1860 Election in Alabama

 I went back this past week and looked over the 1860 national election....in my home-state (Alabama).  It's an interesting 'twist'.

So fact 1:  Lincoln didn't get on the voting roll.  What you did get was Constitutional Union Party (the remains of the Whig Party), who ran a campaign for John Bell.  Oddly enough....in five counties (in the far south of the state....Bell won over the other two competitors (Breckinridge from the Southern Democrat Party and Douglas from the Democratic Party).

Fact 2: Douglas (Democratic Party) mostly wins in 4 counties in the far north of the state (including my county of Lauderdale).

Fact 3: Breckinridge takes 54-percent of the total state vote (entire state vote for the 3 candidates....just over 90,000).

Fact 4: Oddly enough, Greene County (deep into the cotton belt on the western part of the state, and with a low population of whites (to slaves)....votes primarily for the Constitutional Union Party (John Bell).  I doubt if anyone has ever sat down to analyze the voting in this one county and how odd it is to have a right-of-center party carry the county.

Fact 5: If you review the entire state for votes....the Constitutional Union guy took 31-percent of the votes.  Almost one out of three....didn't vote for the Democrat or the Southern Democratic Party candidate.  

It would be eight years after this point before Alabama would have a 'vote' in the Presidential election.  

Candidates for 1868 in Alabama?  Grant for the Republican Party (getting 51-percent of the vote) against Seymour of the Democratic Party.  I should note....50,000 more Alabama citizens voted in 1868, than in 1860.  Grant's votes?  Oddly, they came from the center of the state where the major slave plantations existed before 1860.  Seymour took the bulk of county votes south and north of the center 'ring'.  

Oddly enough out of this Grant vote trend....Winston County in the north (by itself) took a 70-percent Grant win.  How this happened?  There's a fair amount of new immigrants into the region after the war, and I suspect that Grant gained via that method (probably figure into the extra 50,000 new voters).  

Should You Have To Show 'Masterly' Of Math, Reading And Writing To Graduate High School?

 The state of Oregon sat down and thought about it, and finally in the past week....said 'no'.  

Their logic?  Well....kids of 'color' (meaning Hispanic/Black)...can't get their act together on the topics of writing, reading and math in school.  So the consequence falls into play....you shouldn't be tested for graduation purposes.  You just get a certificate of completion, a hand-shake, and out the door you go.  

Your potential employer?  I would imagine Oregon business operations will quietly and quickly develop a 25-question test for you....as you seek to be employed.  Questions like.....the population of X-town was 10,000 in 1999, and they've lost 10-percent of their population over the past 23 years...what number does the current population relate to?

What's really going on?  I would take a guess, and suggest three issues: (1) too many marginal teachers employed in the state and unable to 'teach'. (2) A fair number of kids are products of alcohol/drug issue parents, and unable to concentrate at the level required for high school.  (3) Most residents not wanting assign responsibility to teachers or students. 

But here's the bigger issue....if you have 15,000 kids a year from Oregon who can't perform beyond the 8th grade level of math,  reading and writing....showing up at colleges in the state....how do you explain to them that level of knowledge is not enough to 'enter'?  Do you deny the 15,000 entry?  Do you add a 5th/6th year onto college....teaching them the masterly stuff they were supposed to learn in high school?  

Then you wonder....if you got so many young people lacking....should you go and force the over-65 age Oregonian folks to 'man-up' and work ten to fifteen extra years because they are the best and brightest in the state at present?

It's a weird problem and you just wonder....did some alien-UFO folks land and just insert stupidity into a huge population of Oregonian people?

Just Odd

 An American streaming-video service (not Netflix) has signed a contract with the German folks who produce the series 'Tatort'.....to air roughly 250 of the 1,000-plus episodes they've made of the series (since the 1980s).  

I would imagine English sub-titles will be used.

What of the series?  Well....in the first three minutes of each episode....there's a murder, and it's left dangling over who did it.  

So there are various detectives from each major city who get the call, and investigate.

Some of these (I will admit) are crap.  Some are actually five-star.

The Munester-team (Professor-Doctor Boerne and Detective Thiel) are a duo who have a comic prospective and I'd rate their shows at the five-star level.  There's currently 43 of their films in the 'bucket'.

The Kiel-crew (Detective Borowski and Detective Brandt) make some pretty interesting films (total of 39).

The Wiesbaden-shows?  Detective Murot.  If you were looking for weird twists and turns....it's five star.

I've probably watched in the neighborhood of 150 of the 90-minute murder series and will agree there are serious losers in the bunch, but 20-percent will shock you on quality of the script.  

So if you see the streaming-service chatty about having added 'Tatort'.....yeah, it's probably worth signing up.  

The most shocking show?  They did an episode where blood was at a scene, but no body, and were convinced for 85 minutes that a murder had occurred. In the final five minutes, they discover the supposed dead guy was still alive, and the whole effort to find the murderer and body....was totally wasted.  Then the chief suspect is all angry/upset about faked-up murder.....that he actually does murder the fake-dead guy. 

Safety Bulletin

 

This went out this week in DC...to Senate and staff members.

Basically warning them of crime and threats in their environment.

Yeah, the stuff that regular Americans experienced....has finally come to threaten the elected folks.

How The Whig Party Dissolved

 From the 1760s to 1854....there were two political parties in America....the Democratic Party and the Whig Party.

So in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act came into play (passing).  

After this, the northern group of Whigs kinda left the party and went to a newly forming group....the Republican Party. 

Southern Whigs?  There weren't that many, but they mostly went to a quickly formed 'American' Party, and later transformed their small unit to the Constitutional Union Party. 

To note: John Bell ran for the Presidency in 1860 under the Constitutional Union Party....getting around 12-percent of the national vote (mostly southern politically-minded former Whigs).

I would suggest presently, we are in a 1850s mentality and the Republican Party, as it stands today....probably will only exist after 2030 in a marginal form (like the southern Whig folks).  

 

The 1910 People

 Matt Walsh quote:

"Someone born in 1910 would have lived through WW1, WW2, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and the Kennedy assassination all before they turned 60. We live in comparatively uneventful times."

I would probably add seven additional lines.

The same people (born in 1910) would have marveled at the inventions of penicillin, band-aides (came in the 1920s), the hamburger (1924), traffic signals, the electric guitar, walkie-talkies, the TV, silly putty, barcodes, solar cells, the passenger jet, LED, digital maps, rockets, and the automatic transmission.

The same people would be shocked at the complexity of life evolving.

The same people would be shocked at railway stations dissolving away, and interstate roads getting you from coast to coast in three days.  

This Travis King Episode

 If you remember....Private Travis King was this guy who got all stressed out....while in South Korea, and ended up crossing the border into North Korea....thinking his life would improve.  

The North Koreans after a while....came to realize that the guy had no value whatsoever, and was a 'problem'....so they gave him back to South Korea.

Yesterday, the US Army announced that they have eight charges up against him...desertion is one of them (pretty serious), and oddly enough....some kind of child-porn charge comes into play.  Looking at the mess, if convicted on all eight....he'd probably be doing 15 to 20 years in prison.

King being mentally incompetent?  At some point, his Army lawyer is going to ask for a mental eval, and I suspect that the Army clinic will admit on maturity level....King is probably a 12-year old kid, and not capable of adult actions.

Army's fault for accepting him into service?  Well....you have a limited amount of time to look over test results and just assign a number to each recruit.  King, I suspect, just fell through.  

But here's the thing.....the Army has wasted tons of man-hours on King so far, and they need to show something for all this worthless effort.  

King walking free?  It wouldn't shock me if the charges were dropped and a discharge given to the guy....because of his mental issues.