Retro❉Politics

It's Patriotic!

When the fledgling republic cast around for a flag to embody its new spirit of independence, Betsy Ross was there with her needle and her hemp. Were it not for hemp, she might have had to paint the Stars and stripes onto a deer hide. Somehow, a ragtag army of farmers waving deerskins over their heads would have been less inspiring, and the country might never have been the same.

Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America were drafted on hemp paper. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and America’s other patriotic greats proudly put their names to hemp paper as no modern politician would dare to do. Washington and Jefferson grew acres of hemp, an activity that today would land them in jail for life.

Though hemp was banned in 1937, the United States suddenly reversed it’s position in 1942, subsidized the cultivation of the crop, and even made a short film urging farmers to grow it! What had changed? World War II.

Since 1937 the United States had been importing its hemp from the Far East. But with that supply cut off by the Japanese, the U.S. found itself in a bind. Every Navy battleship required 34, 000 feet of hemp rope to keep running. Without hemp millions of GIs couldn’t tie their shoes, and parachutes had no webbing. So hemp metamorphosed overnight from evil weed to the patriotic crop. Hundreds of thousands of acres were grown under government contract to save the country. After the war the government flip-flopped once more, and hemp became the evil weed again. But who knows when it will be called upon next to save a person, country, or planet?

(via The Hemp Manifesto)

Obama Meets With Catholic Press Ahead of Vatican Visit

Howard Friedman | Religion Clause

Yesterday President Barack Obama met with eight members of the Catholic press ahead of his planned meeting with Pope Benedict XVI next Friday. Obama will be in Italy for the Group of Eight meeting after visiting Russia earlier in the week. (AFP report on trip.) Obama opened the White House meeting with media with a statement and then answered questions from each reporter. The National Catholic Register has a series of reports on questions asked. Most attention has been given to Obama’s statement that “there will be a robust conscience clause in place” when the White House finishes its review of HHS regulations that were put in place at the end of the Bush administration. Obama promised that the conscience protections will not be weaker than those that were in place before the Bush changes. The President also responded to questions on abortion rights, tensions between liberal and conservative Catholics, his own choice of a new church, homosexual rights, and the Middle East.

Turkish Game Show Tries to Convert Atheists

(Newser Summary) – This was probably only a matter of time: A Turkish game show starting this fall will bring on 10 atheists per show and give holy men from four faiths the chance to convert them, the Guardian reports. A Muslim imam, a Greek Orthodox priest, a rabbi, and a Buddhist monk will do their best. Contestants who are persuaded to choose a religion will win a pilgrimage to Mecca, Jerusalem, or Tibet.

The makers of Tovbekarlar Yarisiyor—Penitents Compete—say the aim is to “turn disbelievers on to God,” and to help educate Turkey’s overwhelmingly Muslim population about other faiths. Contestants will be vetted before the show to make sure they are genuine disbelievers, then monitored afterward to make sure they’ve actually converted and are not just faking it to get a free vacation. God forbid.

Source: Guardian (UK)

Opaque Transparency

The Daily Beast

The Obama administration will protect a court filing that reveals conversations Dick Cheney had with top officials over the Bush administration’s response to “Plamegate.” The information, derived from interviews between Cheney and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, was kept private during the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration has agreed that it should not be disclosed out of fears that it will discourage future public officials from holding similar interviews. But the document could shed more light on Cheney’s role in the Valerie Plame case, in which the CIA spy was outed in the press, setting off a scandal. The document is said to reveal conversations between Cheney and top officials about Bush’s mention of uranium in a speech on Iraq and conversations between Cheney and Scooter Libby, who was convicted of obstruction of justice over the Plame case only to have his sentence commuted by the president. As for Plame, Assistant Attorney General David Barron said Cheney discussed “the appropriate response to media inquiries about the source of the disclosure.”

Read it at The Washington Post

200-Year-Old Presidential Code Cracked

(Newser Summary) – A code that stumped Thomas Jefferson and other cryptologists for over two centuries has finally been cracked, the Wall Street Journal reports. The cipher—sent to Jefferson in 1801 by mathematician Robert Patterson as an example of the perfect code—piqued the interest of defense cryptologist Lawren Smithline, who tackled the jumble of letters using methods available in the 19th century, although sped up with the help of computers.

Smithline broke down the code, which Patterson had boasted would remain uncracked until the end of time, into two-letter segments and analyzed 19th-century speeches for clues. After weeks of work, he discovered that the encoded message was the beginning of the Declaration of Independence—which was partially authored by Jefferson himself. “Patterson played this little joke on Thomas Jefferson,” says Smithline. “And nobody knew until now.”

Source: Wall Street Journal