And in 2008 not so good of a judge of whether McCain was a liar (and also Dishonorable - over and over).

=== Clip ===

I wanted to note a couple of things. First, McCain often distorted Obama's views. He said Obama would raise taxes, when (just to repeat myself) Obama will raise taxes only on people making over $250,000 a year. Still, in that case, you can imagine a way in which you might make what he said out to be true, if you squint a bit: Obama will raise some taxes. But there's no way to make this out to be anything but a lie:: [/i]

"His plan will force small busineses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor."

Here's a link to Obama's health plan. If anyone can find the part about forcing anyone into a government-run health care system, I'll eat my hat. (Remember the controversy from the primaries about mandates, and how Obama didn't have them?)

=== /Clip ===

So here is how it is two years later:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/health/policy/18health.html

Business cut jobs:Check. Reduce wages: Semi-Check (no raises). The govt-run health care is a Tax , is a Mandate, appears to be Medicaid rather than some other Public Option, but perhaps those are the same thing: Partial-Semi-Check. McCain's statement looks like it is much more truth than a lie, if you ask me.

Blogs aren't always fonts of wisdom. The opinions may not turn out to be true.  Don't believe everything you read or hear, and don't trust me on this.

Looky here now:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-07-21/news/ct-x-n-poison-ivy-0721-20100721_1_poison-ivy-plant-species-elevated-co2

Elevated CO2 levels in the atmosphere, although destructive to many plant species, are proving a boon for adaptive weeds such as poison ivy, said Lewis Ziska, a federal plant physiologist.

Really? That sounds kind of like Phil Ponce explaining on a PBS special how global warming will make Lake Michigan flood the Chicago shoreline, even though the lake has been at historic lows and ingonring the fact that Chicago is over 600 feet above sea level and in the middle of the continent.

But look a FEDERAL SCIENTIST is making the poison ivy claims! I on the other hand have only lived in the area for 25 years, and have always seen poison ivy, perhaps because I can identify it and do not need a newspaper article to tell me that it exists. I suspect that the article is meant to scare the cityfolk. The big unanswered question in my mind is whether corn and soybeans can tolerate CO2. We should all move to Antarctica, which, by journalistic standards, is the greenest place on earth.

I like this Jacob Davies guy. Lets get on the horn with Ezra and throw him a few links. I still don't get Eric.

It has only gotten worse what with all these furriner types clogging the aisles. A few months ago there was this big lady in a fur coat that blocked the entire aisle while she picked up and put back 40 to 50 beets. BEETS! For chrissake lady, beets are basically purple colored balls of dirt with dirt covering the outside of them! Be a fucking AMERICAN for crying out loud, and get your beets from a can like God intended for us to do, and then move on and get out of everybody's way.

And for the people who are buying eggs, here is the protocol: Open the carton. Eggs not cracked? Then put them in your cart.

Dont open three cartons of eggs and swap the eggs around until you think that you have one carton of the most wonderful, perfect eggs ever created. Here, let me lick that for you. Unsatisfactory? OK I'll put it back on the shelf.

This is your open thread.

Medals of Honor?   David French

This weekend’s New York Times Sunday Magazine contains a fascinating article that hits quite close to home for me. Centered around the story of a 25-year-old Marine who — despite horrific wounds — had the presence of mind and courage to scoop a live grenade under his body to save the lives of his comrades, the article asks a simple question: Why is the military awarding so few medals of honor? Are we less courageous now? Or is the military stifling valor awards in a labyrinthine bureaucracy dominated by rear echelon second-guessers? The numbers are stunning:

Despite its symbolic importance and educational role in military culture, the Medal of Honor has been awarded only six times for service in Iraq or Afghanistan. By contrast, 464 Medals of Honor were awarded for service during World War II, 133 during the Korean War and 246 during the Vietnam War. “From World War I through Vietnam,” The Army Times claimed in April 2009, “the rate of Medal of Honor recipients per 100,000 service members stayed between 2.3 (Korea) and 2.9 (World War II). But since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, only five Medals of Honor have been awarded, a rate of 0.1 per 100,000 — one in a million.”

To be clear, this article hits home for me not because I did anything meriting a valor award in Iraq (I did not), but because I know and served with men who did deserve valor awards but either (i) did not receive them; or (ii) saw the award requests downgraded or denied several steps up the bureaucratic chain. In some cases, we knew conduct would never be considered for more than a Silver Star, so we didn’t make the request.

The men I served with were courageous at a level that civilians simply cannot comprehend. Let me give just one example. In January 2008, a small team of American soldiers was ambushed after an al-Qaeda terrorist faked a surrender (this was common practice). The team leader and another officer were mortally wounded the instant the terrorists opened fire. The senior noncommissioned officer was pinned down and unable to take effective control of the formation; other officers were worked desperately to retrieve their fallen comrades. A Sergeant First Class took immediate control of the situation, personally returning fire and killing the majority of the attackers, directing the team’s defense, and coordinating the recovery under fire of his stricken team members. He shepherded the formation out of the kill zone and coordinated the medical evacuation.

All in a day’s work, you say? How about this additional fact: He did all of this after being shot in the neck in the opening moments of the ambush. He killed the enemy, protected his comrades, and led them to safety while bleeding profusely — collapsing only after help arrived. I’m not sure about you, but I can’t even imagine what I’d do in a similar circumstance. 

This courageous soldier received a Silver Star — our third-highest award for valor. It’s a medal he’ll wear proudly for the rest of his life, and he never asked for more. But did he deserve more? 

To be clear, our guys aren’t out there begging for medals, but these awards are a critical aspect of the ongoing story of our military and the valor of our soldiers. How can the public recognize the heroes in our midst if they will never know who they are? If their courage goes unrecognized or is unfairly minimized?

The incident described appears to be the day Andew was killed.  Andrew made the ultimate sacrifice when he took on a very dangerous mission to persuade members of AQ in Iraq to surrender or leave. I believe that the surge succeeded, at the cost of some of our most courageous and honorable soldiers.

The Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery is a lovely place, and a worthwhile visit for President Obama. It is a new cemetery and with the passing of generations is the resting place for many WWII vets.

As a jumping off point, here is what hairshirtdontist said

My joke is that I have the mind of a 20 year old but the back and knees of a 60 year old, which I started using when I turned 40 (the joke, not the back and knees). I'm 49 now, but I still use the same numbers, which testifies either to mathematical illiteracy or (more likely) a willingness to laugh at jokes that no longer make sense in order to keep the foreigner smiling.

But I do believe I have it rougher than my parents in terms of maturity. (I write about myself, but I suspect it can be extended to others) One of the reasons I feel like a kid is that the world of my parents has given way to a much less hierarchical place. Staying in the same job or with the same company for an entire career was unremarkable. Couples didn't wait until they were in their late 30's or even early 40's to have kids. Knowing someone's age doesn't really give you a lot of information about them, other than what cultural touchstones they may have.

This may be exacerbated by the fact that I am living in a foreign culture, where the precise rules of hierarchical relations are opaque. A colleague was shocked to find out I was 49 because he assumed that having a 10 year old and a 5 year old meant I was mid 30's.

It is probably inflamed by the fact that I do lots of things that people my age probably don't do. I'm or doing aikido 2 or 3 times a week, teaching iaido twice a week. I'm with college age students all the time and I've got a few other hobbies that put me with lots of young people.

Of course, it might be because I can't accept that my parents could ever be as immature as I am, as unorganized as I am, as clueless as I seem to find myself being. However, I think back to when I started judo as a kid, and adding it up and I realize that my dad, who did judo as a kid, was out on the mat with me in his 40's. So he was taking breakfalls on the mat at the same time I was. Maybe he thought the same things I'm thinking. But I also have a memory of being in the back seat after a long drive to see my cousins, and being half asleep, and my father would pick me up and carry me to bed, even though I was probably awake enough to get up and walk, and feeling like he was picking me up with no effort, maybe when I was 8 or 9 or even 10. Yet when I do the same for my 5 year old, I struggle and barely make it up the stairs. Unfortunately, my dad isn't talkative, especially on the subject of his feelings. So this, from a book titled Dueling with O-Sensei, by Ellis Amdur, strikes a chord.

When I was 19 years old, my father became very ill with pancreatic cancer, a horribly painful, wasting disease. I hadn't seen him in some months and when he met me at the airport, the shock of his emaciated face and body made my knees buckle. He was mostly bedridden, but man that he was, he insisted on meeting me on his own two feet. Perhaps a week later, he fell out of bed, and his body, limp and helpless, was so heavy that I couldn't lift him. My mother and I finally managed to help him back into the bed, but the bitter shame that I could not return to my father what he offered me as a child burned through me. That this lovely man, who had carried me through nights of croup as I gasped for air was now nearly helpless, and I, a young man,could not carry him to his rest, scalded me deeply. One of the primary reasons for my drive to master what I could in martial arts was to ensure that I would never again have to experience such shame in the face of the needs of those I love. 

Have at it.

I found this post, by Pat Buchanan, to be very interesting. He observes the Tea-Party phenomena as a manifestation of an “ethno-nationalist” identity.

For after a year of battering as “un-American,” “evil-doers” and racists, and praise from talk-show hosts and Sarah Palin as “the real Americans,” Tea Party America seems to be taking on a new and separate identity.

Ethnonationalism — the recognition of an embryonic people that they are different from their neighbors, and the concomitant drive to live apart — is, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 20 years ago, a more powerful force than any ideology, be it communism, fascism or democracy.

Ethnonationalism is the pre-eminent force of the age we have entered, the creator and destroyer of empires and nations. Even as Schlesinger was writing his “Disuniting of America,” Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were disintegrating into 22 new nations, along the lines of ethnicity. In Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Ossetia and Abkhazia, the process proceeds apace.

It has happened before — and here.

I think agree with Pat Buchanan. I think.

Why use "ethno"? Doesn't he mean "racial"? They don't share similar ethnic identities, do they? Most of the Tea-Party folk share a similar racial identity, don't they? Ethnicity and Race are not fixed, in their definitions, but it seems it would be important to figure this out.

And then...I started thinking of Steve Bruce's Conservative Protestant Politics, (he does a comparative study of conservative Anglo-Protestant Politics in Ulster, South Africa, Scotland, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand):

In the USA, the greater attachment of southern and mid-western states to traditional Protestant religious forms has represented an element of a ‘nativist’ defense of the culture of native-born Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Influxes of Catholics and Jews and the attempts of a secularist establishment in the north and east to impose unwanted social and cultural patterns throughout the Republic provoked cultural defenses from the peripheries. The more socially peripheral and culturally distinct the region, the more likely religion is to provide a focus of resistance, the more so yet when language no longer provides a viable basis for the assertion of cultural differences (Page, 21).

Bruce sees most conservative religious movements as attempts to preserve "ethnic" identity. He also notes that all of the goals of the Religious Right in the Anglo-Protestant world have never been accomplished. Except, in the field of economics...that is, the tax codes. The Religious Right and the Republican coalition were able to preserve the wealth; they believed was being stolen from them. Although Bruce barely touches on the implications an ethnic defense has on the political economy, I believe economics is just as important, if not more so, when dealing with perceived cultural inheritances.

And then...I'm lurking over at Crooked Timber in the Eugenics and Guilt By Association thread and came across this quote from Heather Richardson review of Nancy Cohen Reconstruction of Anmerican Liberalism:

“Setting out to uncover the roots of modern liberalism, Cohen believes she found them in the thought of late-nineteenth-century economists and social scientists. Liberal thinkers of the first postwar generation, like E. L. Godkin and George William Curtis, faced squarely the implications of the postwar expansion of democracy to include workers and people of color. Quickly, they began to fear that the poor would threaten private property and individual liberty, key tenets of liberalism, by demanding cooperative action and redistribution of wealth. In response, Cohen argues, liberal reformers denigrated political self-rule and elevated the idea of the “economic man” who strove to succeed in the marketplace; they clung to the idea of laissez- faire government; and they abandoned equal citizenship and embraced racism. Their plan was to “limit and constrain the power of propertyless majorities in a polity that had recently erected universal male suffrage as its cardinal political ideal” (p. 220).

The early 20^th century has become an important era for the formation of modern American (ethnic?) identity. Allen J. Lichtman’s White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, sees the 1920’s as the beginning of the modern conservative movement. But the introduction to Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America really put this into context for me:

Today, in a manner unknown since the arrival of the Pilgrims, the cultural center of the American nation is fragmenting. The results of the year 2000 census show Hispanics to be overtaking African Americans as the largest minority, while non-Hispanic whites have declined to just two-thirds of the U.S. population and have become a minority in the most populous state, California. Contemplating their demographic decline, white Americans are engaging in an increasingly bitter, internecine “culture war” that pits liberal against conservative in a polarized political climate. Against a demographic backdrop known as the “Browning of America,” the forces of multiculturalism vie for influence with popular initiatives proclaiming “English Only,” “immigration reform,” and a Christian America.

Few are aware that the culture wars of today may represent the continuation of an earlier theme. A generalized amnesia brought on by today’s information age may be the culprit, though the postmodern penchant for discontinuity and presentism likely hits closer to the mark. Hence the fallacy has arisen that the once bitter conflict within white America between old-stock Protestants and newer-stock Catholics or Jews has little to do with contemporary cultural issues in which “race” is the key cleavage and “white” Americans are the principal reference point. Finally, in a large society like the United States, the tendency is to imagine that the country operates in a social vacuum, with its own “exceptional” dynamic of change.

This book takes issue with each of these claims, asserting that the United States, like most European nations, possesses an ethnic “core” (A. Smith 1986) and that the unraveling of a dominant “American” ethnic group is a recent phenomenon, a juggernaut that largely determines the vector of American cultural change. The direction of this change, I contend, did not crystallize in the 1960s but was actually set in the early decades of the twentieth century. In contrast to the important recent work of Desmond King (2000a) and Rogers Smith (1997), I consider nativist excess to be a far less distinct feature of the early twentieth century than liberal innovation. I trace this innovation to its sources within WASPdom and attempt to deconstruct the notion of a united WASP ethnic actor. It is the internecine schism within the Anglo-Protestant soul, and not interethnic conflict, that is the principal focus of this book. The victory of Anglo-Protestant Americans’ liberal alter ego was a sea-change of world historical significance whose ideological momentum has set the parameters within which today’s debates operate.

Hence, by the yardstick of history, questions of immigration and national identity in both the United States and the wider Western world are contested within a comparatively narrow liberal band. Both conservatives and liberals tend to employ the language of Enlightenment liberty and equality (conservatives speak of “equal treatment” and “individual rights,” while liberals use the phrases “equal results” and “individual selfesteem”). Few on the conservative side are willing to speak about an “America for Americans” or to describe nonwhite immigrants as “beaten members of beaten breeds” (King 1998a: 131). Those on the Left likewise refrain from mass appeals to an organic social whole based on the nativeborn working man. Moreover, the notion of an “American” ethnic nation defined in a white or WASP mold is rarely discussed.

 Yet it is instructive to note how different things were not so long ago. In the 1920s, the United States consolidated its Anglo-Protestant ethnic character in a series of legislative actions: the Volstead Act of 1920 prohibited the consumption of alcohol; the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 shaped immigration flows around a quota system designed to preserve WASP dominance; and Al Smith, a Roman Catholic of part-Irish extraction, was defeated in his bid for the presidency in 1928. Nativist commentators glowed with praise for a U.S. Congress whose ethnic composition matched that of the Continental Congress of 1787. In communities large and small, powerful Protestant voluntary associations like the Ku Klux Klan, Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), Masons, and American Protective Association (APA) nurtured the bonds of white Protestant ethnicity and enforced Anglo-American hegemony. Even as late as the 1960s, 90 percent of white Protestants, Catholics, and Jews married members of their own faith.

By the 1960s, as if by magic, the centuries-old machinery of WASP America began to stall like the spacecraft of Martian invaders in the contemporary hit film, War of the Worlds. In 1960, the first non-Protestant president was elected. In 1965, the national origins quota regime for immigration was replaced by a “color-blind” system. Meanwhile, Anglo- Protestants faded from the class photos of the economic, political, and  cultural elite—their numbers declining rapidly, year upon year, in the universities, boardrooms, cabinets, courts, and legislatures. At the mass level, the cords holding Anglo-Protestant Americans together began to unwind as secular associations and mainline churches lost millions of members while the first truly national, non-WASP cultural icons appeared. Not only were barriers to non-WASP ethnic groups virtually eliminated at all levels of American life, but national institutions appeared to be reapplying the idea of communalism in an inverse manner. Namely, minority ethnic communities were now replacing the old Anglo-Protestant ethnie (or ethnic group) as the recipient of collective privilege.

How did such a stunning transformation take place between the 1920s and the 1960s? A recent article by the late John Higham provides the only sustained attempt to focus on this phenomenon. Higham, arguably the most astute observer of his own ethnic group, notes that the full story of the “shattering defeat” of WASP hegemony between the 1920s and the 1960s “has never been told” (Higham 2000: 51–52). Indeed, the best that the current literature can offer is a series of speculative concluding paragraphs in historical works on the ethnonationalism of the 1880–1925 period, together with a number of more recent treatises on the “decline of the WASP” (Gossett 1953, 1963; Higham [1955] 1988, [1975] 1984; Jackson 1967; Schrag 1973; Christopher 1989; Baltzell 1990; Brookhiser 1991; Lind 1995). There also exists a literature on the rise of multiculturalism, which traces this trend to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s (Gerstle 2001, 1993; Glazer 1997; King 2000; Schlesinger [1991] 1993). In most current analyses, the decline of the WASP is treated as a demographic inevitability of only limited relevance to today’s debates about whiteness and multiculturalism. 

This book attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining the decline of American dominant ethnicity—whether in its pre-1960s “WASP” or post-1960s “white” incarnation—as a sociopolitical phenomenon. To probe into this phenomenon is to raise as many questions as answers. Was the decline caused by demographic forces, notably the fertility differentials between WASPs and others? Perhaps politico-economic factors were paramount, a result of “push-pull” conditions that drew foreign labor (and hence voters) to American shores from increasingly non-British or nonwhite sources and propelled their children up the political ladder. Then again, WASP Americanism may have survived by absorbing other white Americans into itself and transmuting into a new “Euro-American,” or “Anglo,” racial group. These are the most popular explanations for what happened. 

Yet, even in combination, they do not satisfy. Indeed, it is easy to forget that few of the world’s dominant ethnic groups, if any, have yielded to pressure from contending subaltern ethnies. Less than 10 percent of the world’s states are ethnically homogeneous, and in a third of states, the majority group constitutes less than half the population (Connor 1994: 39).

http://qpradio.org/post/75687764/14-second

PS, somehow, the blog is stripping out links. This could be the evolution from the original notion of a blog being 'links+commentary' to it being 'things that look like links+commentary'

I'm embarassed to say that I did 3 years as a music major, thinking that I could be some sort of professional horn player, or something. Creative, you know. And I have this love hate relationship with music. I mean, had I spent the time I was learning scales or figuring out fingerings and transpositions and chord voicings on a couple of languages, well, who knows? On the other hand, there is a nagging feeling that if I had been a bit more efficient (and a lot more driven) about learning all that music stuff, well, again, who knows.

I've had two musical epiphanies in my life. I think this is why sports is a lot more popular than music, you play sports and you can get small epiphanies all the time, a fade away jumper that is nothing but net, a backhand passing shot that stuns your opponent, a sweet wedge that puts your ball a foot away from the cup. Maybe just as many people in the world get musical epiphanies as the number of people who get moments of grace in sport, but the thing is that in sports, one naturally finds their own level. I don't think that the backhand passing shot would fool people a grade above me, nor would that fade away jumper for anyone who has a modicum of height and ability. And the wedge shot, well, 1 good shot every 18 holes is not going to have you burning up the links. But you can get the epiphanies when you play people at your own level, but for music, at least for me, I really can only identify two times that the muses descended on me.

The first was when I was a freshman horn major and had gotten into the university orchestra. It was the student solo concert, where music majors competed for the opportunity to play a piece with the orchestra. I was able to play second horn for Griffes Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (you can see the part when the piece goes into Public Domain here, which illustrates another hard pill to swallow, what if all this music, all these resources, had been available for the asking when I was a horn major?) At any rate, I butchered the part in the one rehearsal before the concert, and was having serious doubts. But at the performance, I nailed it. And, the bizarre thing is, I had this vague feeling that I had played well, but I didn't remember any of it, but my horn teacher, who was very hard to please, came up with effusive praise and said that if I could play like that, I could be an orchestral horn player. But another 2 years of trying, I never really played like that, in the sense of playing outside myself, ever again. I still play horn, with a pattern of putting the horn up for a couple of years, and then getting invited to play and frantically getting my lip into shape and doing ok on the part, and then putting my horn up. In fact, I now play with the university orchestra, which is probably the perfect gig for me, because they have one concert a year, a lot of the players come to university with a vague idea that they want to play a musical instrument, choose one, practice like crazy, maybe play the opening their second year, the incidental piece the third year, and the main concert piece their senior year.

To give you an idea how this plays out in Japan, one of our graduates and a former member of the student orchestra, got a job in the university office. She had played second violin in the first concert that I played in, where we played Holst The Planets, and I asked her why she didn't play in the orchestra, and she confessed that she had never learned to read music. She had played the entire second violin part in the Planets, learning it by rote. I realize that it is not like being able to recite the entire Iliad, or reciting pi to the 100,000th digit (but you get a glimpse of cultural influence, don't ya?)  On the other hand, I, having spent lots of time being sort of ok, could come in the last month of practice, get my lip in shape (just barely) in time for the concert.

But back to epiphanies, had I known that what I experienced 20+ years ago was going to be a one off experience, well, maybe I would have made some different choices.

But I did say two musical epiphanies, so here is the second. I also 'played' (I think the technical term would be 'covered') the jazz piano in the 1st university lab band. While I entertained ideas of being a horn player, I knew that I was only a jazz pianist in the way a length of duct tape wrapped around a radiator pipe was a repair. Still, despite a surfeit of incredible horn players, bassists, and drummers, there were no real jazz pianists, so I spent 3 years playing the the 1st lab band. And I could comp well enough to handle everything, but when it came to solos, I was pretty much a 16 bars and I'm out. So it is all the more surprising that at the beginning of the third year, we were reading a chart and I had a solo and somehow, I started playing this solo that somehow fit perfectly. And while I am tempted to attribute it to the monkeys typing Shakespeare thesis, I knew that I was doing it.

Yo-yo Ma gave an interview where he said that somehow, the cello just suited him. I often wonder if I had chosen a different instrument, would it have been different? I've often thought that for my 50th birthday, I would start a new instrument, and somehow, all those skills, like being able to adjust the pitch by stuffing my hand in the bell and figuring out transpositions on the fly would have me playing like the pro I should have been. Or maybe even get plugged into a transcranial magnetic stimulator and play like the love child of Denis Brain and Charlie Parker.

But then, I wake up and realize that my path was decided when I first started playing trumpet because my mom had all of the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass albums, and my cousin had a trumpet that he wasn't using, and in elementary school band, I got put on 3rd trumpet because I both didn't have the chops to hit the high notes and I was the only one who could hear the harmony, which then got me switched in junior high to the only left handed instrument in the orchestra, the horn. And 35 years later, I'm printing out Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel horn parts to play along with the orchestra recording. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.