Einstein and Communism

Einstein, a professed believer in political liberty, virtually refuses to criticize the Soviet government and justifies the murders and creation of slave labor camps. The closest Einstein comes to criticism of the Soviet government is contained in the first sentence of the following quote. However, the next sentence speaks for itself. According to Einstein in 1948, “I am not blind to the serious weaknesses of the Russian system of government and I would not like to live under such government. But it has, on the other side, great merits and it is difficult to decide whether it would have been possible for the Russians to survive by following softer methods” (Einstein quoted in Hook 1987, p. 471).

The Myth of Consistent Skepticism, Skeptical Inquirer magazine, May/Jun 2007

Tom Elia:

The Democratic Party is not so much a political party anymore as much as it is a public relations firm whose primary target audience is a remedial civics class.

Reason

“You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates. We have ours and Cutie has his.”

“Then let’s get at those postulates in a hurry. The storm’s due tomorrow.”

Powell sighed wearily. “That’s where everything falls down. Postulates are based on assumptions and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them. I’m going to bed.”

–Isaac Asimov, Reason (1941)

France: "one of the least popular countries…vanity…arrogance"

Reflecting on the reasons for the drubbing Paris received when she submitted her candidacy to host the 2008 Olympics, Jacques Julliard wrote with perceptiveness and candor:

In Moscow we have been abandoned by our European partners, by our Arab 'friends' and by our African supporters. The plain, unvarnished truth—which the whole political community does everything it can to hide—is that France has become one of the least popular countries on the planet. I have already mentioned its arrogance and vanity. To these should be added the way our rulers presume to lecture the entire world.

Jacques Julliard, "Sur une déculotée," Le Nouvel Observateur, July 19, 2001. The meeting of the International Olympic Committee before choosing the host city for the 2008 Olympics took place in Moscow.

Jean-François Revel, "Anti-Globalism and Anti-Americanism", Anti-Americanism, Encounter Books 2003.

More Jefferson quotes

Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (January 16, 1787) Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:57

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Letter to John Norvell (June 11, 1807) (various errors uncorrected)

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers.

It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4. chapters, heading the 1st. Truths, 2d. Probabilities, 3d. Possibilities, 4th. Lies. The 1st. chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d. would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This however should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d. & 4th. should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy.

Such an editor too would have to set his face against the demoralising practice of feeding the public mind habitually on slander, & the depravity of taste which this nauseous aliment induces. Defamation is becoming a necessary of life: insomuch that a dish of tea, in the morning or evening, cannot be digested without this stimulant. Even those who do not believe these abominations, still read them with complacence to their auditors, and, instead of the abhorrence & indignation which should fill a virtuous mind, betray a secret pleasure in the possibility that some may believe them, tho they do not themselves. It seems to escape them that it is not he who prints, but he who pays for printing a slander, who is its real author.

Letter to Thomas Pinckney (May 29, 1797)

Political dissension is doubtless a less evil than the lethargy of despotism: but still it is a great evil, and it would be as worthy the efforts of the patriot as of the philosopher, to exclude it's [sic] influence if possible, from social life. The good are rare enough at best. There is no reason to subdivide them by artificial lines. But whether we shall ever be able so far to perfect the principles of society as that political opinions shall, in it's intercourse, be as inoffensive as those of philosophy, mechanics, or any other, may well be doubted.

Letter to John Adams (January 11, 1817) (sometimes referred to as "Jefferson's Axiom")

What all agree upon is probably right; what no two agree in most probably is wrong.

Bertrand Russell on Communism and Religion

The City of God contains little that is fundamentally original. The eschatology is Jewish in origin, and came into Christianity mainly through the Book of Revelation. The doctrine of predestination and election is Pauline, though Saint Augustine gave it a much fuller and more logical development than is to be found in the Epistles. The distinction between sacred and profane history is quite clearly set forth in the Old Testament. What Saint Augustine did was to bring these elements together, and to relate them to the history of his own time, in such a way that the fall of the Western Empire, and the subsequent period of confusion, could be assimilated by Christians without any unduly severe trial of their faith.

The Jewish pattern of history, past and future, is such as to make a powerful appeal to the oppressed and unfortunate at all times. Saint Augustine adapted this pattern to Christianity, Marx to Socialism. To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:

Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
The Second Coming = The Revolution
Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium =The Communist Commonwealth

The terms on the left give the emotional content of the terms on the right, and it is this emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringing, that makes Marx's eschatology credible. A similar dictionary could be made for the Nazis, but their conceptions are more purely Old Testament and less Christian than those of Marx, and their Messiah is more analogous to the Maccabees than to Christ.

History of Western Philosophy, Book 2: Catholic Philosophy, Part I: The Fathers, Chapter IV: Saint Augustine's Philosophy and Theology

Thanks for the graphics bandwidth, PETA!

Make your own KFC sign at KentuckyFriedCruelty.com

Martin Gardner on Einstein and Stalin

I have been criticized for calling Einstein "blind" to the realities of Stalinism. Much as I revere Einstein, it must be said that he, like so many other intellectuals of the thirties, made only the feeblest effort to learn the truth about Stalin. Here is a quotation from a letter he wrote to Max Born, and which you will find on page 130 in The Born-Einstein Letters (1971), edited by Born:

By the way, there are increasing signs that the Russian trials are not faked, but that there is a plot among those who look upon Stalin as a stupid reactionary who has betrayed the ideas of the revolution. Though we find it difficult to imagine this kind of internal thing, those who know Russia best are all more or less of the same opinion. I was firmly convinced to begin with that it was a case of a dictator's despotic acts, based on lies and deception, but this was a delusion.

Born's comments are in my opinion just:

The Russian trials were Stalin's purges, with which he attempted to consolidate his power. Like most people in the West, I believed these show trials to be the arbitrary acts of a cruel dictator. Einstein was apparently of a different opinion: he believed that when threatened by Hitler the Russians had no choice but to destroy as many of their enemies within their own camp as possible. I find it hard to reconcile this point of view with Einstein's gentle, humanitarian disposition.

Postscript to "'Bourgeois Idealism' in Soviet Nuclear Physics", in Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus, Prometheus Books, New York, 1981

How much carbon was released for this?

How much carbon was released for this?

How much of an effect will this have on global warming? None. In fact, by totally unnecessary travel, it increased global warming.

This is just an executive's junket disguised as some noble gesture.

Publicity? Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth has gotten more.

Really, this is worthless, like all similar actions.

Fascism in America

Jean-François Revel:

Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and 'fascist,' while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up.

Jean-François Revel, Anti-Americanism, Encounter Books, 2003, p. 156:

The strange thing is that it's always in Europe that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up, yet it's always America that is 'fascist'.

The Volokh Conspiracy:

I wanted to get the source for the "dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe," so I tracked it down to Tom Wolfe's "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America," republished in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976). In the process, I found a more extended discussion that struck me as worth repeating. Here's the relevant excerpt, from pp. 115-17 of the hardcover edition; it reports on a panel discussion at Princeton in 1965, in which the participants included Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist magazine, Günter Grass, and Wolfe:

The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn't make any sense out of it. . . . This was the mid-1960's. . . . [T]he folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy's body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester's book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights. . . .

Support [for Wolfe's view that fascism wasn't coming to America] came from a quarter I hadn't counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.

"For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Not very nice, Günter! Not very nice, Jean-François! A bit supercilious, wouldn't you say! . . .

Bertrand Russell on Hegel (2)

But this purposeless see-saw, which is all that science has to offer, has not satisfied the philosophers. They have professed to discover a formula of progress, showing that the world was becoming gradually more and more to their liking. The recipe for a philosophy of this type is simple. The philosopher first decides which are the features of the existing world that give him pleasure, and which are the features that give him pain. He then, by a careful selection among facts, persuades himself that the universe is subject to a general law leading to an increase of what he finds pleasant and a decrease of that he finds unpleasant. Next, having formulated his law of progress, he turns on the public and says: 'It is fated that the world must develop as I say; therefore those who wish to be on the winning side, and do not care to wage a fruitless war against the inevitable, will join my party.' Those who oppose him are condemned as unphilosophic, unscientific, and out of date, while those who agree with him feel assured of victory, since the universe is on their side. At the same time the winning side, for reasons which remain somewhat obscure, is represented as the side of virtue.

The man who first developed this point of view was Hegel. Hegel's philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious. What follows is not a caricature, though of course Hegelians will maintain that it is.

Hegel's philosophy, in outline, is as follows. Real reality is timeless, as in Parmenides and Plato, but there is also an apparent reality, consisting of the every-day world in space and time. The character of real reality can be determined by logic alone, since there is only one source of possible reality that is not self-contradictory. This is called the 'Absolute Idea'. Of this he gives the following definition: 'The Absolute Idea. The idea, as unity of the subjective and objective Idea, is the notion of the Idea—a notion whose object is the Ideas as such, and for which the objective is Idea—an Object which embraces all characteristics in its unity.' I hate to spoil the luminous clarity of this sentence by any commentary, but in fact the same thing would be expressed by saying 'The Absolute Idea is pure thought thinking about pure thought.' Hegel has already proved to his satisfaction that all Reality is thought, from which it follows that thought cannot think about anything but thought, since there is nothing else to think about.

from "Philosophy and Politics" in Unpopular Essays

Big Bang

From THE ALCHEMY OF THE HEAVENS by Ken Croswell
(page 113):

Popular books claim Hoyle intended "big bang" to be pejorative, but Hoyle disputed that. "The BBC was all radio in those days," he said, "and on radio, you have no visual aids, so it's essential to arrest the attention of the listener and to hold his comprehension by choosing striking words. There was no way in which I coined the phrase to be derogatory; I coined it to be striking, so that people would know the difference between the steady state model and the big bang model."

Bertrand Russell on Hegel - the most intellectual joke I've ever read

For [Hegel] the course of logic and the course of history were broadly identical. Logic, for him, consisted of a series of self-correcting attempts to describe the world. If your first attempt is too simple, as it is sure to be, you will find that it contradicts itself; you will then try the opposite, or "antithesis", but this will also contradict itself. This leads you to a "synthesis", containing something of the original idea and something of its opposite, but more complex and less self-contradictory than either. This new idea, however, will also prove inadequate, and you will be driven, through its opposite, to a new synthesis. This process goes on until you reach the "Absolute Idea", in which there is no contradiction, and which, therefore, describes the real world.

But the real world, in Hegel as in Kant, is not the apparent world. The apparent world goes through developments which are the same as those the logician goes through if he starts from Pure Being and travels on to the Absolute Idea. Pure Being is exemplified by ancient China, of which Hegel knew only that it had existed; the Absolute Idea is exemplified by the Prussian State, which had given Hegel a professorship at Berlin. Why the world should go through this logical evolution is not clear; one is tempted to suppose that the Absolute Idea did not quite understand itself at first, and made mistakes when it tried to embody itself in events. But this, of course, was not what Hegel would have said.

from "Philosophy's Ulterior Motives" in Unpopular Essays

Jefferson didn't say it: update

This information is from a May 2, 2006 post by Jim Lindgren on the blog The Volokh Conspiracy.

Earliest attribution to Jefferson found so far - June 2, 1991 Boston Globe interview with Nadine Strossen: "And I do think that what Thomas Jefferson said is true, 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' "

Abstract of a NY Times article from October 16, 1969: "[NY Mayor John] Lindsay calls demonstration highest form of patriotism".

An obituary of Dorothy Hewitt Hutchinson in the Nov. 11, 1984 Philadelphia Inquirer:

An author, lecturer and world traveler, Mrs. Hutchinson marched in protests and demonstrations and spoke from pulpits whenever and wherever she could in the cause of peace. For her efforts, she was frequently criticized.

But none of her critics caused her to "budge one inch," she said. . . .

She dated much of her work by relating it to the growth of her children. As an example, she recalled to the day and hour when an anonymous note predicting that she would hang arrived early in World War II. It came, she said, while she was bathing her 3-month-old son.

But the note and other forms of criticism did not faze her. "Dissent from public policy can be the highest form of patriotism," she said in an interview in 1965. "I don't think democracy can survive without it, even though you may be crucified by it at times."

Mrs. Hutchinson noted that what critics said had little to do with what she did or thought.

"There's no misery in my life," she said. She wouldn't permit it. . . .

Mrs. Hutchinson took the plea for peace and freedom to the Kremlin, leading a 12-member delegation to Moscow and a tour of the Soviet Union in 1964. . . .

Mrs. Hutchinson led sit-ins and hunger strikes against the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission; protests at the White House against the Vietnam War, and demonstrations on behalf of a nuclear freeze.

Lindgren comments: "Thus, it appears that these misguided politicians are quoting, not Jefferson, but Dorothy Hewitt Hutchinson, a strict pacifist who opposed World War II as immoral and who ignored dissent when it was directed toward herself and her ideas."

Jefferson didn't say it

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

It appears it was that patriotic American, Howard Zinn, who was the first one who used that exact phrase in 2002.

From the discussion at urbanlegends.about.com

an editorial in the Nov/Dec 2001 issue of The New Crisis, the NAACP magazine, here contains this sentence: “Thoughtful dissent, particularly when the blood is running hot, is one of the highest orders of patriotism."

The discussion also gives a longer, vaguely similar quote by TJ:

The man who loves his country on its own account, and not merely for its trappings of interest or power, can never be divorced from it, can never refuse to come forward when he finds that she is engaged in dangers which he has the means of warding off. —

TITLE: To Elbridge Gerry.
EDITION: Washington ed. iv, 188.
EDITION: Ford ed., vii, 151.
PLACE: Philadelphia ,
DATE: June. 1797

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

G.K. Chesterton,The Napoleon of Notting Hill

“...I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. . . . Indeed it’s much more than that, don’t you see? I am inside a man. I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes, looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood. Till I am really a murderer.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Chace, regarding him with a long, grim face, and added: “And that is what you call a religious exercise.”

“Yes,” said Father Brown; “that is what I call a religious exercise.”

After an instant’s silence he resumed: “It’s so real a religious exercise that I’d rather not have said anything about it. But I simply couldn’t have you going off and telling all your countrymen that I had a secret magic connected with Thought-Forms, could I? I’ve put it badly, but it’s true. No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown

A Cold War moment

Sept. 22, 1959 - At about 10:30 PM, the White Sox won the American League pennant. In celebration, Chicago air raid sirens were sounded. I remember hearing the sirens, but not much else. My older brother later said he expected to see mushroom clouds over downtown.

From the Chicago Tribune, Sept. 24, 1959:

USE OF SIRENS TO HAIL SOX ANGERS MANY

Protests Pour in at City Hall

Mayor Daley and the Chicago civil defense corps received an avalanche of protests Wednesday over the sounding of city air raid warning sirens to celebrate the White Sox baseball pennant victory.

The 5 minute wail of more than 100 sirens at 10:30 p. m. Tuesday sent thousands rushing into the streets and caused near panic in almost every section of the city and Evanston, which is tied into the Chicago warning system.

Irate citizens telephoned to the City hall at the rate of 1,100 an hour Wednesday to protest the action, for which Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn, acting defense corps director, assumed full responsibility.

Daley Explains It

Mayor Daley, reached in Troy, N.Y., where he flew to speak at a Democratic political meeting, said the sirens were sounded "in the hilarity and exuberance of the evening."

"I regret if anyone was inconvenienced," he said, "but after 40 years of waiting for a pennant in the American league I assume that everyone who was watching the telecast was happy about the White Sox victory."

Robert M. Woodward, Illinois civil defense director, asked the federal office of civil defense mobilization to investigate the siren scare. Robert Tieken, United States attorney, announced his office also would determine if Chicago authorities had violated any federal law.

"Just a Tribute"

"This was intended as just a tribute to a great little team that brought Chicago a pennant," said Quinn, "and there was certainly no intention to frighten the people.

"I feel bad about this. If it inconvenienced any people or upset them, then I am sorry."

Quinn said he failed to reach Mayor Daley before giving the order to sound the sirens, but that later the mayor gave his approval, citing a city council resolution as authority. The resolution urged that "bells ring, whistles blow, and bands play" when the White Sox clinched victory but made no mention of air raid sirens.

Calls It "Shocking"

Quinn added that the siren alarm clearly demonstrated that people did not know their civil defense instructions. If they did, he said, they would have tuned into the civil defense frequencies on their radios [640 and 1240 kilocycles] and learned there was no cause for alarm.

Woodward termed the use of the sirens "shocking." Federal regulations, signed by the city when the sirens were purchased with 50 per cent federal matching funds, clearly state, he said, they may be sounded only in case of an enemy attack, for test purposes, or in case of a natural disaster in order to "save life or property."

Unaware of Intention

Division Marshal Gerald Slattery, C.G.D.C. coordinator, said he understood the sirens were to be sounded only in case of enemy attack, and added he had been unaware of any intention to use the warning system.

In Evanston, City Manager Bert W. Johnson said its 80,000 citizens were shocked and dismayed that public officials would use so important a warning device to celebrate a ball game. Evanston, he added, may seek a way of unhooking its own sirens from the Chicago system.

The sirens' blast, which awakened thousands, brought the Illinois Bell Telephone company its greatest overload since the ending of World War II. Newspapers, radio, and television stations were swamped with calls from people asking if the Russians were attacking.

Rush Into Streets

Men and women rushed into the street in residential neighborhoods. Many told of herding hysterical children into basements as shelter from an expected bombing. Almost everyone directed his ire against Mayor Daley "or whoever is responsible."

Ald. John J. Hoellen [47th] said that at the next city council meeting Oct. 2 he would demand an official investigation by the council and censure of whoever ordered the sirens sounded.

"The whole neighborhood was panic stricken," Mrs. Frances Sarafin, of 207 N. Kolin av.[sic], told THE TRIBUNE. "It's a horrible thing that Chicagoans should be subjected to this."

Calls it Disgraceful

"Using those sirens as a toy is disgraceful," said Mrs. Kenneth Morgan, 201 E. Walton St. "You wonder about teen-agers doing wrong and then find public officials using such poor judgment."

"Responsible officials should not be permitted to shift the blame," Mrs. Norma Bufhord [sic], 7216 N. Ozman [sic] Ave., said.

"It was childish regression on the part of the mayor to resort to sirens that should be used for national defense," said Mrs. Eleanor Johnson, 2452 N. Harding Ave. "The mayor should be impeached."

Used in Weekly Test

The rising and falling warble of the sirens is the normal civil defense post-attack signal. It is used in the weekly siren test at 10:30 A.M. Tuesdays. The "take cover" signal is a steady 1-minute blast.

A city ordinance provides a fine of $200 and six months in jail for any use of the sirens not authorized by the mayor. The mayor, in a companion ordinance, is authorized to sound the sirens for testing purpose or when an enemy attack warning is received from military authorities.

Any warning of impending air attack would come over a "hot" wire, direct from the air defense command headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo. Chicago is one of nine key alarm centers in the state.

Bob Secter, "The 1959 'Go-Go' White Sox and the air-raid sirens" (excerpt from Chicago Days: 150 Defining Moments in the Life of a Great City, edited by Stevenson Swanson, Contemporary Books):

Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn ordered a celebratory five-minute sounding of the city's air-raid sirens. The late-night wail, at a time when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's threat to bury America was still fresh, frightened tens of thousands of area residents. Many rushed to the streets. Others herded hysterical children to shelter. "We had seven children under 9 and woke them all up when the sirens screamed," said Mrs. Earl Gough of the South Side. "We said Hail Marys together in the basement."

Quinn apologized but also argued that the incident provided "a very good test" of the area's readiness, which he found wanting. Mayor Richard J. Daley claimed Quinn acted in accordance with a City Council proclamation that "there shall be whistles and sirens blowing and there shall be great happiness when the White Sox win the pennant."

1959: A great year -- even for Sox turncoat, Tome McNamee, Chicago Sun-Times, Oct 3, 2005:

The Sox won the pennant on Sept. 22 in 1959, clinching it with a 4-2 win over the Indians in Cleveland, and it was like a gift.

All over the South Side, we jumped up in front of our TVs and stumbled out onto our front stoops -- moms and dads and kids -- and laughed and smiled in the night like rich people, as if nobody had to get up before dawn to go to work.

I, of course, recall almost none of this. I was 5 years old and no doubt sound asleep at that very moment when the Sox got the final out against the Indians and the goofy fire commissioner, Bob Quinn, whooped it up by sounding the city's air raid sirens, which scared half the town.

But real Sox fans, not pathetic future turncoats like me, remember it like yesterday, even if they weren't born yet.

"I'm sitting in the front room with my dad and the sirens went off," says Ed Mucha, who was 25 and living at home with his folks in Gage Park. "My dad had fallen asleep in his chair and now he wakes up and starts shutting off the lights. I say, 'Hey Dad, the Sox won the American League pennant and they're going to the World Series.' He says, 'Oh, I thought we were being attacked.'"

From Disaster Study Number 12, Disaster Research Group, Division of Anthropology and Psychology: Symposium on HUMAN PROBLEMS IN The Utilization of Fallout Shelters, Held at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D. C., 11 and 12 February 1960 (archive.org link)

JOY IN MUDVILLE

The Incident

After forty futile attempts in forty successive years, the Chicago White Sox finally won an American League baseball title in 1959. The pennant was clinched when the White Sox won a night game from the Cleveland Indians on September 22, 1959. The game was broadcast and telecast from Cleveland.

Just a few days earlier, the Chicago City Council had "... resolved that bells ring, whistles blow, bands play and general joy be unconfined when the coveted pennant has been won by the heroes of 35th Street." The evening of the ball game, the fire commissioner (also acting director of the city's civil defense corps) decided to sound the civil defense sirens to add to the spirit of the city council's proclamation.

The baseball game ended at 9:50 P.M. Chicago time. Live telecasts and broadcasts from the dressing room of the victorious team were received for about 15 to 20 minutes immediately afterward. Then at 10:30, some forty minutes after the game had ended, the air raid alert signal went off. A steady blast for a full five minutes sounded, a signal which means that an air attack is possible but is not expected for at least 31 minutes.

Prior to his sounding of the siren, the commissioner properly notified the police and fire departments, the public utilities, and all radio and television stations and newspapers. But only a very few minutes elapsed between the arrival of this notice and the sounding of the siren. Thus, the public had no warning of the event. ...

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being an adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

C.S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children

Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay--and claims a halo for his dishonesty.

- Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers