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The sexual revolution happened in the 1960s, right? Catherine the Great (Massie) suggests that things weren’t so simple 200 years earlier:

Zorich was replaced by a twenty-four-year-old Guards officer, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, whose term [as Catherine’s lover or “favorite”] lasted two years. … Despite Catherine’s praise, most in the Russian court expected Rimsky-Korsakov to last only briefly, because everyone except the empress saw that his heart was not in his work. He was expected to be in constant attendance, was forbidden to leave the palace, and became bored and restless. He escaped into the arms of Countess Bruce, Catherine’s principal lady-in-waiting and for years one of her closest friends. Foolishly, the couple believed that they could carry on their affair inside the palace. They managed for almost a year, but it ended abruptly one day when the empress opened a door and discovered them making love. Catherine sent a message to Rimsky-Korsakov informing him that she would be generous provided he left St. Petersburg immediately. Countess Bruce was commanded to return to her husband. … There was more to this tangled plot. Catherine, the court, and Countess Bruce soon learned that Rimsky-Korsakov had been using Bruce as a decoy with whom to pass the time and alleviate his boredom. His real object was a beautiful young countess, Catherine Stroganova, married to one of the wealthiest men in Russia. The Stroganovs had just returned from six years of living in Paris, and, on first seeing the handsome “king of Epirus,” the young countess fell in love. Only when the disgraced Rimsky-Korsakov left for Moscow and Countess Stroganova immediately followed him, was the extent of this operatic, labyrinthine double betrayal fully revealed. Count Stroganov behaved with patrician dignity. Worried that his young son would be affected by public scandal, he installed his wife in a Moscow palace, where she and her lover lived happily for thirty years. There, they brought up the three children they had together.

[The Empress Catherine] summoned [her apparently unfaithful young lover] Mamonov and Scherbatova and saw immediately that the young woman was pregnant. She pardoned Mamonov and granted the couple permission to marry, even insisting that the ceremony be performed in the palace chapel. She did not attend, but gave them a hundred thousand rubles and a country estate. “God grant them happiness,” she said, stipulating only that they leave St. Petersburg.

At four on Sunday morning, April 10, [eldest son and heir to the throne] Paul awakened his mother [Catherine] to tell her that his wife had been in labor since midnight. … Toward six in the evening on Friday, April 15, after five days of agony, Natalia died. … Beyond Natalia’s death and Paul’s uncontrolled grief, Catherine now faced the fact that three years of marriage and a pregnancy had produced no heir. To subdue this emotional storm, Catherine chose a cruel remedy. She broke into Natalia’s desk. There, as she expected, she found the love letters exchanged by the dead woman and Andrei Razumovsky. Furious at seeing her son weep over a wife who had betrayed him with his best friend, Catherine decided to use the letters to wrench him back to reality. She thrust the pages under Paul’s eyes. He read the proof that the two people he had loved most had deceived him; he did not even know whether the dead child had been his.

More: read Catherine the Great.

Related:

• Sex Education for Catherine the Great
• Russian Empress Stories to Comfort Hillary Supporters

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Today is the 113th anniversary of the first successful flight by the Wright Brothers (Wikipedia).

Where should this be celebrated? The North Carolina beaches are not at their best this time of year and they haven’t been profoundly changed by the flourishing of aviation.

Readers: What part of the world has benefited the most from aviation? My personal nomination is Las Vegas (also not a bad place to be in December!). During a trip earlier this year I learned that 80-90 percent of customers for helicopter tours are foreign visitors (and indeed the folks with whom I shared a tour were from China and the UK; the pilot was a former student of mine, a Swiss citizen who became an instructor at our flight school). If there were no commercial airline service to Vegas, it would be a tiny satellite of Los Angeles, right?

Related:

• Paul Cornu’s 1907 helicopter flight

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Facebook Friend 1’s Post:

Dear Electors:
We have literally never, in 224 years, needed you before.
We need you now.
For the first time in American history, our national election was hacked by a foreign power.
Worse, a foreign power that the presumptive-president-elect has openly courted and engaged.
It is astonishing to me that this is even a question but: WE MUST DEFEND OUR DEMOCRACY FROM FOREIGN POWERS.
In the age of the Internet, it will become increasingly easy for China or Russia or Brazil to hack our systems, and tilt our elections one way or another.
The only way we can protect ourselves against this risk is to deny the beneficiary any benefit.
We must have ZERO TOLERANCE for attacks on our democracy.
And at a very minimum, I urge you to withhold your vote until you are convinced that the CIA is mistaken.
Lessig

His friend’s comment:

Thousands of vulnerable civilians in Aleppo and other cities, face an almost genocidal campaign waged against them by Assad’s forces, backed by Russia. Given President elect Trump’s policy’s aligning so much with those of President Putin, will the slaughter of innocent people be curtailed or escalate should he be inaugurated? And knowing that could even POSSIBLY happen, how could the electoral college not exercise humanity, caution and prudence by denying Trump the Presidency? Notwithstanding the dozens of other reasons why he is unfit for the office.

My comment:

Agreed, T. Imagine if the U.S. were run by a President who had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Then none of this suffering in Aleppo would have occurred.

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The world of government regulation may be getting a little less painful for folks trying to certify airplanes (but not helicopters) with 19 or fewer seats: “FAA Issues Final Rule on Small Airplane Safety Certification Standards”.

It will likely still be true that the paperwork for certification weighs more than the aircraft, but maybe we will get a few finished designs out of this?

If you’re curious, the old rules are here: 14 CFR Part 23

Members of the public still can’t seem to fathom how far behind the world of aviation lags in many ways. A reporter the other day asked me various questions about Malaysia Airlines 370, the B777 that disappeared. I had to remind him that “all of the electronics in that plane taken together are less powerful than the phone in your pocket.”

Related:

• Flight deck integration + regulation = reduced innovation
• FAA committees meet for 17 years…
• Cirrus (and the Chinese) push the world’s first personal jet out the door
• Tecnam P2012, an Italian 11-seater that might benefit from this change, thus allowing Cape Air to replace some of their Cessna 402s (introduced 1967); supposedly the Technam is going to cost more than $2 million, against closer to $200,000 for an old Twin Cessna

 

 

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From Catherine the Great:

The empress then wrote to Voltaire attributing “this freakish event” to the fact that the [rebellious] Orenburg region “is inhabited by all the good-for-nothings of whom Russia has thought fit to rid herself over the past forty years, rather in the same spirit that the American colonies have been populated.”

We might still be British citizens, but for a decision by Catherine:

There was one foreign policy decision Catherine made at this time in which Potemkin played no part. In the summer of 1775, King George III of England requested the loan—the rental, actually—of Russian troops to fight in America against his rebellious colonial subjects. London’s first instruction on this matter came on June 30, 1775, from the Earl of Suffolk at the Foreign Office to Sir Robert Gunning, the British ambassador: The rebellion in a great part of his Majesty’s American colonies is of such a nature as to make it prudent to look forward to every possible exertion. You will endeavor to learn whether, in case it should hereafter be found expedient to make use of foreign troops in North America, His Majesty might rely on the Empress of Russia to furnish him with a considerable corps of her infantry for that purpose. I need not observe to you that this commission is of the most delicate nature. In whatever method you introduce the conversation, whether with Mr. Panin or the empress, you will be very careful to do it unaffectedly, so as to give it quite the air of an idle speculation of your own and by no means that of a proposition. Soon, the British government was more specific. What was wanted was a Russian force of twenty thousand infantry and one thousand Cossack cavalry, for which Britain was prepared to meet all expenses—transport to America, maintenance, and pay. Catherine considered the request. She was indebted to the king and England for the assistance rendered five years before when the Russian fleet made its passage from the Baltic to the Mediterranean—the voyage that had led to Russia’s naval victory over the Turks at Chesme. She was flattered that her soldiers were respected by England. And she was strongly sympathetic to George III’s difficulties—she herself had just dealt with a massive rebellion in Pugachev’s uprising. She nevertheless refused the king’s request. When she did so, Gunning appealed to Panin and then tried the new man, Potemkin, but Catherine was adamant. Even a personal letter from King George could not persuade her. She wrote back a friendly letter, wishing the king success, but still saying no. An important but unexpressed reason was that she considered that Russia’s future lay in the south, along the Black Sea. Despite the peace treaty with Turkey, she sensed that the settlement would not be permanent and that another war would be coming. When this war began, Catherine knew that she would need the twenty thousand soldiers herself.

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Folks who live in public housing here in Boston can start growing marijuana legally today. What else can they do with their taxpayer-funded electricity? Enjoy Verizon FiOS 150 mbps Internet:

The service can be installed now in Dorchester, Roslindale, and West Roxbury, … Boston has issued a cable TV license to Verizon covering just those neighborhoods … The company’s license with the city says Verizon may avoid installations in Boston when it is “commercially impracticable,” though this exception does not apply to public housing for low-income residents.

What if you don’t live in one of these low-income neighborhoods and/or a housing project?

Verizon told Ars today that it “plans to offer FiOS across the city over the next 6 years.”

How about if you hang out in government-owned real estate in the suburbs? The managers of our airport (dual civilian/military use) sent this email:

For those of you that are authorized to access Hanscom AFB as part of your normal operations at Hanscom Field, please make note of the following article related to upcoming legislative changes in the Commonwealth starting December 15th.

Excerpts from the article:

“Even though Massachusetts has passed legislation that decriminalizes marijuana possession, military installations are considered federal property, so nothing changes as it relates to bringing and or having drugs on base, even for civilians” said Maj. Joseph Bincarousky, Sr., 66th Security Forces Squadron commander. “If anyone is found on Hanscom Air Force Base in possession of or using marijuana, that person will be subject to the federal laws related to marijuana, not to the Commonwealth’s law.”

Capt. Christopher McNamee, 66 SFS operations officer, highlighted that base employees and residents will need prudence when sponsoring base visitors.

“When base residents and employees consider sponsoring visitors on base, they may want to tell their visitors that marijuana, and other illegal drugs, are not permitted on the installation,” McNamee said. “Sponsors are ultimately responsible for their visitors, and if they knowingly allow visitors to bring illegal substances, they will be held accountable.”

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What was sex education like before the Age of Internet? Catherine the Great (Massie):

Catherine’s premarital nervousness did not come from fear of the nocturnal intimacies that marriage would demand. She knew nothing about these things. Indeed, on the eve of her marriage, she was so innocent that she did not know how the two sexes physically differed. Nor had she any idea what mysterious acts were performed when a woman lay down with a man. Who did what? How? She questioned her young ladies, but they were as innocent as she. One June night, she staged an impromptu slumber party in her bedroom, covering the floor with mattresses, including her own. Before going to sleep, the eight flustered and excited young women discussed what men were like and how their bodies were formed. No one had any specific information; indeed, their talk was so ill-informed, incoherent, and unhelpful that Catherine said that in the morning she would ask her mother. She did so, but Johanna—herself married at fifteen—refused to answer. Instead, she “severely scolded” her daughter for indecent curiosity.

How did the arranged marriage work out?

The next day, Madame Krause questioned Catherine about her wedding night. Catherine did not answer. She knew that something was wrong, but she did not know what. In the nights that followed, she continued to lie untouched at the side of her sleeping husband, and Madame Krause’s morning questions continued to go unanswered. “And,” she writes in her Memoirs, “matters remained in this state without the slightest change during the following nine years.”

two weeks after their wedding, Peter finally had something to say to Catherine: with a broad smile, he announced that he had fallen in love with Catherine Karr, one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting.

The woman carefully selected by Bestuzhev to oversee and administer these tasks was twenty-four-year-old Maria Semenovna Choglokova, Elizabeth’s first cousin on her mother’s side. Madame Choglokova had a remarkable reputation for virtue and fertility. She idolized her husband and produced a child with almost annual regularity, a domestic accomplishment meant to set an example for Catherine.

According to the author, Catherine never did have a baby with her husband. Her first-born son Paul was the child of a lover, Sergei Saltykov and the subsequent children were fathered by different lovers.

Catherine the Great valued sexual variety and youth. Regardless of her own age, her boyfriends were generally in their 20s and the sexual relationship lasted for about two years:

WHEN CATHERINE, then Sophia, arrived in Russia at the age of fourteen, she learned that “favorite” was the term used to describe an established and formally recognized lover of the woman on the throne, Empress Elizabeth.

Most of Catherine’s favorites were young officers originally selected for their handsome faces …

When Catherine dismissed lovers, it was not because they lacked virility but because they bored her. One need not be an empress to find it impossible to talk in the morning to a person with whom one has spent the night.

Catherine had twelve lovers. What shocked her contemporaries was not this number, but the age difference between Catherine and her later favorites. She crafted an explanation: she categorized these young men as students whom she hoped to develop into intellectual companions. If they did not completely measure up—and she did not pretend that one would become another Voltaire or Diderot, or even another Potemkin—then she could at least say that she was helping to train them for future roles in administering the empire.

Most of the favorites were young men whose youth and social inexperience offered a striking contrast to the dignified demeanor of their imperial patroness. The differences in age and station confused the court and created a whirlwind of gossip in Europe. But the specific manner and intimate practices by which these favorites pleased Catherine are unknown. Only in the cases of Potemkin and Zavadovsky is private correspondence available, and, in this regard, it is unspecific. Those seeking physical details of Catherine’s romantic liaisons will learn nothing; neither in her own words nor in the words of others are there any references to sexual preferences and behavior. Her bedroom door remains closed.

[Note that Catherine’s 18th-century behavior is similar to what lawyers interviewed for Real World Divorce told us about choices made by their female clients. Catherine got her position and wealth from a husband and then discarded him (not through divorce court, but by having him murdered). As there was no marital partner who could add substantially to her wealth going forward, she settled into a long cougarhood where she used the cash she’d gotten from her marriage to fund a series of sexual relationships with attractive young men.

The husband’s death occasioned little more interest than a present-day divorce lawsuit:

At Catherine’s request, [French Ambassador] Pictet sent a long account to Voltaire, explaining the intolerable situation in which she had found herself after her coup, and her innocence in the murder itself. Voltaire accepted this account, and brushed it aside by saying, “I know that … [Catherine] is reproached with some bagatelle about her husband, but these are family matters in which I do not mix.”

]

More: Read Catherine the Great.

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From Catherine the Great:

Fear for herself, her son, and the nation prompted the empress to investigate a new, controversial method of inoculation that assured permanent immunity: the injection of matter taken from the smallpox pustules of a patient recovering from a mild case. This medical technique was being used in Britain and the British North American colonies (Thomas Jefferson was inoculated in 1766) but was shunned in continental Europe as being too dangerous.

Catherine’s willingness to be inoculated attracted favorable notice in western Europe. Voltaire compared what she had allowed Dimsdale to do with the ridiculous views and practices of “our argumentative charlatans in our medical schools.” At the time, the prevailing attitude toward the disease was fatalistic: people believed that, sooner or later, everyone must have it, and that some would survive and some would die. Most refused inoculation. Frederick of Prussia wrote to Catherine urging her not to take the risk. She replied that she had always been afraid of smallpox and wished more than anything to escape this fear. In May 1774, almost six years after Catherine was inoculated, smallpox killed the king of France. Louis XV took to bed a barely pubescent girl who was carrying smallpox. He died soon after, ending a reign of fifty-nine years. His successor, nineteen-year-old Louis XVI, was inoculated immediately.

The imposition of medical precautions led to rioting. Many in Moscow’s terror-stricken population came to believe that the physicians and their medicines had brought the plague to the city. They refused to obey orders forbidding them to gather in marketplaces and churches and to kiss supposedly miraculous icons in hope of protection. Instead, they gathered to seek salvation and solace around these icons. A famous icon of the Virgin at Varvarsky Gate became a magnet; day after day, crowds of diseased people swarmed around her feet. She became the deadliest center of contagion in the city.

Attempting to reduce infection by preventing the formation of crowds, and relying on his authority as a priest, he had the Varvarsky Virgin removed from the city gate under cover of night and hidden. He believed that once the people knew that he was the one responsible, they would go home and the plague-ridden site would be eliminated. Instead, his well-meaning attempt provoked a riot. The crowd, rather than dispersing, was enraged. Ambrosius fled to a monastery and took refuge in a cellar, but the mob pursued him, dragged him out, and tore him apart. The riot was put down by troops, who killed a hundred people and arrested three hundred.

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I started with Obamacare here in Massachusetts in 2015. It was about $300/month. It went up closer to $400/month for 2016. I just got the first bill for the same plan (Harvard Pilgrim Standard Silver) but at 2017 rates: $705.05/month.

This is for a plan where I pay for at least the first $2000 per year. So if I do actually need health care for any reason the annual cost will be at least $10,460. All of this must be paid with post-tax dollars since I’m paying for it rather than having an employer pay for it.

Note that if I were getting the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and working full time (2000 hours/year), assuming an income and payroll tax rate of 0 percent, I would generate a surplus of only $4,040 with which to pay for (a) food, (b) shelter, (c) retirement, (d) taxes to feed the Great Father in Washington, (e) taxes to support local schools and state operations, etc.

Exercise for the reader: What is the implied annual inflation rate here and what will the cost be next year?

Related:

• my health care reform plan

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From Catherine the Great:

At the time of Catherine’s accession, the Russian population included ten million serfs, most of them peasants who furnished the overwhelming majority of the agricultural laborers in an overwhelmingly agricultural state. From the beginning of her reign, Catherine wanted to deal with the fundamental problem of serfdom, but the institution was too deeply interwoven into the economic and social fabric of Russian life for her to approach in her first months. Nevertheless, if a permanent, overall solution must be postponed, she could not put off the question of the church’s extensive lands and the one million male serfs who, with their families, worked these lands.

The price of a serf, even one highly skilled, was often less than that of a prize hunting dog. In general, a male serf could be bought for between two hundred and five hundred rubles; a girl or woman would cost between fifty and two hundred rubles, depending on her age, talents, and comeliness. Serfs sometimes changed owners for no price at all. He or she could be bartered against a horse or a dog, and a whole family could be gambled away in a night of cards.

In many ways, the condition of Russian serfs resembled that of black slaves in America. They were considered a human subspecies by their owners, and this chasm between serfs and masters was believed to be sanctioned by God. They were bought and sold like animals. They were subject to arbitrary treatment, hardship, and, all too often, cruelty. In Russia, however, there was no color barrier between master and slave. Russian serfs were not aliens in a foreign land; they had not been violently abducted from their homelands, languages, and religions, and carried thousands of miles across an ocean. Serfs in Russia were the descendants of impoverished, uneducated people of the same race, the same blood, and the same language as their owners.

The only limit on a nobleman’s power was that he was not permitted to execute a serf; he was, however, allowed to inflict punishment likely to cause death.

If the market-clearing price for a serf was low in the 18th century, a time when crops had to be harvested by hand, why do we expect that minimum wage can be raised to $15/hour without leading to substantial layoffs? Education levels are higher today than in Catherine the Great’s time, of course, but local human labor has to compete with (1) machines, and (2) global labor.

Related:

• unemployed = 21st century draft horse?
• Revisiting the 21st Century Draft Horse posting

 

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