Here’s a question I often get asked: why didn’t Robert E. Lee allow his daughters to be free or marry? It’s a topic worth far more discussion, especially as America seems obsessed with putting up statues of the man as if to celebrate state-sanctioned rape of women.

I put that same question to ChatGPT and its response is…

Daughters within the Confederacy had no rights because they were just “human property” of the pro-slavery government?

Robert E. Lee, according to this software, was a cruel and harsh master who participated in the systemic mistreatment and oppression of his human property — his own daughters.

Ouch.

Well, this is awkward.

The “United Daughters of the Confederacy” (UDC) have been the ones in America putting up all the obviously controversial anti-American statues of the brutal and dehumanizing Lee to promote continued abuse of women.

But Confederate monuments were always a tool of white supremacy — that is their history. Long after the Confederacy’s demise, Southerners — and, more specifically, white women — used statues, textbooks, and public ceremonies to prop up its legacy. Many of these memorials were put up by Ladies Memorial Associations around the same time that Jim Crow laws were passed in the South—the same groups that edited history textbooks to include a more favorable treatment of the Confederacy. These women wielded race and class privilege to rewrite history.

That article goes on to point out that the UDC poisons history with some truly crazy ideas.

Rather than accept defeat, Confederate women immediately began rewriting history to suit their outlook. The Old South was transformed into a bucolic paradise where… slaves were happy. The mental gymnastics are truly staggering. An article in UDC Magazine (the official magazine of the United Daughters of the Confederacy) claimed that the Middle Passage wasn’t so bad, because “the sixteen inches of deck space allotted each slave is not all that smaller than the eighteen inches the Royal Navy allowed for each sailor’s hammock and the slaves rapidly had more room due to the much higher death rate.” That article was published in 1989.

It’s crazy because the UDC twists extreme heat and filth in cramped space without ventilation or sanitation with the spread of deadly disease under the violent and abusive ship crew… all the way into that strange phrase: slaves “rapidly had more room due to the much higher death rate”.

That inhumane article should be added to the dictionary definition for Nazi lebensraum (room acquired to live in more comfortably after certain inhabitants are killed — genocide).

It reminds me of claims that Leland Stanford’s wife died from having too nice a lunch.

But I digress.

Were ALL women in the Confederacy slaves and property guarded by an unjust state, or were the white women treated differently? You probably know the answer, given the level of crazy that formed into a UDC.

The Confederacy never actually established an age requirement. So [women] bound their breasts if they had to, and just kind of layered on clothes, wore loose clothing, cut their hair short and rubbed dirt on their faces. […] Even in the cases where these women were found out as soldiers, there does not actually seem to be much uproar. More or less, they were just sent home.

Yeah, those pro-slavery soldiers? They included white women.

Hardly being treated as slaves, white women were fighting before AND AFTER the Civil War to enslave Black women.

Sorry about that ChatGPT.

On the one hand this flawed software tries to generate a salient point about Robert E. Lee’s unbelievably brutal treatment of his own family, a true monster. On the other hand it’s factually false that his bizarrely caged daughters experienced anything as bad as his Black slaves.

His daughters were white, after all… or were they?

A fresh deep dive into the prosecution of Sophie Scholl illuminates a complete lack of justice in Nazi Germany, grotesque absence of law and order.

She was targeted by a Nazi who was trying to be as cruel as possible to women. He had given a speech to students where he demanded girls stop learning and birth a child for Hitler instead. Protests broke out and he grew unstable, angry at the resistance.

On January 13, 1943, students protested against a particularly aggressive Nazi even by NSDAP standards. In a speech at the Deutsches Museum, he had insulted female students and recommended they “give the Führer a child” rather than sit in the lecture hall. He said it would make him happy to put “one of my adjutants” at the disposal of anyone not pretty enough to be impregnated yet — he “promised a pleasant [rape] experience”.

If that sounds familiar, he used a social platform monopoly to mock girls for being hot or not, as a show of unregulated power.

During this state of mysogynist rage he was informed Sophie had been arrested for dropping anti-Nazi leaflets. He rushed everything, jumping to extremes in order to stage a bogus trial with Nazi lawyers and judges conspiring against her in every way. With no real representation, denied any rights at all, she was beheaded almost immediately.

Today she is remembered as a national hero, as she astutely predicted, one of the most important Germans of all time.

Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go… What does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?

Is it any wonder that extremist right-wing propaganda mouthpieces were hyperventilating about a balloon? Seth Meyers probably said it best:

I take that back. A comment on Seth Meyer’s commentary said it even better:

Don’t know why they’re freaking out so hard over a balloon. There was a Russian blimp in the Whitehouse for years…

And now for some crucial history from November 1945 (Report on the U.S. Office of Censorship) on why FOX News should have known to just shut up about a stupid balloon.

Late in 1944 voluntary censorship was presented with a unique problem in connected with the landing of Japanese bomb-carrying balloons in the western part of the United States… Censorship asked editors and broadcasters not to mention these incidents unless the War Department officially gave out information. There was complete compliance with this request, even when six persons were killed by one of the bombs in Oregon on May 5, 1945. Stories of the tragedy did not disclose the cause. […] The Japanese received neither information nor comfort about their fantastic scheme to attack the United States.

If nothing else this could have been a case of simple unity across the American defense spectrum. There’s no good in politicizing such an obvious case of foreign interference, no gain from dumping fuel onto a Chinese fire, and instead every reason in the world to come together and quietly and calmly let the oxygen out. Censorship of toxic speech, counter-intuitively proven during WWII as essential to democracy, is being hugely undervalued as FOX keeps blowing the wrong way.

Or, as I wrote years ago, “broadcast subversion and manipulation by foreign military intelligence or domestic collaborators” has a known fix called regulation.

This old cipher story never really seems to get old. A team deciphering letters in a French library has just announced their discovery of the “lost letters” of England’s monarchy.

In “Under the Molehill – an Elizabethan Spy Story”, John Bossy writes that a secret correspondence with [a Queen’s] associates and allies, prior to its compromise in mid-1583, was “kept so secure that none of it has survived, and we don’t know what was in it.” We have found over 55 letters fully in cipher in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which, after we broke the code and deciphered the letters, unexpectedly turned out to be letters from Mary Stuart, addressed mostly to Michel de Castelnau Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England. Written between 1578 and 1584, those newly deciphered letters are most likely part of the aforementioned secret correspondence considered to have been lost, and they constitute a voluminous body of new primary material on Mary Stuart – about 50,000 words in total, shedding new light on some of her years of captivity in England.

I put “lost letters” in quotes because to be fair they weren’t supposed to be found and deciphered. Semantics, I know.

The fun new part to the old story of solving antique substitution ciphers is how researchers put a graphical user interface tool into the mix to speed things up.

Due to a large amount of material (more than 150,000 symbols in total), and since automated transcription such as off-the-shelf OCR software was not applicable,Footnote44 we utilized a special GUI (graphical user interface) tool developed by the CrypTool 2 project. After transcribing some documents, we performed an initial computer analysis and decipherment, applying the GUI tool codebreaking function described in Appendix A, identifying the original plaintext language, which turned out to be French, and recovering fragments of plaintexts. We then recovered the homophones – the symbols representing single letters of the alphabet, also identifying special symbols (e.g., a symbol to duplicate the last symbol), and the structure of the cipher. After that, we could identify the symbols for common prefixes, suffixes, prepositions, and words. Based on the partial decipherment of several documents, we were able to attribute the letters to Mary, Queen of Scots, addressed to Castelnau, the French ambassador. By reviewing the text of previously-known letters between Mary and Castelnau, we found several documents matching our decipherments, enabling us to determine or validate the meaning of other symbols. Finally, we identified symbols representing names, places, and the twelve months of the year and completed the transcription and decipherment of all the documents.

It’s a great read that focuses a lot on integrity controls and attacks relative to confidentially.