Compute! was one of the earliest and longest running multi-format computer magazines published in the U.S. In the early days, it covered the Atari 400/800, Apple II and Commodore PET as well as various kit computers. The May 1981 issue includes:
The Editor's Notes - A look at some of the things seen at the West Coast Computer Faire, including the Votrax Type-'N-Talk text to speech synthesizer, the Commodore Super-PET, A 256K memory expansion from Axlon for the Atari 800, and more.
The Readers' Feedback - Praise for the magazine, small business programs for the Atari, improving magazine distribution, and more.
Computers and Society - Addressing computer phobia.
Computer Aided Instruction, Boon or Bust? - Analyzing the effects of computers in the classroom. Still a novel idea at the time.
They Mysterious and Unpredictable RND - The last part in a series on random numbers. This part presents solutions for finding maximum and minimum numbers in a sample of random numbers, simulating dice rolls and a number of other exercises.
Land of the Lost - A Program For a Cassette Filing System - A type-in menu-driven program to create labels for cassettes (the dominant home computer storage medium of the time).
Table of Contents from the May 1981 issue of Compute!
The Apple Gazette
Using Named GOSUB and GOTO Statements in Applesoft BASIC - A simple way to create named subroutines vs. just using line numbers.
Commas, Colons, and Quote Marks Too - Writing BASIC programs that can accept commas, colons and quotation marks as part of their input.
The Atari Gazette
A Cure for Atari BASIC or, Make Your Atari a Bit Wiser - An assembly language program that adds the ability to do bitwise operations in Atari BASIC.
Copy Your Atari Screen to Your Printer - A short BASIC program that will dump the contents of the screen to a printer.
Hardware Information at Last! - Three new Atari technical manuals, including Atari 400/800 Technical User Notes, Atari 400/800 Operating System, and Atari 400/800 Disk Operating System.
Using Strings for Graphics Storage - A method for using BASIC strings to create graphics on the Atari.
Atari Machine I/O - Three machine language routines for processing input.
The OSI Gazette
Through the Fill-The-Buffer Routine with Gun and Camera - Some technical info on how the "Fill-the-Buffer" routine (FTB) of OS BASIC works.
FOOTU: FOO Revisited - Converting FOO (a racing game for the OSI) to run on OSI systems with BASIC-in-ROM.
The PET Gazette
A Fast Visible Memory Dump - A program for creating a graphical memory dump to a printer.
Machine Language: Getting to the Machine Language Program - Methods for combining BASIC programs with machine language routines.
A Thirteen Line BASIC Delete - A short BASIC program that allows you to delete any group of lines form an existing program.
Calculated Bar-graph Routines on the Pet - How to calculate the length of bars in a bar graph so that they can be properly printed.
The Revised Pet/CBM Personal Computer Guide - A look at the changes in the newest revision of the Osborne/McGraw-Hill Pet/CBM Personal Computer Guide.
The SBC Gazette
Nuts and Volts - Information about building your own microcontrollers.
A Kim-1 Music File in Microsoft Basic: Part 1
New Products - Atari sponsors contest for new software; the BYTEWRITER-1 dot matrix printer from Microtek; Hayes releases the Smartmodem, a 300 baud modem that set the standard for years to come for $279; and more.
Ashley N’Dakpri runs Afro Touch, a hair-braiding salon in Louisiana. She wants to hire more stylists to meet demand, but Louisiana’s strict occupational licensing regulations prevent her from doing so.
Ashley legally isn’t allowed to hire new stylists unless they have a cosmetologist’s license, a certification that requires five hundred hours of training and thousands of dollars in fees to obtain. She notes that many potential employees are no longer interested in working for her once they discover the onerous occupational licensing requirements.
State-level occupational licenses are a major barrier to minority entrepreneurship. These licenses prevent many minorities from starting their own businesses in fields across the economic spectrum.
The beauty industry is perhaps the most egregious example of a field whose occupational licensing requirements prevent minority entrepreneurship, but these licenses are also found in many other industries popular with minority entrepreneurs, including construction, childcare, and pest control.
Cosmetology licenses are often far more difficult to get than licenses for professions that deal with life and death. In Massachusetts, for instance, cosmetologists must complete one thousand hours of coursework and two years of apprenticeship before they are allowed to ply their trade in the beauty industry. Emergency medical technicians, by contrast, must only take 150 hours of courses to be allowed to work.
What are these occupational licenses protecting consumers from? A bad hair day? These permits present an enormous entrepreneurial barrier to mostly minority women. According to a study by the Institute of Justice, Louisiana has just thirty-two licensed African hair braiders. In stark contrast, neighboring Mississippi, which has approximately four hundred thousand fewer black residents but doesn’t regulate hair braiding, has 1,200.
California is the worst occupational licensing offender, according to IJ, putting up “a nearly impenetrable thicket of bureaucracy.” Basic trades such as door repair, carpentry, and landscaping require potential entrepreneurs to devote 1,460 days to supervised practice and spend up to thousands of dollars for a license before they can legally work.
Nearly one-quarter of American workers hold a license, according to the Labor Department, up from about 5 percent in the 1950s. Unsurprisingly, a Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota report concluded that minorities are significantly less likely to hold a license than whites.
Research by economist Stephen Slivinski indicates that licensing requirements reduce minority entrepreneurship. He finds that states that require more occupational licenses have lower rates of low-income entrepreneurship.
It’s already difficult enough for minority entrepreneurs to find a product that fills a gap in the market and outcompete established players without simultaneously worrying about the government hamstringing them through bad policies like excessive occupational licensing.
With fewer government hurdles, minority entrepreneurs can more readily overcome racial economic gaps through their own inspiration and ingenuity.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
The first shot in this set is unlabeled and undated but was probably taken in the early 1960s. It was obviously taken at a beach and it looks like a Florida East coast beach to me but it could be from somewhere else. The second and third photos were processed in October 1962 and appear to be of some kind of party or perhaps a church youth group gathering. The last photo was processed in July 1961. The flag in the background appears to be the Canadian Red Ensign which was the official Canadian flag before the current maple leaf design was adopted in 1965. It looks like this could be at a border crossing.
Processed October 1962
Processed October 1962
Processed July 1961
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
Americans are facing 40-year high inflation and there’s been no shortage of discussion on the topic. It’s the number one issue on the mind of Americans heading into midterms, and every day on TV and in newspapers pundits are debating how long it will last and deciding who is to blame.
What’s most astonishing amid the flurry of news is just how badly the commentary misses. While there is broad agreement that the US is experiencing dangerously high inflation, partisanship and ideology have polluted basic economics.
Progressive politicians like Robert Reich and Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweet incessantly that “corporate greed” is to blame, an idea even Democratic economists have summarily dismissed. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has blamed Vladmir Putin. Republicans, on the other hand, have consistently made the case that Joe Biden is the inflation culprit.
All of these explanations are entirely or mostly wrong.
While it’s true that Putin and Biden deserve some blame—particularly in terms of high energy prices—there seems to be an unspoken bipartisan consensus to ignore the elephant in the room: the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented money printing.
One person not playing the game is Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian entrepreneur and investor who regularly appears on ABC’s Shark Tank. While speaking to journalist Daniela Cambone, O’Leary bluntly explained why Americans are experiencing the highest inflation in generations.
“The printing presses have gone insane,” O’Leary said. “That’s why we have inflation in the first place.”
By printing presses, O’Leary is talking about the Federal Reserve. The central bank has been expanding the supply of money for decades, and the clip has picked up in recent years. Nothing, however, has compared to the monetary expansion that occurred during the pandemic, something Fed Chairman Jerome Powell recently admitted in a 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelley.
"You flooded the system with money," the CBS journalist said.
"Yes, we did," Powell responded.
This is what O’Leary is getting at. “Flooding the system with money” is what drove inflation to historic highs, and the result was always an obvious one.
“For all the talk of inflation, you print $6.72 trillion in thirty months, what the hell did you think was going to happen?” O’Leary says. “Of course there’s going to be inflation.”
O’Leary’s figures are not wrong. Federal Reserve data show that in August 2019 there was $14.9 trillion total in circulation. By January 2022, there was $21.6 trillion.
In other words, more than 30 percent of dollars in circulation in January 2022 had been created in the previous 30 months.
What Is Inflation?
Money creation is the obvious driver of price inflation, a concept that most Americans have at least a vague understanding of because we see it all around us today. Prices are up for almost everything, and up a lot.
But are higher prices alone evidence of inflation? Prices are always changing, after all. Sometimes they go up and sometimes they fall; oftentimes it has nothing to do with money printing, but is simply a reflection of changes in supply and demand.
This is what makes inflation challenging to define, and in fact there are two definitions for it.
For centuries, inflation was defined essentially as an increase in the money supply. Basic economics holds that if you expand the money supply without expanding goods and services, prices will rise. So that was the definition of inflation: an increase in the supply of money.
Economists in the twentieth century added a second definition, however, calling inflation “a general and sustained increase in prices.” We can see from this definition that what separates inflation from simple price increases is that they are broad and sustained.
Some economists prefer the older definition of inflation, and Henry Hazlitt, author of Economics in One Lesson, can help us see why.
“Inflation is an increase in the quantity of money and credit. Its chief consequence is soaring prices,” Hazlitt explained. “Therefore inflation—if we misuse the term to mean the rising prices themselves—is caused solely by printing more money. For this the government’s monetary policies are entirely responsible.”
Hazlitt argues that rising prices are the consequence of inflation, which is an increase in the money supply. This is why some economists don’t like the new definition of inflation.
It’s not difficult to see why some economists see the traditional definition of inflation as superior. It gets right to the cause of price increases (an expansion of the money supply), while the new definition focuses on a symptom of inflation (“a general and sustained increase in prices”).
This second definition is far less clear, which might be precisely why some people like it.
Nobody wants to be blamed for inflation, after all, and under the first definition blame will always return to one spot: the people who control the money supply, and to a lesser extent the politicians, big banks, and bureaucrats who support the Fed and directly benefit from its largesse.
That’s a lot of pressure for central bankers and politicians. It’s far easier to say Vladmir Putin is primarily responsible for high prices, or the ”greedy corporations,” or Joe Biden’s Build Back Better policies.
Inflation: A Silent Killer
Now, some will tell you that if you’re under 60 this is probably the first time you’ve experienced inflation, but this is not true. Usually inflation is just small enough that people don’t notice it as much.
For example, government data show a dollar printed in 1990 had already lost 50 percent of its purchasing power by 2021. This is why inflation is often called a “silent killer.”
Yet history shows inflation often does not remain silent. It persists and grows, and over time it becomes a destroyer of civilizations.
“I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek once observed.
This is why Hayek believed the only way to have sound money was to take control of it out of the hands of central bankers and planners.
“I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government,” Hayek said.
This is precisely why there has been such enthusiasm around decentralized currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Whether cryptocurrencies can supplant the dollar remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: the primary cause of inflation is not a boogeyman. It’s not a Russian dictator, corporate greed, or bad legislation. 1
The primary cause of inflation is the printing presses, exactly like Kevin O’Leary says.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
I am not sure where the photos in this set were taken. My guess would be somewhere in South or Central America. They were likely taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
Antic was primarily an Atari 8-bit magazine though it did also cover the Atari ST. In 1987 it was nearing the end of its life. The April 1987 issue includes:
Features
Designer Labels - A type-in program that lets you combine Print Shop graphics with your text to create custom labels.
Page 6 Grab-Bag, Part 2 - Two short and useful type-in programs. The first gives you the ability to pause or slow down program listings with the press of a button and the second makes it easy to insert sounds into your own programs.
All About [Break] Disabling - Pressing the break key normally interrupts whatever program you are running. If you do it accidentally, it can be a real time waster as well as cause you to lose data. This type-in program provides a way to disable this functionality.
ICD Boosts 8-Bit Atari Power - ICD is a company that produced high powered upgrades for the Atari 8-bit. Some of these include the 1MB Multi I/O Board, 256K RAMBO XL memory upgrade, R-Time 8 Cartridge (real-time clock/calendar), SpartaDOS 3.2, hard drive interface and more.
Table of Contents from the April 1987 issue of Antic: The Atari Resource
Departments
Starting Out: New Owners Column - Part 13 of a BASIC programming tutorial. This part goes over the various ways to use color.
Game of the Month: Taxman - Keeping with the April income tax theme, this type-in game is a maze game in which you must collect interest from your accounts while evading the IRS agents. If they catch you, you must declare the interest. If they catch you 10 times, you get audited and the game is over.
I/O Board - Letters from readers about Son of Infobits database, the Star NX-10 printer, Bumblebee high scores, modems and the hearing impaired, the Atari 800 attract mode, databases that work with the 10MB SupraDrive, and more.
Product Reviews - Reviews of video Vegas from Baudville, Mercenary from Datasoft, Wizard's Crown (an RPG from SSI), Fight Night from Accolade, and Gettysburg from SSI.
ST Resource
Pathways Uncovered - File handling on the Atari ST, including creating folders or sub-directories.
ST Reviews - Reviews of The Pinball Factory from Michtron, Silent Service from MicroProse, Black Cauldron from Sierra On-Line, and Universe II from Omnitrend Software.
Typesetter Elite - Software that enables you to create and print high resolution pages.
Bacl cover of the April 1987 issue of Antic: The Atari Resource
You could always find tons of ads in Commodore related magazines from places that sold Commodore hardware and software. Some stuck around and others came and went. The above ad is from a place called S&S Wholesalers, Inc. and was located in Miami Beach. It is from the July 1988 issue of Commodore Magazine.
Their advertising also is a little misleading as most of the prices listed require purchasing additional items. You could get blank disks for 19 cents each but only if you also bought something to hold them in. The next item advertised is a "Commodore C64 Computer" for $99. The picture looks like a Commodore 64C which was a newer model. It was a good price for the time as a C64C was more typically in the $140 to $160 range. But were you really getting a C64C or the older model? Plus, it required the purchase of a software package and exactly what software packages qualified and how much they cost is not mentioned.
The pattern continues with a printer for $99 but only with purchase of a printer stand...a Commodore 128D computer for $499 but only with the purchase of a software package...and a 12" color monitor for $139 but only with the purchase of a monitor cable. There were a couple of items that appear not to have required additional purchases. One was a joystick for $12.90 and a 300 Baud Modem for $19.90 which wasn't a bad price but 300 baud was slow, even for the time.
To be fair, I'm sure it was a perfectly legitimate company. I just doubt the prices were as good as they seemed after making the additional required purchases.
GamePro wasn't my personal favorite gaming magazine but there is no doubt it was one of the most popular. It seemed to be targeted towards a younger or at least less mature audience. Like most others, it didn't survive the transition into the new millenia very well. The April 1999 issue includes:
Features
Soul Reaver: Kain's Legacy - A feature on Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain, and adventure game for the PlayStation that became one of the most popular games on that platform.
LamePro! - LamePro was a periodic parody that GamePro did of itself. This issue contains reviews of games like Rouge Squadron and Saddam's Command and Cower plus parody ads, news and more.
Table of Contents from the April 1999 issue of GamePro
ProStrategy Section
NetPro ProStrategy: The Beginner's Guide to EverQuest, Part III - For a long time Everquest was, by far, the most popular MMORPG.
Role-Player's Realm ProStrategy: Brave Fencer Musashi, Part 3 - A strategy guide that takes you through the last half of Brave Fencer Musashi for the PlayStation.
ProStrategy Guide: Drac's Back in Castlevania - A strategy guide for Castelvania on the Nintendo 64.
Table of Contents from the April 1999 issue of GamePro (continued)
Sneak Previews & ProReviews
Sneak Previews - An early look at games in development including Street Fighter Alpha 3, Quake II, Gauntlet Legends, Beetle Adventure Racing, Driver, Smash Brothers, Soul of the Samurai, Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko, Ace Combat 3 Electrosphere, and Shen Mue.
PlayStation ProReviews - Reviews of Silent Hill, Rollcage, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, K-1 Revenge, Street Sk8er, Rush Down, WCW/NWO Thunder, Sports Car GT, and Blast Radius.
Nintendo 64 ProReviews - Reviews of Vigilante V8, Mario Party, and California Speed.
Dreamcast ProReviews - A review of the Japanese version of Sonic Adventure.
Departments
Head2Head - Letter from the editor about playing games and having fun plus letters from readers bout Xeongears, Thrill Kill, Parasite Eve's mature rating, and more.
Art Attack - Fan art from readers including subject such as Oddworld, Zelda and more.
Buyers Beware - "Chipping" your PlayStation, Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak and heat, and using 3rd party controllers on the PlayStation.
Last week, The Atlantic published an article by Dr. Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University, titled “Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty.”
In the piece, Oster argues that, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we were plagued by a lack of true knowledge about the best way to react to the virus. Consequently, “almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong.”
Because of this, Oster argues we should forgive those who were wrong and move on; after all, how could they be blamed for their position when all the information was not available? By doing this, she concludes, we can avoid “a repetitive doom loop” of negativity and address the issues—ranging from a dip in test scores to a rise in mental health problems—that we are now facing.
This may seem like a reasonable argument at first glance. It is true that there was a lot we did not know at the start of the pandemic; it is also true that solely dwelling on the past can prevent people from moving forward in a productive way.
At the same time, upon closer examination, the core of Oster’s argument is deeply flawed because 1) it does not reckon with the real injustices done to millions of people during the pandemic as a result of arrogant policymaking and 2) it fundamentally misunderstands the nature and role of forgiveness in society.
The Consequences of Lacking Humility
The first issue with Oster’s argument is that it does not properly consider the injustices done to millions of people during the pandemic—primarily as a consequence of policy that was profoundly lacking in humility.
We can split up Covid-19 policymaking into two time periods: one is before we had adequate information to make reliable policy decisions and the second is after we had adequate information. I understand these categories are somewhat vague, but they will suffice for our purposes because, as we will see, the issue with the policy-making during both of these periods was the same.
In the first time period, when we did not have adequate information to know what was best, interventionist policymakers nevertheless acted as if they did know. They fell into a trap that the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek called the pretense of knowledge: namely, “the idea that anyone could know enough to engineer society successfully.”
In states across the country—in the absence of real evidence but the presence of real conceit—people were prohibited from visiting their sick family members in the hospital and elderly family members in nursing homes, leaving the most vulnerable in our society alone and their loved ones separated from them—even during the last days of their lives. There were strict limits on the number of people allowed at funerals—depriving the grieving of the best healing power of all: human-to-human connection and support. Public officials even closed beaches, poured sand into outdoor skateparks, and put chains on outdoor basketball hoops—forcing kids into prolonged isolation in their homes.
And for what? How many lives were saved due to such measures? We now know, based on numerous studies, that the answer is few to none. There was absolutely nothing dangerous about gathering outside for a funeral or playing a game of basketball with friends, for example. Yet, policymakers—in a time of admitted uncertainty—acted as if they were certain anyway. And to make matters worse, those who challenged these policies were shut out of the public debate—accused of wanting people to die, of being science deniers, and of spreading “misinformation.”
Then, in the second time period, when we did have adequate knowledge to make well-informed policy choices, policymakers did not follow the evidence, instead opting to follow ideology and cave to social pressure.
School closures are a clear example of this. One of the first things that was known about the virus was that kids were the least vulnerable to severe infection. We also soon found out that schools were not a hotspot of Covid transmission. Even so, there were prolonged school closures across the country, affecting millions of kids.
During the 2020-2021 school year, fewer than a dozen states had at least 75 percent of kids learning in person; in 19 states—including some of the largest in the country—the proportion was under 50 percent. Then, even when kids went back to school, many districts instituted farcical rules such as requiring children to stay home for two weeks any time they had a potential exposure to Covid-19, requiring masking in classrooms, not allowing kids to talk during lunch, and even forcing them to eat lunch outside in freezing weather.
Consequently, kids have now fallen behind months in reading and math—with some people reporting that there are third graders unable to even read three-letter words. Mental health problems have gotten much worse, and there are now kids in second and third grade that do not remember ever having a normal school year. And the detrimental effects we are seeing right now are just the tip of the iceberg.
And so the same question applies here: what was this all for? These policies did little to nothing to protect children, as they were never in significant danger from Covid-19. They certainly did not make the lives of parents easier, as they had to care for their kids learning online even though they had jobs of their own. It didn’t even make teachers safer, as studies have shown that schools were not a place of high transmission. This all happened because arrogant policymakers ignored the evidence or presumed to have knowledge they did not actually possess in order to appease either political entities such as teachers’ unions or their own political ideology that held that Covid restrictions must be in accordance with the most stringent risk preferences.
And it’s not as if public authorities have now learned their lesson. Even today, there are schools across the country that will not allow children to attend unless they received the Covid-19 vaccine, even though the CDC now admits vaccines do not prevent infection or the spread of the virus.
This is not to say that Oster supported all of these measures, as I know for a fact that she did not. Rather, this is to point out that there were real injustices done—injustices that have not been learned from and therefore cannot and should not be so easily forgiven.
Finally, Oster’s article seems to conflate mistakes made in the absence of evidence by private individuals and mistakes made due to arrogance by public authorities. But those two things are not at all the same. The anger that most people feel is towards the latter, yet, from the beginning of the piece, Oster fails to make this distinction. But it is precisely this distinction that illuminates why people feel like we cannot move on: namely, because policymakers assumed that they knew best, forced their vision onto the entire country, and then never took responsibility when their policies harmed countless people.
Misunderstanding the Nature of Forgiveness
The second significant issue with Oster’s argument is that it fundamentally misunderstands the role and nature of forgiveness in society. While it is of course an important virtue, it is also not the only virtue.
In a commentary on the story of Noah, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that “the first moral principle set out in the Torah” is that of justice. God says, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.” However, Rabbi Sacks points out that this principle, on its own, would “[draw people] into a potentially endless and destructive cycle of retaliation, which is bad for both sides.”
Oster intuitively understands this limitation of justice as a stand-alone value. She rightly points out that solely focusing on this in the context of Covid-19 would lead to “a repetitive doom loop” of negativity—never allowing our society to move forward.
Rabbi Sacks agrees. So, in order to account for the limits of justice acting as the only value, he explains that the second moral principle laid out in the Hebrew Bible is that of forgiveness. God said to Noah, after the flood, that “I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake, although the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done.”
From this, we can derive that the world is built on the dual moral imperatives of justice and forgiveness. Rabbi Sacks writes that “Without these, no group can survive in the long run.”
He is correct. Without forgiveness, we would be stuck in a cycle of bitter attacks against one another. But, without accountability or justice, the injustices that took place are 1) bound to happen again and 2) less likely to be forgiven or forgotten by the victims.
Prerequisites to Forgiveness?
The issue with Oster’s argument is that it assumes forgiveness can and should happen even in the absence of justice. But when an individual is wronged in a serious way, we know from human experience that it is incredibly hard, if not impossible, to move forward productively with the perpetrator until they take responsibility, apologize, and pledge not to wrong that person again. Thus, it is hard to believe that we can achieve forgiveness in the absence of justice or accountability. But, further, generally agreed-upon moral principles would suggest that those who have committed injustices do not deserve to be forgiven—let off the hook, if you will—unless they take responsibility and steps to ensure it does not happen again. And thus, we realize that even if we could achieve forgiveness in the absence of justice, it is not apparent that we should.
This is all to suggest that it seems as though justice and accountability are actually prerequisites to forgiveness.
In the case of Covid-19, we know—as demonstrated in the previous section—that injustices were committed on a mass scale. We can therefore conclude that the first thing that needs to happen toward the end of forgiveness is a substantive reckoning among those who committed those injustices, where they take responsibility for their actions, recognize where they went wrong, and take concrete steps to change the institutions, processes, and policy frameworks that produced such mistakes. This includes people ranging from politicians to public health bureaucrats to union leaders.
To do so would be to demonstrate a tremendous amount of humility—a virtue that should be greatly admired and emulated by others. Public trust can only be restored once this takes place because, right now, there is nothing stopping any of the terrible things that happened from happening again.
In other words, nothing has changed yet.
As always, the proper approach contains a balancing act. The issue is that, currently, too many people have taken extreme positions that neglect one of the two moral principles discussed above: justice and forgiveness. However, the greater the number of people that recognize justice and forgiveness are not mutually exclusive, but rather perfect companions, the closer we will get to being able to move forward as a unified country in order to address the myriad problems we still face.
Jack Elbaum was a Hazlitt Writing Fellow at FEE and is a junior at George Washington University. His writing has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The New York Post, and the Washington Examiner. You can contact him at jackelbaum16@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @Jack_Elbaum.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
This set features a mix of subjects. The first looks like an early morning shot of someone's snow covered backyard. The second features two women in a kitchen. The third is the only one dated, at least by year (1957) and is a shot out a window towards some mountains. The final shot shows a small waterfall in the woods somewhere. While only one is dated, they are all likely from the late 1950s.
1957
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
