ANGELS AND DEMONS WHO WON'T BE EVIL

On 4^th September 1781, a group of forty-four settlers known as "Los Pobladores" founded the pueblo called "La Reyna de los Angeles", named for Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciúncula (Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porciúncula River). Two-thirds of the settlers were mestizo or mulatto with African, Amerindian, and European ancestry. The settlement remained a small ranch town for decades, but by 1820 the population had increased to about 650 residents. It became a part of Mexico in 1821 following the Mexican War of Independence. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War, Los Angeles and the rest of California were purchased as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, thereby becoming part of the United States. Los Angeles was incorporated as a municipality on April 4, 1850, five months before California achieved statehood.

Today, the pueblo is commemorated in the historic district of Los Angeles Pueblo Plaza and Olvera Street, the oldest part of Los Angeles.

It was also on the 4^th September 1888 that George Eastman registered the trademark Kodak  and receives a patent for his camera that uses roll film.

Herewith a photograph of Hollywood Boulevard from the top of the Kodak Theatre looking in the direction of downtown Los Angeles in the background.

And yet another California event.

Google was first incorporated as a privately held company on the 4^th September 1998. Google Inc. is an American multinational corporation which provides Internet-related products and services, including internet search, cloud computing, and software and advertising technologies. Advertising revenues from AdWords generate almost all of the company's profits.

Page

Brin

The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while both attended Stanford University. Together, Brin and Page own about 16 percent of the company's stake. Its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and the company's unofficial slogan is "Don’t be evil". In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.

EMOTION RECOLLECTED IN TRANQUILITY

There is a sonnet written by William Wordsworth entitled

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

describing London and the River Thames, viewed from Westminster Bridge in the early morning. It was first published in the collection Poems in Two Volumes in 1807.

Earth hath not anything to show more fair:


Wordsworth

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by


A sight so touching in its majesty:


This City now doth, like a garment, wear


The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,


Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie


Open unto the fields, and to the sky;


All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.


Never did sun more beautifully steep


In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;


Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!


The river glideth at his own sweet will:


Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;


And all that mighty heart is lying still!

As to whether the sonnet was actually composed on the 3^rd September 1802, we have this entry from his sister Dorothy’s journal:

Dorothy Wordsworth

... we left London on Saturday morning at ½ past 5 or 6, the 31st July (I have forgot which) we mounted the Dover Coach at Charing Cross. It was a beautiful morning. The City, St Paul’s, with the River & a multitude of little Boats, made a most beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge. The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke & they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such a pure light that there was even something like the purity of one of nature's own grand Spectacles

Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal, Saturday 31st July 1802

The sonnet, or at least the journal entry, was written when William and Dorothy were passing through London travelling to Calais to visit Annette Vallon by whom he had a daughter Caroline, prior to his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson. That the sonnet so closely follows Dorothy's journal entry comes as no surprise because Dorothy wrote her Grasmere Journal to "give Wm pleasure by it" and it was freely available to Wordsworth, who said of Dorothy that "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears". Dorothy’s entry being dated the 31^st July 1802, does seem to indicate that there was some poetic licence as to the date mentioned in the title.

Poems in Two Volumes, included the likes of ‘I wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ‘The world is too much with us’, etc. There was a scathing review of the work by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sEcTJe38T4QC&pg=PA214&dq=Edinburgh+review+Wordsworth+Poems+in+Two+Volumes&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jHfGT_DvHoeq-gbP69i-BQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Edinburgh%20review%20Wordsworth%20Poems%20in%20Two%20Volumes&f=false.

Francis Jeffrey

I confess I find Mr Jeffrey’s view convincing; however, there are many who find the piece appealing.

On another note for the 3rd September;

The Westerbork transit camp was a World War II Nazi refugee, detention and transit camp in Hooghalen, ten kilometres north of Westerbork, in the north-eastern Netherlands. Its function during the war was to assemble Roma and Dutch Jews for transport to other concentration camps.

Anne Frank, another diarist, stayed in the hut shown to the left from August until early September 1944, when she was taken to Auschwitz. She and her family were put on the first of the three final trains (the three final transports were most probably a reaction to the Allie’s offensive) on 3^rd September 1944 for Auschwitz, arriving there three days later.

REALPOLITIK, INTELLIGENT FORETHOUGHT OR AMORAL PUSUIT OF POLITICAL POWER

The 2^nd September reveals some interesting political attitudes and coincidences.

On the 2^nd September 1807, the British Royal Navy bombarded Copenhagen with firebombs and phosphorus rockets to prevent Denmark from surrendering its fleet to Napoleon. The British repeated this type of exercise during the second World War when on the 3^rd July 1940 as part of Operation Catapult and known as the Battle of Mers-el-Kebir, the British bombarded the French Navy at Mers-el-Kebir on the Alegrian coast. the French fleet was at anchor and not expecting an assault from Britain. The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,297 French servicemen, the sinking of a battleship and the damaging of five other ships. France and the United Kingdom were not at war but, after the armistice with Germany, Britain feared the French fleet would end up as a part of the German Navy. Although French Admiral François Darlan had assured Winston Churchill the fleet would not fall into German possession, the British acted upon the assumption that Darlan's promises were insufficient guarantees. This was not without reason as Darlan later served in the Vichy government as prime minister.

T. Roosevelt

The U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt, clearly learned much from the history lesson of the British Navy’s action at Copenhagen. In a speech he made whilst Vice-President of the United States at the Minnesota State Fair on the 2^nd September 1901, he first used the term “speak softly and carry a big stick”. This big stick ideology (the idea of negotiating peacefully, simultaneously threatening with the "big stick", or the military) ties in heavily with the idea of Realpolitik, which implies an amoral pursuit of political power that resembles Machiavellian ideals; however Roosevelt described his style of foreign policy as "the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis". This was of course very much part of the Monroe Doctrine. Roosevelt’s speech was given twelve days before the assassination of President William McKinley, which subsequently thrust him into the presidency.

Ho Chi Minh

Another Roosevelt, Franklyn, also a President of the United States, made comment about the French colonisation of Indo-China. In 1940-1945, French Indochina was occupied by Japan, which used the colony as a base from which to conduct military operations further south. Soon after the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, the Vietminh entered Hanoi and Hồ Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on the 2nd September 1945. Franklin Roosevelt had spoken against French rule in Indochina and America was supportive of the Viet Minh at this time. From support in 1945 to ten years later and the beginning of a war that would last for nearly 20 years.

Herewith a video of the ceremony of the Declaration of Independence on the 2^nd September 1945. Ho Chi Minh died exactly 24 years later on the 2^nd September 1969, at the height of the war.

FOR JAMES

This video shot on way through Germany on 12th July 2012, on the way to the Chauvets' in Tour-sur- Marne.

Film of 7 Goedeke Strasse, Celle, Germany - unedited