Belfast's Bloody Sunday

July 10, 1921:

On 8 July, the RIC attempted to enter the mainly Catholic and republican area around Union Street and Stanhope Street. However, they were confronted by about 15 IRA volunteers in a firefight that lasted over three hours.
The following day, 9 July, the IRA ambushed an armoured police truck on Raglan Street, killing one RIC man, injuring two more and destroying their armoured car. Around 14 IRA men took part in the operation. They had been alerted to the police presence by local residents banging dustbin lids to warn the IRA of the RIC patrol.
This sparked an outbreak of ferocious fighting between Catholics and Protestants in west Belfast on the following day, Sunday 10 July, in which 16 civilians (11 Catholics and 5 Protestants) lost their lives and 161 houses were destroyed. Of the houses destroyed, 150 were Catholic.
Gun battles raged all day along the sectarian 'boundary' between the Falls and Shankill Roads and rival gunmen used rifles, machine guns and hand grenades in the clashes. Gunmen were seen firing from windows, rooftops and street corners. A "Loyalist mob, several thousand strong" attempted to storm the Catholic Falls Road, carrying petrol and other flammable materials.
Another four people died over the following two days. While the IRA was involved in the violence, it did not control the actions of the Catholic community. An IRA officer reported that "the Catholic mob is almost beyond control".
The violence occurred only one day before a truce between the IRA and British forces formally ended the conflict - though in the north the official truce did not end the fighting. IRA members later recalled, "The Truce was not observed by either side in the north". The leader of the Belfast IRA's Active Service Unit, Roger McCorley, stated that "the Truce lasted six hours only".

I wasn't familiar with this Bloody Sunday, only the Derry Bloody Sunday (January 30, 1972)  There were a lot of bloody days during the Irish Civil War.  What a terrible mess.

Chart of the Day

Ezra Klein:

Republican messaging keeps getting more and more effective, even though it is more and more detatched from reality.  Go figure.  All the Reaganophiles would be shocked to know St. Ronnie RASIED taxes to try to narrow deficits.  They would also be shocked to realize they don't know much.

Notre Dame Bengal Bouts Alum Is Now A Pro Boxer

The Atlantic:

As soon as he could drive, Mike Lee would venture from suburban Wheaton, Illinois into tough South Chicago to train at local boxing gyms. Lee's father owns one of the nation's biggest sellers of barcode devices, and by all outward appearances Lee seems like someone who should be hanging out at a suburban mall. But he loved a boxing gym's atmosphere—the buzz of the three-minute bell, the whipping of the speed bags, the melody of the jump ropes, the acrid smell of sweat—and learning the boxing trade. Lee is quiet and thoughtful and, by his own description, shy. He was a popular kid—starred as a middle linebacker on his high school team—but to him, there was nothing like the culture of boxing. "There aren't a lot of kids from my background in boxing gyms," says Lee. He felt more at home among the working class, regarding many in his peer group as "phony."

After finishing high school at Benet Academy, a private prep school, he went to the University of Missouri for a year then transferred to Notre Dame University. While he was in South Bend, he became a local boxing legend as a three-time winner of the "Bengal Bouts", an intramural boxing tournament started by Knute Rockne, which now benefits the poor of Bangladesh. (To get a better sense of where the aid was going, Lee volunteered and worked at a Bangladeshi school one summer and also set up his own foundation there.) While attending Notre Dame, he constantly traveled back and forth to Chicago gyms.

After he graduated (3.8 GPA) with a finance degree, there were job offers from Wall Street. But Lee, who also won a 2009 Golden Gloves championship, felt he really hadn't accomplished much as a boxer, and he wanted to see how far he could go in the sport. While his friends were moving onto finance careers in Chicago and New York, he had dreams of being a boxing world champion. He sought out his father for advice. An intense man who looks like an Irish cop, his dad told him to go after his real passion. So Lee called Ronnie Shields, a noted trainer based in Houston, who told Lee that he would give him an honest assessment. Shields asked him when he would arrive at the gym and Lee said he would see him the following morning. Shields laughed, but Lee took the next plane out, and there he was in the morning, going through the toughest workout of his life, throwing up in a trashcan afterwards. Lee loved it. Shields saw some skill, a passion for learning the trade, and a lot of heart.

I'm also a Bengal Bouts alum, but I fought 4 years and lost every fight.  It was a lot of fun, I met great guys and it was a great way to lose 20 to 25 pounds in the middle of winter  You have a real motivation to lose wieght when that means a smaller guy will be punching you in the melon.

Reds and Brewers Honor Negro League Teams

WDJT-TV:

The Milwaukee Brewers plan to pay tribune to the Negro League at Saturday's game against the Reds. 

   The Brewers will wear reproductions of uniforms worn by the Milwaukee Bears, the city's 1923 representative in the Negro National League. 

   The team played one season before disbanding but featured some of the game's most influential men, including Hall-of-Fame player/manager John Preston "Pete" Hill. 

   The Cincinnati Reds will wear uniforms of the 1936-37 Cincinnati Tigers. 

More on the Cincinnati Tigers:

The Cincinnati Tigers were a professional baseball team based in Cincinnati, Ohio, which played in the Negro Leagues. The Tigers were founded in 1934 by DeHart Hubbard, the first black to win an individual Olympic gold medal when he won the long jump during the 1924 Summer Olympics. In 1937, the Tigers joined the Negro American League in its inaugural season. Using Cincinnati Reds hand-me-down uniforms, the Tigers played at Crosley Field, often outdrawing the Reds. The Tigers folded after the 1937 season.

Some Things Are Just Accidents

15 Awesomely Accidental Inventions, at Business Pundit, via Ritholtz.

At some times, luck makes a big difference.  You just have to adapt to what you get.

Never Learning Lessons

James Fallows on the stupidity of Republican economics, and Obama's mistake in going along with those morons:

Those days of the 1970s are now nearly 40 years in the past. And this morning's jobs report makes me wonder whether, as a political system, we ever learn anything. Even this basic thing: That when tens of millions of people cannot find work because of an overall "failure of demand" -- not enough paychecks going to not enough people who can not make enough payments to create jobs for enough other people -- the main problem facing the nation is not "runaway government spending." Any more than it was when Herbert Hoover tightened up on spending as markets crashed, in the wave of folly that Keynes and Ahamed in their different ways chronicled. A lot has changed since the 1930s, and the 1970s. But not this basic principle.

The Congressional Republicans, in saying today that the weak jobs report shows the importance of not raising taxes in tough economic times, understand half this reality. (Or maybe a quarter of it: there is no failure of demand in the top levels of the US income distribution, the levels whose taxes the Republicans fight hardest to hold down. I won't even get into the "propensity to spend" arguments about why higher taxes at the top could actually increase overall demand.) But they refuse to see how exactly the same logic undercuts their current anti-spending drive.

The Republican party is an evil combination of corporate shills and idiots.  The corporate shills know they are misleading people, but don't care because they are crooks.  The idiots just don't understand basic logic.  Too many voters seem to feel better when the Republicans blame government and poor minorities for all of our economic problems.  If Democrats don't get a spine and learn how to explain basic economics, the voters are going to continue believing Republican crap.  If these voters don't wise up, we're going to be up Shit Creek without a paddle. 

The Great Train Wreck of 1918

July 9, 1918:

The Great Train Wreck of 1918 occurred on July 9, 1918, in Nashville, Tennessee. Two passenger trains, operated by the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway ("NC&StL"), collided head-on, killing 101 people and injuring an additional 171. It is considered the deadliest rail accident in United States history.
The two trains involved were the No. 4, scheduled to depart Nashville for Memphis, Tennessee at 7:00 a.m., and the No. 1 from Memphis, about a half-hour late for a scheduled arrival in Nashville at 7:10 a.m. At about 7:20 a.m., the two trains collided while traversing a section of single track line known as "Dutchman's Curve" west of downtown, in the present-day neighborhood of Belle Meade. Traveling at an estimated 50/60 miles per hour, the impact derailed both trains and destroyed several wooden cars.
An investigation by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) attributed the cause of the accident to several factors, notably serious errors by the No. 4 crew and tower operators, all of whom failed to properly account for the presence of the No. 1 train on the line. The ICC also pointed to a lack of a proper system for the accurate determination of train positions and noted that the wooden construction of the cars greatly increased the number of fatalities.

Also:

In the 1970s, songwriters Bobby Braddock and Rafe VanHoy told the story of the trainwreck in the song "The Great Nashville Railroad Disaster (A True Story)". The song was recorded by Country music singer David Allan Coe on his 1980 album "I've Got Something To Say".

A David Allen Coe song without racist words.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Bigger Government is needed for the US economy, at One Salient Oversight:

What is obvious though is that the market is just not creating enough jobs. While the cause might be debatable, the result is not.

But what is needed to fix this is not just another round of stimulus packages. What is needed is a structural expansion of government spending. In essence, the US government needs to spend more.

Of course readers of this blog might wonder if I have changed my mind from recent times when I advocated austerity. The problem is that the word "austerity" has ended up becoming synonymous with spending cuts - which is the favoured position of conservatives. While I have advocated spending cuts in the area of military spending I came to the conclusion that the only way the US could ever hope to cut enough spending to make any difference would be to destroy Medicare or Social Security (and I don't use the word "destroy" lightly - you'd be looking at cuts of over 50% to make any difference). The alternative is to raise taxes - and that is the option I have always promoted. I still define this as "austerity" since it causes pain, but it is not the preferred description of the word in these times.

What I have done, though, is change my position on the market's ability to recover properly. I would've been happy for Obama to cut military spending and raise taxes in order to run a small deficit (at the least) but do little else while the economy stumbles, falls and eventually recovers from my austerity package. Now I realise that the economy wouldn't recover - at least not quick enough to make any difference.

His policy prescriptions are also very interesting.  Included are universal health care and promotion of renewable energy.  I think the water grid is a little out there.  Unfortunately, as he notes, there is zero chance of them being enacted.  He fears that the economy will tank, Obama and the Democrats will be swept out of office by lunatic Republicans, and the country will be led further down the path to ruin.  I hope that since the Republicans are the main cause of all of our economic woes, as well as so many incorrect beliefs among voters, more than half the country will vote against the Republicans.  I hope.

Dragging the Economy Down

Yglesias:

For a while temporary census-related jobs masked the underlying trend, but we’ve been steadily shedding government work. Maybe you think that’s a good thing. Certainly most of President Obama’s critics from the right claim to believe it’s a good thing. But what happens when you shed public sector jobs amidst an already weak economic climate is the sharply reduced incomes of the former teachers and whatnot lead to them spending less in their local communities.

Republicans are idiots.  Cutting all these government jobs is going to drag the economy back into recession.  They claimed that uncertainty about tax rates prevented private businesses from hiring (false).  Now the Bush tax cuts are in place for two more years, still not much hiring.  Now they are threatening to default on the debt if they don't get more government cuts without raising tax revenues.  So they are pushing to further weaken the economy, pushing us toward another depression, while creating even more uncertainty to prevent the creation of jobs.  Their solution: more tax cuts, less government spending and fewer regulations.  All things which will make our problems worse.  The GOP is worthless. 

Be Still My Broken Heart

ESPN:

Ohio State's 2010 Big Ten championship, its 12-1 season, its victories over rival Michigan and in the Allstate Sugar Bowl -- all gone. Coach Jim Tressel is out and so is star quarterback Terrelle Pryor. Left behind: two years of self-imposed probation.
The question now is whether it will be enough to save Ohio State from more severe penalties in an upcoming trip to see the NCAA committee on infractions.

And that is only in the hope of avoiding worse punishment.  It goes deeper than 2010.  I'm smiling.