What I’m Blogging

It was on this day in 1918 that the first cases of what would become the influenza pandemic were reported in the U.S. when 107 soldiers got sick at Fort Riley, Kansas.

…the worst pandemic in world history…

It was the worst pandemic in world history. The flu that year killed only 2.5 percent of its victims, but more than a fifth of the world’s entire population caught it, and so it’s estimated that between 50 million and 100 million people died in just a few months.

Historians believe at least 500,000 people died in the United States alone. That’s more than the number of Americans killed in combat in all the wars of the 20th century combined. Usually, the flu would have been most likely to kill babies and the elderly, but the flu of 1918 somehow targeted healthy people in their 20s and 30s. And it was an extremely virulent strain. In the worst cases, victims’ skin would turn dark red, and their feet would turn black.

No one is sure exactly how many people died, because it wasn’t even clear at the time what the disease was. World War I was currently under way, and there were rumors that German soldiers had snuck into Boston Harbor and released some new kind of germ weapon. One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic in this country was that it was barely reported in the media. President Woodrow Wilson had passed laws to censor all kinds of news stories about the war, and newspaper editors were terrified of printing anything that might cause a scandal.

So as the flu epidemic spread across the country. In large cities, people were dying of the flu so rapidly that undertakers ran out of coffins, streetcars had to be used as hearses, and mass graves were dug. The newspapers barely commented on it. In the fall of 1918, doctors tried to get newspapers to warn people in Philadelphia against attending a parade. The newspapers refused. In the week after the parade, almost 5,000 Philadelphians died of the flu.

Among the writers affected by the flu pandemic was Katherine Anne Porter, who grew so sick with the disease that her family had already arranged her funeral before she managed to recover. The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy got on a train with her parents on October 30, 1918. Her father died of the flu before their train reached Minneapolis. Her mother died a day later. The novelist William Maxwell lost his mother to the flu that year. Maxwell later said that all the novels he went on to write were inspired by that loss.

It was on this day in 1933 that newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a special session of Congress and began the first hundred days of enacting his New Deal legislation.

…A quarter of the American workforce was unemployed…

It was the Great Depression. A quarter of the American workforce was unemployed. The prices for industrial goods and agricultural products were falling. There were breadlines in every major city for all the unemployed and hungry. Thousands of people roamed the country on freight trains looking for odd jobs and handouts. Banks were failing at an unprecedented rate, and millions of Americans had lost all or part of their savings.

So people were shocked by Roosevelt’s cheerful demeanor when they saw him just before his inauguration. He was facing one of the most difficult domestic situations in the country’s history, but he seemed excited about it. At his first press conference, on March 8, 1933, the reporters were surprised that the new president actually talked to them. Almost all previous presidents had refused to talk off the cuff with reporters, but Franklin Roosevelt didn’t mind answering all kinds of questions about what he planned to do for the country’s problems.

And then on this day in 1933 he called Congress into session. He had Democratic majorities in both houses. The first piece of legislation the President proposed was the Emergency Banking Act. Even though no one had a chance to examine it in detail, the bill passed after forty minutes of debate. For the next few months, bills were passed almost daily. Among the new federal programs created were the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which distributed half a billion dollars to the poor; the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed people to work on forestry projects; the Public Works Administration, which employed people to build bridges, dams and roads all across the country; the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built and maintained dams on the Tennessee River, controlling flooding and providing cheap energy; and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which provided for the first insurance of banking deposits.

It was on this day in 1951 that the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg began. They were a middle-aged, married Jewish couple, charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. Julius Rosenberg was the leader of a Communist spy ring, and he persuaded his brother-in-law to steal secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory having to do with nuclear weapons. Those secrets were relatively minor and had little effect on the Russians’ acquiring nuclear weapons, but it was strongly suggested by the government that the Rosenbergs were personally responsible for helping Communist Russia acquire the atomic bomb.

…he later said that this was a lie…

The FBI arrested Rosenberg’s wife, Ethel, in hopes of forcing Julius to talk, even though was no evidence to suggest that she had any direct role in the spy ring. The main evidence in the trial came from Ethel’s younger brother David Greenglass, who had worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory as a mechanical engineer. He testified that Ethel typed up the documents he provided, but he later said that this was a lie.

The trial was over in less than a month, and both Ethel and Julius were found guilty. The government offered to spare Ethel’s life if Julius would make a last-minute deal to name names, but he refused to do so, and so they were both executed, one after the other, in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1953.

I hate Windows. I hate large corporations that deploy and use Windows. I hate it more when they do so without the benefits of real security and anti-virus software. And “Oh ya”, I hate people who code viruses and trojans.

…minutes, hours, days all meld together…

For the last week the team at the office has been battling an infection on a massive scale. Several of the little buggers got loose in the TV Land network and now the cries of “unclean” echo from coast to coast. Minutes, hours, days all meld together, as the task of clean up expands to fill all available time. Long days, little sleep, and an inability to perform any other activity has taken it’s toll and I spent the majority of my weekend “off” sleeping.

The Company has hired an army of contractors to patch and clean their thousands of machines. Vendors are lining up to pitch the latest and greatest security offerings. The economic fallout from it is going to be huge.

I get rotated back into the line tomorrow. Hopefully the madness will have subsided by then, but I’m, as ever, not hopeful.