to be that the government forced companies to take on loans from 'minorities and the poor'. You didn't quite work yourself into a froth about liberalism, affirmative action or whatever else you think is wrong with left but it seems like you were heading in that direction.
If you look at the people who are defaulting on mortgages it's not really minorities and the poor (I guess in your mind minority = poor?) but mostly middle class Americans who took out loans that they couldn't afford to pay back. Just look at where these defaulters live and you'll see that suburban middle class (white, black, hispanic, etc.) enclaves are most effected.
I won't disagree with you that some of this crisis has it's roots during the Clinton era or that the government is partially to blame. I'd blame the government for not regulating the lending industry enough rather then accusing them of forcing risky loans on companies. These companies, as well as the housing industry, wanted to take on these loans because they saw green and more importantly, other institutions wanted the securities these loans were wrapped up in because they thought it would make them money.
Please don't use this crisis as some sort of attack against the poor and/or minorities. It just makes you sound ignorant.
Parent
What about the Community Reinvestment Act? (Score:3, Insightful)
What CRA Whiners Aren't Telling You (Score:5, Insightful)
The CRA only applies to banks.
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/barr021308.pdf
The CRA is only at worst 50% responsible (an additional 30% of the subprime loans were made by "affiliates" of banks, and therefore partially covered by CRA, the remaining 20% of all loans were made directly by banks... and the worst case scenario is that the regulators were there twisting the banks' arms for every single loan). The other 50% of the mortgages were irrefutably made of the originators' free will.
Secondly, the CRA doesn't call for Option ARMs or interest-only loans or giving people money with zero down or piggybacking another mortgage for the down payment or liar loans... those are entirely the invention of the banks and mortgage companies that offered them.
Parent
Re:Prescient? (Score:5, Interesting)
The government may have adjusted the rules to try and give people loans to poorer people, but you cannot say the bank was forced to give them loans. There is a lot of process that goes into getting a loan which includes checks and balances on whom is supposed to get approved. The fact of the matter is that too many people had in an interest in pushing loans, good or bad, because they got an immediate payoff and they could pass a bad loan to someone else. Think of all the people who get a cut when you sell a house,
That's right, the bank got an immediate payoff for making the loan! Why? Because they turned around and sold the loan. Basically everyone could pass the buck onto someone else. Unless your were the final sucker who got caught holding the loan which ends up worthless. It was a game of hot-potato being played by financial experts who convinced themselves they knew better than someone else.
As for politcal activism, that is a load of crap. It came down to businesses wanted to do business anyway they like without any oversight, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with this Ponzi scheme. If people had to actually hold onto the loans that they made none of this stuff would have happened. But you would have had rich financial analyst's screaming "this not a free market!"
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, it's not what you say, it's how you say it.
Flamebait: "Hay, fatass, your fucking slip is showing, moron. Ain't you got a momma?"
Discourse: "Pardon me, miss, but your slip is showing."
Both say the same thing.