(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Good News Round Up: Post-Kos Crash Edition [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-03-16 God has given wine to gladden the hearts of his people. Psalm 104 Welcome to the Good News of Thursday…..that carries the scent of Wednesday (Wrote this as the Intro to the History Corner for Wednesday, but we all know the Good News Round Up, along with all sorts of news, sports, weather, op-ed, comments, and pie fights (left over from Tuesday’s Pi/Pie Day) never got into pixels or run through the InterTubes of Life. Still, I thought it was a decent intro, so I post it here for posterity, anterity, and whatever side-erities it fits for you.) (Wednesday History Corner Reprise) Good morning to the Good News RoundUp trying its level best to BE Rounded Up. The Gnuville Breakfast Brunch and Rescue Shelter has been on continuous operation stretching into its second day. Medical personnel are treating Kos Tech Team members coming in from the front lines. Some of these are endlessly pacing around, showing Einstein hair and muttering “The Kos dwords are thunking to a Malaysian subroutine that is Hashing all our Hashes……I don’t think we can unwind the CKI fast enough to underwire the Knix bras in real time because of the FDIC 250K deposit limit…..”. You can see why professional help has been called in. Others barely make it to the cots as the last of a 6 pack of “Super Caffeine” Geek-Ade wears off from the last 37 straight hours (“But at least it’s the Venezuelan ORGANIC brand, so it doesn’t hurt me….”). We Gnusies are pitching in and crossing fingers that our Wednesday post will post today, complete with comment threads (and I am hoping things are cleared up today as well; I’m on deck for my monthly, 3rd Thursday hosting gig tomorrow). So we’ll see if this ever sees the light of cyberspace. Thank you to everyone working to fix things! (Regular 3rd Thursday Turn of Hosting the GNR Introduction) Good Day fellow seekers of Good News, Hope, Uplift, Consolation, and a place to mentally be At Ease. The Good News Round Up Team here at DailyKos has once again faced the odds, plucked up their courage, taken a deep breath, and tensely nodded to allow me to put up today’s Edition. I thank you all for your confidence and bravery. Here at the Gnuville Breakfast Brunch and Refreshment Center, refreshments are not only served by the drink (coffee, tea, mimosas, hot cocoa, cold beers, luscious smoothies (choice of 22 different organic powders to blend into 14 differing forms of yogurt with other liquids), or stiff single-malts. Refreshments are also served for the mind, the heart, the feelings, the soul/spirit/center (additives of organized religion or non-theistic morality as you prefer…..and NO forcing your additive into someone else’s glass, mug, or straw……House Rules here at the Breakfast Brunch.) My habit is to add the additives of various historical and/or hysterical moments plucked from my daily History Corner that have graced earlier versions of March 16ths from years and centuries gone by. You will see them dealt around the table to make up a good hand for your Third Thursday of the Month. Also, today falls between and betwixt and among March dates of excitement. Just consider: two days ago was Pi Day, as 3.14 of the mathematical persuasion was sliced up and served with whipped cream, or baked in a lava stone oven and served bubbling with cheese, sauce and endless combinations of toppings on a crust made by grandmothers….. Yesterday was the 15th, the ominous Ides of March, ominous to those daring to usurp the Republic, (with a big opener back in 44BC….see Caesar, Julius---see him fall), and ominous to those daring to usurp the Republic (see 2023…..see Trump, The Don of John---see him fall into indictments). 44 BCE (A two-digit, before common era, minus sort of date!) Rome, Roman Empire Emperor Julius Caesar was NOT beware of the Ides of March (see why you should read Shakespeare?) and was murdered by (“Et tu”) Brutus, Cassius and other conspirators. The transition from Republic to Empire to a step back toward Republic. (So the Ides of March have shown all those other Ides of the other months of the year just HOW to Ide: you get a really famous guy (who was not only a fine general, but has a calendar system (Julian) named after him, a whole month named after him (between June and August), and even a section (Caesarian) of childbirth techniques named after him. Then you dress the Good and the Goofy of this day in togas of mirth and tunics of thought for your Ides Party.) Yet also at the OTHER Tween and Twixt of the Between and Betwixt, tomorrow will be Ireland’s day of Days, St. Patrick’s Day. Such a day, especially in Ireland, takes lots of planning, and we bring you a glimpse of what’s going on across the Emerald Isle as well as the British Isles overall (this clip comes from Yorkshire, but captures the essence from Inverness to Galway.) x YouTube Video So, with today being recovery from Usurpers being dealt with AND St. Patrick’s Eve, lets see how the cards fall today. Good News from Learning & Reading Yes, here you are, Reading the Good News because someone cared enough to see you learned to read. Earlier March 16ths have featured Historical moments when others before us have also had the chance to read and learn to read about learning…. 1802 Washington DC This day President Jefferson signs a bill creating the first United States Military Academy. It would be housed at a stone fort from the American Revolution on the Hudson River called West Point. Cadets had to be able to handle college level course work (in an era when a 6th grade education was a high bar). They would be nominated by Representatives and Senators for admission. Opened for drill and classes July 4th, 1802. …... To the right is a 2019 photo of a portion of the cadets of that year….. all those at the Point who were female and black that year….and they all have swords and know how to use them…… GUARANTEED to tick off the misogynists, the bigots, and the MAGAs, and make bronze statues carrying Confederate West Pointers melt down. 1829 Columbus, Ohio The state legislature enacts a bill that authorizes high school night classes, a United States first. (Even the bright kids who wanted more education than most folks of the elementary persuasion had chores to do all day long, so night classes were a practical solution.) 1883 Philadelphia Susan Hayhurst is on the faculty of the Pennsylvania Women’s College of Medicine in Philadelphia, training women to become doctors. Hayhurst teaches pharmacology there, but like many professions, she learned about it via the apprenticing approach. Lately Pennsylvania as established the School of Pharmacology , one of the first of its kind in the US, also in Philadelphia. Ms. Hayhurst wants to upgrade her knowledge and one of the pharmacy professors lets her sit in on his lectures. She does likewise with other professors. Although the School does not admit women they don’t kick her out, so she keeps taking classes, passing exams and writing papers. On this day, Ms. Hayhurst graduates, along with 149 fellow students, all male. She becomes the 1st US woman graduate of a pharmacy college. Good News in Arts, Letters and Modern and Even Future Media Writers. Dancers. Musicians. Playwrights. Actresses. Directors and Producers. Actors. Composers. All these people only accidentally provide things of “survival value” to us humans. Computers, AI programs, Terminators, Robots….certain people you have met or gone to school with…..none of these see the need, the value, the utility for these human activities or for those who produce them. These areas have no “survival value” but are rather what give value to surviving. When the heart surges, the soul is refreshed or awed, the mind left stunned and there is a small smile or a tear in the eye…..well that’s what we live for and look for to make “life worthwhile.” Nichelle Nichols had a chance to move us that way. Her Wikipedia biography is HERE. But for many of us, she will always be Communications Officer Uhura. Well now comes this heart-lifting, tear-in- the-eye, catch-in-the-throat GREAT STORY that Lt. Uhura, personally and face to face persuaded by Dr. Martin Luther King himself to NOT resign from the USS Enterprise after 1 season, THAT Lt. Uhura…..well, she will now forever be a Star…..among the stars……and the music of the spheres changes to a new melody….. Whew! Well after that send off, let it be noted that on March 16ths there have been others who have inspired, consoled, and enriched us in ways no AI program could ever dream of doing (since they do not dream, and do not know why they do not dream…..) 1799 Tonbridge, England Birth of Anna Children (later Atkins), botantist, photographer. Her mother died soon after giving birth to her so Anna was raised by her father, a chemist and zoologist and a good teacher. Anna was fascinated by zoology and her skill at drawing led to her becoming the illustrator of a textbook on shellfish. She married John Atkins, a well-off merchant whose hobby was science. In the early 1840s photography (see Daguerre) was getting off the ground and Atkins, her husband and her sister-in-law tried their hand. In 1842 she used a cyanotype process to produce photographs and included them in a book published in 1843 “Photographs of British Algae.” Considered the first book ever published that included photographs. (It caught on……) 1827 New York City Freedom’s Journal joins the ranks of newspapers in this sprawling metropolis. The weekly is the first Afro-American newspaper edited for blacks and by blacks. 1850 Boston Publishing firm Ticknor, Reed and Fields scores big today. Their new offering from Nathaniel Hawthorne goes on sale today: “The Scarlet Letter” (Adultery, revenge and redemption in Puritan Massachusetts…… clearly a red letter day……) 1881 Denver, Colorado Birth of Fannie Charles Dillon, pianist, composer. (Female composers are unusual; American female composers are quite rare.) At age 9 her family moved to Long Beach, California where she studied piano (including some studies in Berlin.) She taught music for several years at Los Angeles High School (where one of her students was John Cage , who clearly skipped several classes having to do with melody and harmony) and at Pomona College. She was a founder of the Woodland Theater at Big Bear Lake. She composed several unusual compositions for piano, orchestra and voice and is noted for including bird calls into her works. Nevertheless—Old Glory, The Alps, Woodland Flute Call, are among several other striking compositions. (Starts at 10:11) x YouTube Video GOOD NEWS FROM SCIENCE, MEDICINE and ENGINEERING After the last 36 hours or so here at DailyKos, we have had an object lesson in computerese……and servers……and databases….. On other fronts the clever, brainy people with an affinity for white lab coats continue to think, discover and invent STUFF for us and around us. There is Good News on the Electric Vehicle front: AMONG AUTO BUILDERS There is further electrifying Good News on the electric front (yes, you’ll get a nearly room temperature charge from THIS NEWS.) Those stories are following in the footsteps of prior March 16ths: 1867 London, UK Dr. Joseph Lister was already famous for introducing anesthetics for surgery. Painless surgery is a huge breakthrough (and came in time for our Civil War. Having a patient “bite the bullet” against the pain became the exception, not the rule.) On this day he publishes another advance in “The Lancet” medical journal (still extant) where Lister outlines his description and process of antiseptic surgery. While it would still be 20 years before Pasteur pinned down the source of infection to germs and bacteria, Lister’s methods resulted in far fewer post-operative infections, so he, and medical science, were on the right track. All of us 150 years later are grateful (and even alive) because of his work. 1926 Auburn, Massachusetts OK, you’ve heard of Sally Ride, and Voyager 2, Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik, Cape Canaveral and maybe even V-2, Von Braun and Peenemunde. But all those came later. Our reach for the stars started here, in Massachusetts. On this day Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fueled rocket, with a couple instruments that note it reached an altitude of 184 feet. Proof of concept; guidance, control, orbital mechanics will all need to be worked out, but today is WHY all those eventually become important. (You have to wonder what Goddard’s neighbors thought….) Then again, before my brain ages too far along, I need to take a leaf from stand-up comic George Burns, who stood up doing comedy and one-liners until his wrinkles reached his shins: “If you make it to 80, you’ve learned everything you need to know. The trouble is remembering it.” So there is THIS STORY on brain aging, how to get it, how to use it, how to fight it. Meanwhile, on a remote Pacific bit of land, there is some sort of case to be made for the existence of certain cousins of we homo sapiens. Our homo neanderthalis and homo denosovian have not survived in full form to our days (although their genes have in our DNA). But THIS STORY may, just may, have found traces of our Hobbit cousins……for reals (not just of the Tolkien persuasion…..) GOOD NEWS IN PUBLIC LIFE AND POLITICS Yes, this is a political website, and news of the day is a daily feature, complete with comments, extensions, amplifications, refutations and all the good stuff of debating that makes debating good for us. As a member of the ordained clergy around here (Lutheran) it annoys me no end that the MAGA/white supremacists out there are either stemming from or using my religion for their evil ends. We saw way too much of this in decades and centuries past, to the point that American hero James Madison wrote freedom of and (by implication) freedom FROM religion into the Constitution. The Founding gang had seen and had read too much and too many instances in Europe of the power of the state/king being blessed and even justified by the (approved) religion/denomination of the day (which tended to make that denomination THE Approved religion.) On the other hand, they had also seen the power of the state used against religions for reasons of greed or even other religion (Madison had personally witnessed Baptists being rounded up in his home state of Virginia, a state that required members of the Legislature be members in good standing of the Episcopal church……and no other.) At its best the Faith and its leaders offer a “prophetic critique” of current events, not in the sense of telling the future type prophetic speech, but in the “calling to task” sort of speech. (See prophet Nathan telling the adulterous King David, “Thou Art the Man” ---who has done wrong. Sometimes only the King James English will do….) Now even among us Lutherans we have contending bodies that more or less get along with each other…..to a point…..since we all claim Martin Luther as our opening source. That said, in my lifetime and in my professional capacity, I have taken a good bit of chaff from the Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod, a conservative body. (Despite “Missouri” in their official title, they are a national body; same goes for the Wisconsin-Synod. In both cases this is a function of where each church started.) But now I will unabashedly cheer on a bishop of the Mo Synod WHO HERE blasts the white supremacists who justify their attitudes and actions on Christian grounds. The good bishop spews them and their views out of his mouth with vigor and publicly. Good on ya, sir! There is also THIS ARTICLE that is a nice think piece and critique of that link between certain (usually on the air), “non-denominational” churches and their implicit or even explicit support for toxic whiteness. Picking March 16 for this sort of public matters and issues has a sturdy history down through the years, with March 16 public events that offered uplift and hope, even when scarred with sorrow and death……the hope is a sturdy one that marches through the pain. 1882 Washington DC After ratification by the Senate, on this day President Chester Arthur signs the Treaty of Geneva, which meant the United States formally joined the International Red Cross. 1917 St. Petersburg, Russia World War I has become a military disaster for Russia. There have been demonstrations, riots for bread since the shelves are empty, and mutinies. Russia is on the brink of defaulting on its money obligations (see? it HAS happened before.) On this day Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, abdicates in favor of his brother Michael. This proves to be a stopgap before Russia moves to a democracy under Kerensky for a few months……and then came the hell of Lenin. 1996 (Formerly East) Berlin, Germany For decades millions of Germans lived in dread of the East German secret police (“Stasi”). Then in 1989 the evil symbol of the regime came down as the Berlin Wall opened. Communism collapsed and the words “East” and “West” no longer described Germany. As another sign of change, even healing, on this day, for the first time, ordinary citizens were allowed inside the central archives of the former East German secret police, the hated Stasi security agency. People could look up their own names, family, friends, and see what, if anything, the despised Stasi had on them. Sometimes it was so mundane it brought chuckles. Other times it was clear an arrest had been pending. But it was definitely healing….. 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