Hipstre's History
September 12, 2010

Either a lot happened on this day, or I am getting really good at finding stuff.


image

September 12, 2006 - We’ve been having our own problems with crackpot Christian sects here in 2010, but did you know that Nuclear war killed “a third part of man over a fourth part of the Earth” just four years ago? At least that was what was supposed to happen according to the “House of Yahweh”. The HoY claims to be (unlike other sects of Christianity) the one true church, possessors the only true and proper interpretation of the Bible. Their founder Yisrayl Hawkins, claimed that September 12, 2006 would be the start of the Nuke-yoo-lar War. Don’t take my word on it, hear it from Yisrayl himself.

Of course, the only thing that happened on that day was Justin Timberlake released Future Sex/Lovesounds and Girls Gone Wild producer (and swell guy) Joe Francis plead guilty to failing to report and document the ages of “performers”.

Yisrayal, Wild Girl, Timberlake

Why the smirk, Yisrayl? That girl’s not your daughter.

Lovesounds? Future Sex? Girls Gone Wild? Those are all the sorts of things to which the House of Yahweh would object strenuously, I suspect. Of course, they would be objecting from their jail cells. In the intervening years the upper echelons of the HoY have been arrested, convicted and jailed mostly on charges of raping their own children (not disallowed, in fact, positively recommended in “The Good Book”, by the way). And when they aren’t raping children to honor Yahweh, they are performing miraculous healings on them. A HoY member was convicted of performing “surgery” on and murdering her own seven year old daughter at home.


image

September 12, 1960 - H.L. Mencken once said, “Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority… All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant…” Eighty years to the day after his birth, on this day, John F. Kennedy addressed the Greater Houston Ministerial Association:

image

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute–where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote–where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference–and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”

“Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end–where all men and all churches are treated as equal–where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice.”

Read the entire text at belief.net. Seperation of church and state is about protecting religions from one another as much as anything else. If the state starts taking on religious values, it is almost certain that they won’t be your values.


image

September 12, 2000 - The Lower House of the Dutch Parliament passes Bill 26672 (“On the opening up of marriage”) which allows and gives full legal protection to same sex marriages, divorces, and adoptions. The law went into effect in April, 2001.

Real Patents!

Across the ocean, patents are issued in America for a headband with slots for eyeglasses (#6,115,843), and Headgear with a fan, electronic communication device, and binoculars (#6,115,846).


image

September 12, 1994 - People used to say things like, “You know when I was a kid, ‘Made in Japan’ meant 'made to break’, now you can’t even get a transistor radio that isn’t made in Japan. But you know what, all the great inventions come from America, the rest of the world is just copying our genius.” In the spirit of American Innovation, on this day Frank Eugene Corder crashed a stolen Cessna into the White House (Lawn).

Class act and drunken lunatic F. Corder image

A short play, based on the events of the day. The setting is the back of the White House. Two secret service agents take a smoke break.

Secret Service Guy #1: Maybe someone should look into the use of airplanes as weapons.

Secret Service Guy #2: Yeah, I’ll get right on that… Say, did you hear they aren’t gonna go for the death penalty in the OJ case?

Secret Service Guy #1: NO WAY!

Secret Service Guy #2: Yeah, with all that blood evidence, and him running away and all…

Secret Service Guy #1: Jeesh, DO YOUR JOB Marcia Clark! Speaking of which, shouldn’t we be investigating the possibility of hijacking planes and using them as weapons?

Secret Service Guy #2: Dude, they are going to show the trial LIVE ON CABLE TV!

Secret Service Guy #1: NO WAY!


image

September 12, 1910 - William Coolidge perfects a method for making tungsten ductile (soft, and workable). This allowed the creation of superior tungsten filament light bulbs–the kind you have used every day of your life. On the same day, the LAPD hires Alice Stebbin Wells as the world’s first police woman.

image


image

September 12, 1968 - I often ask myself, “How long has it been since Albania withdrew from the Warsaw Pact?” Perhaps this short movie will help:

image


Quickly:

2 years ago - Writer David Foster Wallace commits suicide, not by cutting a hole in the front of a microwave oven and cooking his own brain, but by the mundane and undignified act of hanging himself.

72 years ago - Hitler demands “self-determination” for Sudeten Germans living in Czechoslovakia.

18 years ago - Ethel Hudson, last New Hampshire Shaker dies, and the Shaker colony with her. The Shakers started as a doomsday cult. There are three Shakers left in Massachusetts.

33 years ago - Steven Biko dies after twenty or more days of police torture.


Yesterday - Tomorrow