ADDICTED - The Plant Evolved to Kill

I was surprised to learn that the tobacco plant did not evolve until just after the last ice age, only about 8,000 years ago. Its innovative strategy for survival against the surge of new insects and herbivores the warmer weather had created, was the elevated production of an insecticide called nicotine. It's bitter taste discouraged any large hungry herbivores. And if swallowed, it sickened and killed all bugs and small mammals.

But this strategy for defense played right into the human trait of becoming addicted to things that are bad for us. By 2,000 years ago the Mayans were using tobacco to get a rush from nicotine. But their favored method of delivery – as an enema – limited the distribution of the drug, not to mention the mobility of the users. Still, the way these two life forms meshed together, like gears in a machine - a plant which produced a poison to protect itself and a creature which tended to become addicted to poisons – may be the ultimate proof that humans bring out God's sense of humor. Which makes sense since it seems that humans seem to bring out God.

In 1492 Columbus arrived, uninvited,  in the new world and the natives presented him with a canoe filled with fruit and “dried leaves”. The natives were probably hoping Christopher would start a fire  while sitting in the canoe and smoking the leaves. Instead the Spaniards ate the fruit and threw the leaves away; no word on what they did with the canoe.

However a later Spanish explorer, Rodrigo de Jerez, who was in Cuba dreaming of gold and the good life, tried “drinking” the smoke from the burning leaves. He was immediately addicted. When he brought his new addiction back to Spain with him, he was arrested and thrown into a dungeon. When he was finally released 7 years later, the streets of Seville were crowded with addicts merrily puffing away in public. Ironic, huh?

By 1577 English physicians were recommending tobacco as a treatment for toothache, worms, lockjaw and oddly enough, cancer. In 1603 they petitioned the king to make tobacco a controlled substance, not because it was unhealthy but because they were not getting their cut of the profits. And in 1610 Sir Francis Bacon made a note that he really wanted to quit smoking but was finding it really hard to do. It would take another three hundred and fifty years before the American Medical Association would come to the official conclusion that nicotine is addictive.

In 1612 John Rolf harvested Virginia’s first crop of tobacco. Three years later his first shipment hit the streets of London. The result was similar to the introduction of crack cocaine in American inner cities in the 1980’s. By 1618 there were “…7,000 shops, in and about London, that doth vent tobacco”, according to Mr. Barnaby Rich, a tobacco addict.

As the weed spread around the globe, many governments set a zero tolerance level. Sultan Murad IV executed 18 smokers a day for ten years. It did not work. Czar Alexis "The Most Peaceful" sent first time smokers to Siberia with their noses slit. Second time smokers were executed. That did no good. In China if you were caught carrying tobacco with the intent to distribute the penalty for a first offense was decapitation. There is no record of any second time offenders, so in that regard the zero tolerance worked. And yet, the weed still thrived as a personal sin, even in China. Those who advocate the standard American approach of punishment first, toward cocaine and marijuana, might want to consider the Chinese failure with tobacco. It seemed there was only one thing that would make smokers stop smoking. Death.

Lung cancer was first described in 1761 by, appropriately enough, Giovanni Morgagni. He was the inventor of pathology. He described it as a rare affliction. And even a century later, the disease accounted for only 1% of all cancers diagnosed.

However, less than a century after that, (by 1927) as cigarette smoking became more common, lung cancer had climbed to 14% of all autopsies. Dr. Fritz Lickint made the first statistical link between smoking and lung cancer in 1928. Five years later the prestigious “Journal of the American Medical Association” began carrying advertising for cigarettes in their own publication. And, oddly  enough, at the same time, research into smoking and cancers began to fade from the pages of that publication.

The addictive quality of tobacco should have been obvious from the actual advertising campaigns used to sell cigarettes. “Not a cough in a (rail) car load”, “More Doctors Smoke Camels than any other Cigarette”, “L and M cigarettes. Just what the doctor ordered”... "Making smoking 'safe' for smokers” (who else would it be safe for?), and my favorite,  “We're tobacco men ... not medicine men”.

And the rationalization approach was also big along Madison Avenue, the advertising venue of choice in mid-twentieth century America. "When smokers changed to Philip Morris, every case of nose or throat irritation--due to smoking--either cleared up completely or definitely improved”, “That must be why my mother started smoking Pall Mall's when she was 15”. And then there was the confusing yet illogical approach. “39,468 dentists say, "Smoke Viceroy Cigarettes.” Who cares what dentists say about lung cancer? If those catch phrases didn’t drive people away from tobacco, nothing could.  And "vaping" makes no difference. Remember the problem is not tobacco, but the insecticide it produces - nicotine. A plastic stick or a tobacco stick makes not difference. Nicotine kills.

Consider the particular brand of cigarettes called “Marlboro”. It was first introduced in 1924 and marketed as an upscale cigarette for women (“Mild as May”). It struggled as an “also-ran” until Phillip Morris reintroduced it as a filtered cigarette.

The new advertising campaign featured a craggy faced cowboy working the range, with the theme music from “The Magnificent Seven” swelling underneath. By 1957 Marlboro was the best selling cigarette in the world. The only problem was that the original “Marlboro Man”, Carl Bradley, actually smoked a different brand of cigarettes (“Kools”). Luckily for Phillip Morris, Carl was thrown off a horse into a pond and drowned before anybody found that out.

Of the approximately one dozen men who replaced Carl in print and television ads over the next forty years, three of the "Marlboro Men" died of lung cancer (Wayne McLaren, David McLean and Dick Hammer). By the 1970’s the brand was unofficially known as “Cowboy Killers”. But that didn't seem to hurt sales. I used to smoke them myself.

Today, with 1/3rd of the world’s population still smoking tobacco, chewing tobacco or inserting tobacco enemas, 4,000 Americans still die each year (5.4 million world-wide) from tobacco caused cancer, strokes, or house fires caused by smoking. The number of fires caused by tobacco enemas is thought to be insignificant, but I remain suspicious of this method of nicotine delivery.

Under heat Cigarettes (or little cigars) convert the nicotine fortified tobacco contained in modern cigarettes into 60 various carcinogens, and 96% of all lung cancer patients each year describe themselves as moderate to heavy smokers.

These figures mean that smoking tobacco has killed far more people than smoking marijuana. And yet, despite this, every day we send people to prison for selling the “gateway drug” while the only tobacco related criminals in jail are those caught avoiding state cigarette taxes. Yea, God must be having a real laugh over his experiment with tobacco.  Not so much his experiment with humans.

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CAN YOU SAY "PONZI SCHEME", It Ain't History

I doubt that you have ever heard of 67 year old Robert Dean White, but you really ought to hear what he has to say.  Federal prosecutors have an extensive library of the imparted wisdom of Mr. White, and my personally favorite “cut” is his description of the parent firm he worked for, “The Petters Group Worldwide”, as “…a Ponzi scheme.” They should have be replaying that little tune in every hedge fund board room in Greenwich, Connecticut, as a lesson of  what becomes of people who actually start to believe that capitalism has their best interests at heart. Capitalism has no heart. That is what government is supposed to provide.  But, let me not get ahead of myself, here.
Charles Ponzi (AKA Charles Ponei, AKA Charles P. Bianchi) was far from the first to invent this scheme. He just had his name attached to it. He was an Italian immigrant who stumbled upon the International Postal Reply Coupon, a now defunct system of international postage. The price of IPRC stamps varied from nation to nation, and Ponzi convinced investors that he was buying the stamps cheaply in Italy, in huge bulk, and selling them for a profit in America. He promised a 400% return on investments and seemed to be making good on that promise. People actually paid him to take their money. Ponzi went, in 1919,  from a penniless ex-con to a millionaire. In July of 1920 alone he made $420,000 - about $5 million in 2019 money. 
Then in August of 1920 the Boston Post asked the U.S. Post Office how many IPRC’s Ponzi had actually exchanged and found out the number was zero.  He was using new investments to pay off old investors, and pocketing a substantial profit. By September of 1920 Ponzi was in jail. The vast majority of his investors lost everything. A team of accountants searched valiantly for months but were never able to reconstruct where all the money had disappeared to. After serving his sentence and being deported,. Ponzi told an Italian reporter not to feel sorry for his victims, “Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price,” he said. “It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over.”  Evidently, darn few agreed with him. As a 16 year old high school student Tom Petters leased an office in downtown St. Cloud, Minnesota, out of which he sold stereo equipment to college students. When his father found out about the venture the budding entrepreneur was pulled up by his short hairs and forced to close it all down. But Tom was just starting slow.

In 1988 he formed The Petters Group World Wide (“Partnership Defined”), which eventually became a self described $2.3 billion investment group, with 3,200 employees.  In June of 2002 Tom and Ted Deikel bought the name and inventory of a division of Federated Department stores called “Fingerhut”.  A year later he bought a company called eBid.com. Two years later he shelled out $246 million for Polaroid.  They used own the "instant picture" business when "pictures" still meant film.  '

In October 2006 he joined with Whitebox Advisors to buy Sun Country Airlines. In February 2007 he bought the marketing company Juice Media World Wide, and in November he became sole owner of Sun Country.  In 2008 his acquisitions accelerated. He bought EducAsian in January, the magazine conglomerate Metropolitan Media Group in July and the charter airline Southwest Aviation and Enable Holdings, Inc., both in August.   If you have been paying attention, you may have noticed you have not heard of any of those companies over the last decade or two. 

During the summer of 2008, the moral pressure on insiders became so great that Ms. Deanna Coleman, vice president of operations for Petters Co., contacted the Security and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She was convinced the entire house of cards was about to come crashing down, and wanted to get out before the corporation came crashing down on her.  And in September of 2008 the F.B.I. raided John’s home and offices, and those of Mr. Robert Dean White, Petters Group's Chief Financial Officer.

Tom’s entire house of cards folded like…well, like a house of cards. Just a month prior to his personal Goetterdaemerung, Tom explained to the fawning students of the Carlson School of Management, “You’ve got to figure out how to leverage and move things forward and not backwards. Sometimes sideways and left and not always how you had anticipated.” But evidently Tom did anticipate what was coming because he is heard on one of the tapes the F.B.I. made with Ms. Coleman's help, admitting he cheated on his taxes, and used an employee to create false documents to fool investors, but that he “didn’t know what choice” he had. I guess, in his mind,  honesty was not a viable choice.The Feds alleged that for ten years Tom has been showing investors purchase orders to prove he was selling merchandise to Walmart. But when one investor finally checked with Walmart,  the Arkansas firm said the P.O. numbers were fake and they had never bought anything from any of Tom’s many, many companies.   This revelation led to a full Federal audit of PGW which showed $1.9 billion in the “in” drawer and $3.5 billion in bills. As near as it can be figured, Tom and his business partners stole about $11 billion.  And since the Feds lack the creative accounting of Wall Street types, owing more than you own equals bankruptcy.  Ah, if they only had the imagination of Tom Petters or Charles Ponzi  or Donald Trump, they would know that being in debt was just another opportunity.

On 8 October, 2008, the following story appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper, written by Dan Browning., "...(Deanna Lynn) Coleman, 42 (above before)...pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. Her guilty plea was one of three Wednesday. Robert Dean White, 67, of Excelsior, and Michael Catain, 52, of Shorewood, also admitted to their roles in the scheme, which involved the creation of false bank statements and other documents that were used to trick investors into funding...a giant Ponzi scheme..." 

 Deanna Coleman (above, after) received a one year sentence. Her attorney said she will probably be  "...will be penniless" for the rest of her life...", but "She wanted to bring it to a screeching halt,"   Two years later, Robert Dean White got 5 years. David Baer, the Peters Group general council was busted with an office safe filled with drugs. He got probation

Tom Petters himself of convicted of 10 counts of wire fraud, 3 counts of mail fraud, 5 counts of money laundering, and conspiracy to commit all of the above.  Mr.  Petters was incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth Kansas, where he taught the other inmates how to start new businesses.  In a 2012 interview he was described as "...tan and well groomed...calm and positives with a good sense of humor." He told the interviewer he expected the courts to eventually vindicated him. The man who prosecuted him, John Marti, had a different view. "Tom Petters is about as narcissistic as they come,"  The one time stereo salesman will be eligible for parole on 25 April, 2052, when he will be 95 years old., just another victim of his narcissism. 

William Cohan,  the one time Wall Street investment banker and author, wrote a 2009 best selling book, entitled "House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism."  But, in truth, the story has been told before, a million times, and not just on Wall Street, or even Minneapolis.  Honoré de Balzac  actually put the reality of capitalism down on paper well over a hundred years ago, when he wrote, "The secret of a great fortune made without apparent cause is soon forgotten., if the crime is committed in a respectable way."   Meaning, not by minority men or women, and not at gunpoint.

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The Lady Who Won the Battle of The Little Big Horn

I am surprised that most people think the Seventh Cavalry was wiped out at the battle of the Little Big Horn. In truth, of the 650 white officers and enlisted men, scouts and civilians engaged on 25 June, 1876, only some 286 were killed. That was a devastating 44%,  but hardly the entire command.  Most of the men under second in command Major Marcus Reno over three days of intensive combat,  made it out alive.  Whereas, the 210 men directly under the command of “General” George Armstrong Custer were dead within three hours of the first shot being fired. But the results for the U.S. Army were even worse in the Second Battle of the Little Big Horn, when, for fifty-seven years, they were mercilessly attacked by a five foot four inch tall Victorian widow with blue-gray eyes and chestnut hair. Her name was Elizabeth Bacon Custer. And she wiped out the entire U.S. Army. 

Immediately after the battle the military judgments were unanimous. President Grant, who had been elevated to the White House based on his record as a military commander, told a reporter, “I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops brought on by Custer himself,…(which) was wholly unnecessary – wholly unnecessary.” General Philip Sheridan, the man who had lobbied for Custer’s inclusion on the expedition considered the disaster primarily Custer’s fault. “Had the Seventh Cavalry been held together, it would have been able to handle the Indians on the Little Big Horn."

And finally, General Samuel Davis Sturgis (above), overall commander of the seventh (but who was not in the field with them), and whose son, James, had died on the Little Big Horn, was appalled by the suggestion that a monument be dedicated to the memory of “The American Murat”, General Custer. “For God’s sake", urged Sturgis, "let them hide it in some dark valley, or veil it, or put it anywhere the bleeding hearts of the widows, orphans, fathers and mothers of the men so uselessly sacrificed to Custer’s ambition, can never be wrung at the sight of it.” And the vast majority of professional army officers agreed with General Sturgis.

Having dismissed the dead Custer, at first the army also dismissed his 34 year old widow. Barely a month after her husband had died amid the Montana scrub brush, “Libby” Custer was forced to leave her home at  Fort Abraham Lincoln. As a widow Libby had no right to quarters on any post, and so lost the social support of her Army life and friends. Her income was immediately reduced to the widow’s pension of $30 a month. Her total assets were worth barely $8,000, while the claims against Custer’s estate exceeded $13,000. And then, in her hour of need, Libby spied the perfect weapon to be used in defense of herself and her dead spouse.

His name was Frederick Whittaker, and he scratched out a living as a writer of pulp fiction and non-fiction for magazines of the day. A kind reviewer described his work as, “…about the best of its kind”.  Whittaker had met Custer (above with Libby) during the Civil War, and the General’s death inspired him to write a dramatic eulogy for Galaxy Magazine,  praising the fallen hero. Whittaker also mentioned Custer’s “natural recklessness and vanity”, but Libby was willing to ignore that mistake, and immediately contacted him. Libby provided Whittaker with the couple’s personal letters, access to family and friends, war department correspondence and permission to use large sections from Custer’s own book, “My Life on the Plains” - which Libby had largely written.

What emerged, just six months after Little Big Horn, was “A Complete Life of General George A. Custer”. It was absolute pulp, filled with inaccuracies and excessive praise for Custer, but it was also a best seller. “So fell the brave caviler, the Christian soldier, surrounded by foes, but dying in harness amid the men he loved.” This time there was no hint of faults in Custer. Instead the blame was laid elsewhere. Of Custer, Whittaker wrote; “He could have run like Reno had he wished...It is clear, in the light of Custer’s previous character, that he held on to the last, expecting to be supported, as he had a right to expect. It was only when he clearly saw he had been betrayed, that he resolved to die game, as it was too late to retreat.”

http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.Whittaker (Sheldon and Company, New York, 1876).

Few professional soldiers were willing to admit in public that Whittaker had gotten it wrong,But in private they agreed.  Custer was not a great Indian fighter. In fact one of the most serious charges laid against Custer before his death was that in December of 1868, at the Battle of the Washita, Custer had deserted a junior commander, Major Elliot, and his 21 men, who were all killed. But those experienced officers withheld their criticism of Whittaker to avoid being forced to also criticize Custer's widow. This was, after all, the Victorian age, and women had to be protected. But  the essential truth about what happened on the Little Big Horn was always known, to the professionals. 

On the hot afternoon of 25 June,  1876, Major Marcus Reno was ordered by Custer to advance into the valley of the Little Big Horn River with three companies, about 120 troopers,  and attack the Indian village - which they hadn't even seen yet.  He was also told he would be supported by "the entire outfit".  So Reno had crossed the river and reformed his men in a wooded glade. Then he led  two companies forward, in line abreast with their right flank anchored on the river, and with the third company following in reserve. They rode due north, toward the Indian camps. I say "camps" because it turned out  there were at least two. However, as the river curved away, Reno was forced to throw the third company into line as well, to avoid being outflanked on the river side.  Reno now had no reserve, had been assigned no supplies of ammunition or water except what each trooper carried, and as he trotted across the flat valley floor there was no sign of Custer or the promised support.

 

The expectation of Custer and Reno was that once confronted, the Sioux and Cheyenne would disperse, and run to escape. This was the way Indians had always reacted to U.S. Army cavalry.  Indian warriors were not soldiers. They were fathers and husbands with families to support  and defend. But three days earlier the Indians had surprised and battered another Army column coming up from the south and forced it to retreat. The Indians thought they were now secure in this camp. They had posted no scouts. And the sudden appearance of Custer with some 650 mounted soldiers, had caught them napping. There was no time to send their women and children to safety. There was no time to save their pony herds, without which they could not hunt, feed their children, or survive. Their backs were against the wall, and confronted, they came swarming out of their camp, desperate to drive off the attackers.

The army had thought there might be 3-500 Indians in the camp. In fact there were closer to 3,000, of which perhaps 1,000 were warriors.  The cavalry was out numbered. And thanks to Custer, they were being out-General-ed. And thanks to their single shot carbines, they were even going to be out-gunned.

Confronted by a growing mass of aggressive warriors in this front, Reno ordered his men to halt and form a skirmish line.  Every fourth trooper became a horse-holder, who withdrew fifty yards. The remaining  three knelt in an evenly spaced line and began firing their carbines. The object was to keep their enemy at least one hundred yards distant. But this also reduced Reno's rifles on the line to less than 100 guns.  Meanwhile, the Indians, armed with less accurate repeating rifles and pistols, as well as bows and arrows, wanted to close to less than 20 yards. Within a few minutes there were an estimated 500 Indians alone in the trees and brush along the river, pouring fire into Reno's open right  flank. One of the men on the skirmish line later said that if they had held that line for a few more minutes, "We would be in that valley, still." And there was still no sign of Custer and the "rest of the outfit", as promised.

Worried he was about to be surrounded, Reno ordered his men to abandon the skirmish line and to fall back into the woods along the Little Big Horn River.  Even though the stream was barely 20 yards wide, Reno's rear and flank would be temporarily secure. He immediately  began to make a new plan. but while Reno was speaking to an Indian scout named Bloody Knife, the man's head virtually exploded from a rifle round.  Reno was coated in the man's brains and blood. The Major lost control of himself. After issuing a dozen contradictory orders, with no warning or planning , Reno's ordered his men to mount and retreat back across the river. The movement became a wild uncoordinated running fight, splashing through the water and followed by a desperate climb up the steep bluff.

At the top of what came to called Reno Hill, the major finally had a stroke of luck. His desperate men were met by Captain Fredrick Benteen and his 110 men. They had been sent off by Custer hours earlier to search for Indians to the south. They had found nothing, and, having heard nothing from Custer, were returning on Benteen's own initiative,....luckily at this exact moment. Shortly there after, Custer's entire ammunition supply, packed on mules, and guarded by a single company, also arrived at Reno's Hill.  There was still no sign of Custer, or of the 225 men under his command. But with the ammunition packs, at least Reno's command could defend themselves

For three days Reno, Benteen and their men, held off Indian snipping and attacks. The wounded suffered under the summer sun, and a few men braved the constant snipping to crawl down to the Little Big Horn for water. (View of LBH valley from Reno Hill). The ordeal came to an end only when another supporting column appeared, from the north. Given a choice of fighting or running, as usual, the Indians retreated. And once they did, Custer's butchered command was discovered, on a rise renamed "Last Stand Hill".

Frederick Whittaker's book, and the public outcry which followed it, shifted blame for the disaster off Custer and lay it on Reno. The criticism mounted day by day. Eventually Reno was forced to ask for, and received a Court of Inquiry (not a Court Martial) on his conduct at Little Big Horn. This cleared his name and revealed the character of the "sketchy" people Whittaker had relied on for his version of the battle. But it made little difference to the general public who declared the inquiry a whitewash. Custer was a hero, the subject of paintings and legends. And that was the way the public saw it, whatever the reality.

Elizabeth Custer went on to support herself comfortably by writing three books; “Tenting on the Plains”,"Following the Guidon” and “Boots and Saddles”. In each her husband was idolized and lionized. In 1901 she managed to squeeze out one more, a children’s book, “The Boy General. Story of the Life of Major-General George A. Custer”: “The true soldier asks no questions; he obeys, and Custer was a true soldier. He gave his life in carrying out the orders of his commanding general… He had trained and exhorted his men and officers to loyalty, and with one exception they stood true to their trust, as was shown by the order in which they fell.”

By the time Libby died, in 1933, at the age of ninety-one, her vision of Little Big Horn was set in the concrete of the printed page, in dozens of books and even a few movies. Among the first who had endorsed Libby's view was Edward S. Godfrey, who had been a junior officer at the Little Big Horn and a Custer “fan” from before the battle. His 1892 “Custer’s Last Battle” was unequivocal. “...had Reno made his charge as ordered,…the Hostiles would have been so engaged… that Custer’s approach…would have broken the moral of the warriors….(Reno’s) faltering ...his halting, his falling back to the defense position in the woods...; his conduct up to and during the siege…was not such as to inspire confidence or even respect,…” .” It was absurd, as anyone who had been in the valley with Reno could have told Godfrey. But Godfrey had been with the ammunition train, And he simply refused to listen anyone who even hinted that Custer might in any way have been at fault. When Reno died, questions were even asked if  he should be buried in a military cemetery. 

These attacks on Reno continued for most of the 20th century. The 1941 movie staring Errol Flynn as Custer displays Libby's view of Reno as well as any tome, and were echoed even by respected historians such as Robert Utley, who in the 1980’s described Reno as "… a besotted, socially inept mediocrity, (who) commanded little respect in the regiment and was the antithesis of the electric Custer in almost every way.”

So for over a century Marcus Reno was reviled and despised as the coward who did not charge as ordered, instead, pleading weasel-like, that Custer had not supported him as promised. It would not be until Ronald Nichols biography of Reno, “In Custer’s Shadow” (U. of Oklahoma Press, 1999) that Reno would receive a fair hearing.

About this same time the Indian accounts of the fight began to finally be given a serious consideration by white historians, including the story told to photographer Edward Curtis back in 1907 by three of Custer’s Crow Indian scouts. The three (now aging) men said they had watched amazed as Custer stood on the bluffs overlooking Reno’s fight in the valley. This Indian version was supported by some soldiers in the valley fight who reported seeing Custer on the bluffs. (Most historians had always assumed they were imagining things.)

One of the scouts, White Man Runs Him, claimed to have scolded Custer; “Why don’t you cross the river and fight too?” To which, the scouts say, Custer replied, “It is early yet and plenty of time. Let them fight. Our turn will come.”

And it did. But General Custer was not ready for it. And that point must remain undisputed.

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