General – Page 56 – The Daily Brief

Art Appreciation

06. April 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, Pajama Game

No, I can’t say I appreciate modern contemporary art all that much, even though I work in two places that are full of stuffed full of it. Most of it leaves me… ummm, completely under-whelmed. Especially the three panel job in the hallway at the radio station, which looks like the worlds’ most incompetent dry-wall specialist had been allowed to cut loose with a 5-gallon bucket of auto-body filler and a dozen spray cans of silver paint.

Mind you, it is an interesting effect, and it would be very striking as a wall-covering; say, large panels of it interspersed with dark, stark modern Neo-Classical columns, and a plain ceiling and dark marble floor. As a wall-treatment, it might be quite impressive, in such a room as that, but as three large unframed canvasses covered in Bondo and silver paint, hanging in a corridor, it lacks a certain something. Like appeal, to someone who doesn’t have to pretend to see a deep meaning in it. The station had an art benefit auction a while back, of donated objects d’art, and we speculate viciously that the place is decorated in items that didn’t sell and that the artist refused to take back.

My parents had one of those framed oil modernistic things on the dining room wall, for years and years, mostly because it was done in very nice shades of blue (which matched Mom’s décor of the time) and a good friend had given it to them… no, not the artist. It was a bit of set property— the friend worked for one of the Hollywood studios; a lot of times, props were given away to the crews, rather than take up storage space. We were inexpressibly thrilled sometime in the late 1960ies to have spotted this picture, on a repeat of an absolutely ancient Perry Mason show… on the wall of the studio of an artist, supposedly the corpse du jour. It was actually a horrible pastiche, of a moonlight ocean, and some shoreline rocks and pier, with half of it being vaguely Impressionist, and half irresolutely Cubist. Cruelly, Mom and Dad used it to gage the artistic judgment and flattery-administering capabilities of anyone who remarked on it. Anyone lavishing compliments was instantly condemned — married couples have such a way of exchanging knowing glances. Another person, who would become a very dear friend, earned credit immeasurable from Mom and Dad, for finally asking if he couldn’t sit on the other side of the dining room table, just so he wouldn’t have to look at the horrible thing.

No, modern art doesn’t grab me at all, and if it tried, I’d slap it’s face and prefer charges of ungentlemanly behavior. The stuff that gets written up, and displayed everywhere just looks more and more like an over-the-top joke. It’s as if they are trying to top each other, on what they can get the so-called aficionados to swallow and come back for more, and somehow missing the whole point of art. That is, it should fill up a blank space of wall, intrigue or interest your friends and neighbors, and be something that you yourself can stand to look at every morning for a couple of decades. Or even, look at every morning for a couple of decades with a hangover. (Or make your dinner guests look at it, over the course of a fine meal.) Bonus, if the colors in it match something else in the room. Oh, and if possible, it should be something that appeals to you, and to you personally. Frankly, the average Jackson Pollock makes me think of nothing so much as the unspeakably disgusting sidewalk underneath trees where grackles have been roosting.

Say, that’s an idea!! I could get a grant from the NEA, and park huge canvases under the trees, and feed the flock something different every night that would turn their poop different colors! At the end of the week… it wouldn’t be enormous canvases covered with multicolored grackle poop, it would be Art with a capital “A”! Hey, if half a cow in formaldehyde can wow the art world, this has a better than even chance, especially if I can wrap it in layers and layers of vaguely progressive explanations, and slip in a couple of stiletto-slices at the bourgeoisie.

It is to giggle at, though, that the bourgeoisie— well, that part of it who has money to spend on art that they like and are past being dragooned into subsidizing something that they really don’t care for at all—- are buying Thomas Kinkade The Painter ™ of Light.

I don’t know if acres of cozy ginger-bready cottages sagging under the weight of sun-set colored icing are much of an artistic improvement over half a dead cow, or a an acre of multicolored paint splatters, but it must be easier to contemplate over a meal, unless you are diabetic. And at least, Kinkade has made a bundle selling what people actually, you know, really want… not begging for grants and sucking up to people with more money than confidence in their own taste, just to stick us all wish something that we don’t really care for. I predict that he will be this era’s version of a Rogers’s group; enormously popular, than drop out of fashion as something embarrassing and old-fashioned (you’ll be able to buy prints at yard sales for nickels) and then there will be a revival of interest in about 100 years.

They’ll last longer than grackle poop, anyway.

Imperial Muslims

04. April 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, War

I’ve been spending a lot of time researching whether we should be paranoid about Muslims, or whether they really are out to get us. This article in the WSJ online edition (courtesy of Powerline) pretty much summarizes and confirms a lot of what I have read elsewhere. There are, however, glimmers of hope – in a separate post at Powerline, John Hinderaker quotes (with a link to a video) Iraqi politician Iyad Jamal Al-Din as asking: “How come Israel has developed a democratic regime…whereas the Arabs have not developed democratic regimes, using the existence of Israel as a pretext? How come Israel is not using the Arabs as a pretext for delaying its economic development, its free economy, and its free press?” How come indeed.

Bordertown

03. April 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Home Front, Pajama Game

It’s part of the tourist attraction to San Antonio, besides the Riverwalk and the Alamo. Even though this part of South Texas is still a good few hours drive from the actual physical border between Mexico and the United States, the River City is still closer to it than most of the rest of the continental states. It falls well within that ambiguous and fluid zone where people on both sides of it have shifted back and forth so many times that it would be hard to pin down a consistent attitude about it all. This is a place where a fourth or fifth-generation descendent of German Hill-Country immigrants may speak perfectly colloquial Spanish and collect Diego Riviera paintings…. And the grandson of a semi-literate Mexican handyman who came here in the early 1920ies looking for a bit of a break from the unrest south of the border, may have a doctoral degree and a fine series of fine academic initials after his name. And the fact that the original settlers were from the Canary Islands, and all non-Hispanic whites are usually referred to as “Anglos”, no matter what their ethnic origin might be, just adds a certain surreality to the whole place.

San Antonio is in fact, about half Hispanic: surnames like Garcia, Martinez. and Gonzales with an s or Gonzalez with a z being so common they fade into ordinariness. In this bordertown, Garcia and Gonzalez are your next-door neighbors, or your co-workers, everyone knows what a quincianera is, and loves breakfast tacos, and faijitas, and believes with the faith of holy writ that the hotter the salsa is, the better, and knows a smattering of Spanish. Quite often, in fact, it’s the kids named Garcia or Martinez who have to learn it as a second language in high school… just another surreality of life in a city where at least one place on every block of every main avenue serves up takeaway breakfast tacos… and some of them feature drive up service.

The cross-border flow is neither one-way or steerage class, either. Mexican and American shoppers and entrepreneurs criss-cross every day… it’s pharmacy visits and surgical care in both directions, bargains on clothes and garden pottery, and high-end gadgets. North Star Mall, close by the airport has been for years a shopping destination for wealthy Mexicans. During Santa Semana, the Holy Week between Palm Sunday and Easter, you could walk the main floor from one end to the other, and not overhear a word of English in conversation among the throngs. The wealthy Mexicans who come and go sometimes mesh uncomfortably with the local middle and working class Hispanics; the mother of a friend of mine grumbled about how they were so rude, and left the sales tables in such a mess, and left rejected clothes crumpled all over the floor in the dressing rooms at Talbots. Local people most always made a stab at putting them back on the hanger, instead of assuming that someone would come along and straighten out the mess after they were quite finished.

There was a small protest, this week, by mostly high school students— just old enough to be aware of of the problem, but not old enough to grasp the very real ambiguities. We are all immigrants, one way or another: many of us can name the ancestor, and the country he or she came from, and make some intelligent guesses as to why they climbed out of the ancestral rut and lit out for the new territories, the new world, the frontier, the north . Most of us suspect that those ancestors improved their lot; if not immediately for themselves, then for their descendents. I know that my own immigrant grandparents certainly found much nicer weather and better plumbing than what they variously left behind in Three Mile Town, Reading and the Merseyside, and I can’t grudge some dirt-farmer or shade tree mechanic in Jalisco having a chance at something a little better in their turn. I can’t, I really can’t. What a country this must be, when they are willing to risk their lives in the desert, or in the packed back of an 18-wheeler after paying money to a coyote–a people-smuggler— all for a chance to work in the fields, or packing plant or stapling asphalt tile in the hot sun of late afternoon in a Texas summer… and how crappy is the situation they are leaving. Even if all they want is a couple of seasons to work in the North, and send money back home, why do they have to come north in the first place?

What is with Mexico, that they must bleed off their most ambitious and hardworking, but frustrated citizens to the North, that part with paved roads and factories? Why is there nothing for them, back where they came from in some dirt scrabble- village? Why do the “activists” at Aztlan demand that the Southwest be turned back to Mexico, when it was Mexico setting the conditions that made their parents or grandparents head north in the first place?

Tejanos, Chicanos, Mexican-Americans, citizens of the borderlands, call them whatever; they have pulled their weight always: a good proportion of the Alamo defenders were actually native Tejanos, and Juan Seguin might have been their commander, instead of William Travis. (It was an item of crushing historical stupidity and Anglo arrogance that the Alamo Tejanos and Seguin were never given proper credit and attention during their 19th century lifetimes.) They enlist in large numbers generation after generation; machismo is untrammeled, and makes for a large proportion of soldiers who are admiringly described as “crazy-brave”. Citations for battlefield heroism run well above the norm for other ethnicities. Mexico ought to be a military powerhouse, with all that raw soldiering talent, but somehow, that never works out. They did beat the French once, but then hasn’t everyone? The Garcias and the Gonzalezs come north, as they always have; the suspicion on this side of it, is that the Border is Mexico’s safety valve, bleeding off the potentially politically restless and/or economically ambitious.

And the fear has become, this, this year along the borderlands, and in other places, is that the situation is out of hand. Ranch owners along the border, who had heretofore dealt with the illegal transients by sympathetically looking the other way, are fed to the teeth with aggressive trespass, with gates being left open, taps left running and fences cut, with not being able to go about their properties after dark without being armed. Law enforcement along the border are similarly fed to the teeth with well-armed gangs operating across the border, apparently with the connivance of Mexican authorities, whether authorized officially or not, with finding dying border crossers in the back of trucks, and alone, dead of thirst and exposure in the desert. Hospitals in border towns are being driven close to bankruptcy by medical care which they must give to the illegal, and for which they are not reimbursed. And legal immigrants everywhere, who have gone through the hassle and expense of doing the proper paperwork, and waiting patiently in line, are apoplectic at seeing that not playing by established rules may be rewarded.

And so, that is where people of good intent are stranded. De Nile is the river that runs through Egypt… but Ambivalence is the other name of the river that runs through the Borderlands.

The Joy of Springtime

03. April 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General

Last month, one of our own (I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten who) posted his enjoyment of the spring season, and I bragged about having already moved my houseplants outside. I was, as ever, premature in my rejoicing of the warm weather. It seems that our wonderful warm spell was immediately followed by another 2-3 weeks of chill, with the nights falling down towards the freezing mark (the plants survived).

But now it’s April, and we have indeed reached the warm days. The days when you can actually see the pollen drifting yellow from the pines that surround my apartment. The days when you could wash your car every five minutes, and still have it covered in yellow dust as the pollen continues to drift. The days when you could spend your every waking hour browsing the aisles at your favorite plant nursery.

It’s time to re-seed the beds, fertilize the soil, plant the annuals, and plan the garden enhancements. All normal parts of being a home-owner.

How frustrating, then, to have the home-owner’s instincts, but no home to use them on. As an apartment dweller, even in a townhome, one’s options are limited. The red Georgia clay is not mine to dig up, not mine to fill with azaleas, hydrangeas and hostas. It belongs to the apartment owners, and so I content myself with containers.

Green plastic pots, of various sizes, hold an assortment of plant life outside my front door. And four half-barrels, and a couple wash-tubs. Last year, I went hog-wild, and my neighbor started calling my yard the “botanical garden annex.” It’s not, of course. It was just a reaction to having spent most of February in Chicago, and being grateful to be back where it was warm. My neighbor, who loves to wander the property and salvage treasures from the dumpsters, was forever bringing me plants or empty pots that he had found.

The dumpster plants seem to thrive in my care, somehow. Thanksgiving 2004, we pulled a 6-foot palm tree out of the dumpster, dragging it from its pot as we pulled. I re-potted it and brought it inside, and it’s still going strong. This year, my neighbor found an abandoned schefflera – it’s only problem was that it was ridiculously rootbound (still in its original nursery pot, I think). I pruned the deadwood from it, and it’s doing well.

And whenever my neighbor brought me an empty pot last year, I had an overwhelming urge to find a plant for it.

Not this year.

This year, my plans are more for maintenance, less for expansion. Some plants will need to be re-potted into larger homes, and all the pots need soil enrichment. So I visited the big-box store the other day, and stocked up on gravel, sand and compost, with a little extra potting soil, just in case I run across a plant I can’t live without.

I’m trying to figure out what to do with my Norfolk Pine… he’s in the largest plastic pot I’ve run across, and I honestly think his next re-potting will be into a half-barrel, but I don’t want to do that until I’m in a house of my own. Once he moves into the barrel, he’ll never be able to come inside for the winter again.

I also have a small tree that the squirrels planted for me. It grew last year in the windowbox with my petunias. I transplanted it last fall into a pot of its own, and it has leaves this spring, so I’ll see how it weathers the summer, and maybe move it into a larger pot this fall. Last year’s butterfly bush (buddleia davidii) survived the winter, and the miniature roses did, as well. I planted 2 new butterfly bushes this year, of a different variety than the other, that blooms earlier (buddleia alternifola) – I saw it at Biltmore last year and fell in love with it.

I’m waiting to plant my petunias – last fall’s pansies are still going strong, so I don’t need to replace them yet. I always have petunias, because Mom always had petunias along the side of our house, so when I see the petunias, I think of Mom, and remember childhood.

But the petunias are the only other flowers I’m planting this year. Well, petunias and some Sweet Pea that will vine all over the backs of the metal chairs someone threw away. The seats are missing, but they’re just the right size to hold a flowerpot, and it makes for an interesting look.

I’m also creating a bird-bath this year, with my neighbor’s help. We found a discarded satellite dish, which is exactly the right shape for a bird bath, so he’s going to fix it up for me.

Looking forward to the butterflies, and the hummingbirds, and the color when everything’s in bloom. Until then, I’m enjoying the green, and the new growth, and the preparation.

C-5 Crashes at Dover AFB

03. April 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Air Force, Domestic, General

News Article

DOVER, Del. – A C-5 cargo plane carrying 17 people crashed just short of a runway at Dover Air Force Base early Monday after developing problems during takeoff, military officials said. There was no immediate word on fatalities.

The plane, the military’s largest, went down about 6:30 a.m., according to Tech Sgt. Melissa Phillips, a spokeswoman for the base.

Allen Metheny, assistant director in the state Department of Public Safety, said some people aboard the plane were taken to hospitals with injuries, but he did not have numbers or details. BayHealth in Dover said the hospital received about 10 people from the crash, including some who appeared able to walk, spokeswoman Pam Marecki said.

Flying Status

02. April 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Air Force, General, Pajama Game

My first flying experience was at a local fair in 1962 near Fulton, NY. There was a barnstorming pilot type with a Steerman biplane trainer who was offering short rides for “a penny a pound” which, as I recall, set my dad back by about sixty-five cents. I was hooked. Three years later, my father arranged to have Mom and the four kids fly on Eastern Airlines from Syracuse to NYC, where we met him and traveled on to Connecticut to visit his sisters and their families. In those days flying was an important event in the sense that people actually dressed up, with my brother and I in suits and ties, and my sisters wearing skirts with crinolines (today sweat suits seem to be de rigeur, with the airport experience only a couple of notches above that of the Cleveland Greyhound terminal).

Joining the USAF as a radar technician (328X1) gave little hope of flying, other than in transport from one duty station to another. However, things changed around late 1974, when SAC decided that it needed to have technicians available to fly missions in order to troubleshoot certain types of problems that only occurred while airborne. Until that point we were limited to high-speed taxi checks, which involved accelerating down the runway to near S1 speed, and then hitting the brakes. They wanted people who could fly entire B-52 and KC-135 sorties, often 8 – 10 hours or more in duration. I had just earned Master Technician rating and, with an expressed passion for flying, I was able to convince the powers-that-be that I was the ideal candidate. Another plus was that I would collect flight pay. As I recall, this amounted to $75 each month that I flew for some minimum amount of hours (I think it was five or ten). Qualification for this status required that I undergo physiological flight training, which meant a TDY to Pease AFB New Hampshire. More »

The Harsh Reality Of Nature

31. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General

I just saw a short clip on The Science Channel, where a pride of lions were feasting on a zebra – ripping out chunks, and the zebra was still thrashing around.

Oh, it’s dinner time on the east coast – bon appetit. 🙂

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses…

31. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, Politics

Timmer’s “upside-down, and subject, American flag” pic, and more, can be found here. As I stated here, I understand what the protesters are trying to say; but I find the way they have framed their argument incredibly stupid.

Particular among their faux pas is the “stolen land” argument. And, although any Californian student of our history can’t help but be ashamed at the way our forebears wrested the land from the old grantholders, to use that argument, our Mexican-American cousins would have to also concede that the land was previously “stolen” from the Native Americans. (Admittedly, most Mexicans, and even moreso, Mexican-Americans, have a high percentage of “native blood.” But that almost exclusively is from other tribes, further to the south.)

In this comment, I made light of Timmer’s making the same case I am covering here, by mentioning the Israelis. But that’s only humorous because the idea of “their ancestral homeland” has currency with so many of the same people who would deny this land to those who have come before us. Indeed, the Israelites “stole” the land from the Canaanites, who moved northward, crossbred with the “Sea People” (most likely Minoans), became the Phoenicians, and became the most powerful empire of the transition from the Bronze to Iron Ages (not to mention great friends and trading partners with the Israelites). Now, many of their progeny are “Palestinians”, and living in far greater squalor than their “Israeli-Arab” cousins. Crying over lost land, like any embrace of victimhood, gets one nowhere.

And I grow weary of idiotarians, like Kathy McKee, saying that Mexico is the “5th richest” economy in the world [she’s wrong about that, it’s between the floundering France, and California (even without California, the US is still #1)], and they “should take care of their own.” Well, applying that standard, we would have excluded the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Ashkenazi Jews… . What those “student protestors” should be saying is that immigrants are the embodiment of the American Dream. They should chant loud and clear the words of Emma Lazarus:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

The “answer” to the illegal immigration problem is simple: Increase quotas to reasonable levels (or eliminate them entirely), and eliminate the obviously racist and xenophobically inspired red tape for Mexicans, and others from “those” nations, to come to the US (even as visitors).

Oh, and as for “amnesty”, once one admits that the law, as it stands, is an ass, it becomes much easier to swallow.

Disturbing

30. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General

I’m sure every recruiter has their own personal stories of encounters with people who were vehemently against the war, Bush, and the military. My experiences have been pretty tame, water throwing, being yelled at or insulted, nothing major. However, I work with a recruiter who got egged while walking by a Wal-Mart, and a recruiter in another station near mine had the rear window of their G-Jet shot out while they were driving.

Apparently some student(s) at the University of Wisconsion-Madison decided to toss a brick through the window of their on-campus recruiter’s office. According to the article this was not the first time that someone has broken out their window. Apparently the campus’ anti-war club Stop the War was interviewed by the paper for some quotes and perspective. A representative of Stop the War, condones such attacks because they “get people onto the streets” and supporting anti-war/recruiting efforts. I think I’m starting to see another connection between the anti-war movement and islamic extremism. Anti-war groups advocate peace through violent acts; Islam is billed as the religion of peace, but acts of extreme barbarism are performs in its name. No wonder the two groups have become bed-buddies of convience, neither’s acts mesh with the philosophy they trumpet.

HT B5.

Globalization of Taste

29. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Pajama Game, World

Sgt/Cpl. Blondie stumbled across evidence of this, at a local chain grocery—the one I always call the Humongous Big-Ass Grocery. It is truly one of the glories of living in Texas, a local chain which has run practically every other big grocery chain out of town with a combination of unparalleled customer service, quite good prices on their house brands, and an unimaginable variety of fine grocery items for the discriminating foodie. I firmly believe that the Iron Curtain would have slipped off its’ rod and collapsed even sooner if selected members of the Politburo could have been given guided tours of the average HEB store… the sheer lavish glories of American grocery stores are legend, and HEB does that all one or two steps better. They pay really close attention to their local market. I have a theory that you can calculate the average per capita income in a neighborhood (before taxes) by counting up how many varieties of olive oil are on the shelves at the local HEB… so many varieties X so many $ thousands in income, and there you have it. I haven’t worked out the exact figures yet (I’m only an English major, you know!!!!), but the greater the variety of olio d’ olive, the higher the income. The HEB nearest Lackland AFB, I’ll have you know, had only 2, and one of them was that nasty yellow Pompeii brand drek, which was all that was on the major grocery markets for decades, before anyone acquired any taste in the matter at all.

Olive oil— it’s a small thing, but something I noticed, because of being in Greece, where it was the font of all civilization (according to legend), and then in Spain where Alcampo, the Spanish equivalent to Walmart, with every imaginable item under one roof, and at next to wholesale prices, offered an entire aisle of olive oil, of every quantity and quality.
I came home from Spain with six 1.5 liter bottles of a good and faintly greenish brand of the stuff, which lasted me for barely a year.
That’s the trouble with being stationed overseas a lot; eventually you sample the local stuff- something that is a local taste, and hardly ever exported, and when you come home, you are bereft… sometimes. A year or so after I came home from Japan, my friend Marsh (She of the marvelous engine-mount challenged car) were overjoyed to discover a small Japanese-American eatery that offered… Katsudon!

Katsudon; a dish all the more luscious because it is very good, and filling and cheap, and most marvelous of all— available everywhere. (And when you said it, the waiter/waitress understood it!) It was the hamburger, or the meatloaf of Japan, a bowl of rice topped with a breaded and friend pork cutlet, and a savory glob of poached egg and onion, all the juices seeping down to flavor the rice with sweet liquor. You could go— or so said the Japanese lady who taught the “Intro to Japan 1A— into any casual eatery in Japan, and ask for “katsudon” and get some variant of it. There is of late in one of my cooking magazines, a recipe for such, which shows how adventurous the foodie population may have become— two decades ago, practically no one who hadn’t done a tour in Japan had ever heard of it at all. People who have served overseas have heaps of examples— lovely and particularly local foods which they became addicted to, and could never find again, or if they could, at great expense, once they came “home”.

Which gets me back, however circuitously to HEB, and food items from Japan. Blondie found an import item at a local HEB store, and fell on it joyfully; a particular brand of Japanese soda. It came in very distinctive blue-green glass bottles, sealed with a blue-green glass marble in the neck of it. A bulge in the neck, and a pinch molded into the glass on one side kept the bottle from rolling back into the top opening if you drank it holding the bottle in a certain way. Vendors kept a particular punch at their stand, to open it by pushing the marble back into the neck— where it had otherwise made a tight seal against force of carbonation. The soda was otherwise fairly indistinguishable from ginger ale, or some other clear, mildly sweet and carbonated drink… but still. Neither of us expected to see it on the market here, but whattaya know. Here it is.
Street Fair 1977
This pic of me (center) and two other girls from the barracks (Sorry, I can’t recall their names!) was taken during a local festival, about 1977, when all the traffic on Misawa’s main street was cut off, and it was decorated with lanterns and banners, and stalls. All of us have a bottle of this particular soda in hand.

Memo: Just So You Know Where We Are Coming From

28. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Good God, World

To: Those Insisting Upon A Death Sentence For Apostasy
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: The Case of Abdul Rahman

I would refer you to the matchless words of the “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom- 16 June 1786”: Read them, heed them, commit them to heart, for this is where we are coming from.

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do…. More »

Things that make you go hmmm….

28. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: A Href, Ain't That America?, Domestic, General

Baldilocks points us to a UPI story about one of former president Bill Clinton’s chauffeurs.

Seems that while 3 cars were waiting for Clinton to arrive at Newark Airport, a Port Authority cop checked their license plate numbers. Turns out one car belonged to a Pakistani native who was a wanted man. He skipped out on his residency hearing six years ago, and has a deportation order against him.

Hmmmm…….

Red Ken Vs. US Embassy

28. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General

In a matter strangely reminiscent of Rudy Guiliani’s UN diplomat parking ticket kerfuffle, it seems the US Embassy to Great Britain has refused to pay London Mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone’s congestion fee (about $14/car) on cars entering the city center.

Our embassy is framing the argument as a tax matter, and claim they are exempt under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. I would agree with this. But I wonder, how many of the estimated 100 cars/day at the embassy are actually conducting the US’s business, and how many are just the private vehicles of staffers commuting to work?

But this quote from Livingstone really jumps the shark:

When British troops are putting their lives on the line for American foreign policy it would be quite nice if they paid the congestion charge.

Man, this guy is an idiot.

Update: It seems this has been going on for decades, and is far broader based. Here’s an article from last year, saying NYC also want’s property taxes for embassy buildings not directly related to the diplomatic mission. And here’s a World Bank paper (PDF), from 1995 about (among other things) African nations which wanted fees for diplomatic vehicles.

Over the Weekend (060327)

27. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General

The Case Against Abdul Rahman to Be Dropped. Now if he can get out of Afghanistan before the whack-jobs kill him, this would be a good thing.

I keep hearing that most Americans are pessimistic about how things are going in Iraq. It seems that Iraqis are much more optimistic than we are. So American Soldiers who are there and the Iraqis themselves feel better about what’s going on than we do here. I guess we should tell them to start reading 20 Newspapers a day.

And finally, this. just. cracks. me. up.

Many Marines Shun Added Body Armor Because Of Its Weight
By Antonio Castaneda, Associated Press via The Early Bird.

HUSAYBAH, Iraq — Extra body armor — the lack of which caused a political storm in the United States — has flooded into Iraq, but many Marines here promptly stuck it in lockers or under bunks. Too heavy and cumbersome, many say.

Marines already carry loads as heavy as 70 pounds when they patrol the dangerous streets in towns and villages in restive Anbar province. The new armor plates, while only about five pounds per set, are not worth carrying for the additional safety they are said to provide, some say.

“We have to climb over walls and go through windows,” said Sgt. Justin Shank of Greencastle, Pa. “I understand the more armor, the safer you are. But it makes you slower. People don’t understand that this is combat, and people are going to die.”

Staff Sgt. Thomas Bain of Buffalo, N.Y., shared concerns about the extra pounds.

“Before you know it, they’re going to get us injured because we’re hauling too much weight and don’t have enough mobility to maneuver in a fight from house to house,” said Bain, who is assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. “I think we’re starting to go overboard on the armor.”

Drawing Power

26. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, History, Technology

Virginia Postrel has this interesting post on the history of American automotive art, including lots of links, including this exibit at Detroit’s Skillman Branch Library, and this to the online collection, Plan59.

Easter Bunny Deemed Offensive… In St. Paul

26. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Stupidity

This from Different River:

Don’t they know that their city was named after one of the main founders of Christianity? And that by calling that person a “Saint” one makes a specific religious claim about that individual?

[…]

This is not “being sensitive” – this is implying that non-Christians are stupid and/or inconsistent and/or outright hypocrites, who are happy to live in a city named after a Christian saint, but offended by one little stuffed rabbit.

First it’s cartoon pigs, then fictitious rabbits. As Napoleon said, “from the sublime to the ridiculous, is but a step.”

Hat Tip: Clayton Cramer

The Fantasy Country

26. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: European Disunion, General, History, Memoir, Pajama Game

With a bit of surprise, I tallied it up today, and realized it has been slightly over 20 years since I was in France, actually, driving across Europe in the VEV (Very Elderly Volvo) with a nearly-5-year old Blondie tucked up in the back seat with a couple of pillows, the tattered striped baby blanket that was her woobie for more years than she is comfortable admitting and a stock of Asterix and Obelix comics. I took a zig-zaggy course across Europe in the autumn of 1985; the car-ferry from Patras to Brindisi, then up the boot of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, across the narrow neck of Austria, west across Germany with a stop in the Rhineland and a charming small town along the Moselle – and because the major roads across France were toll-roads, and (to me) hideously expensive, I went across France entirely on secondary roads, guided by my invaluable road atlas, the Hallwag Euroguide.

I hit a couple of places in France that I had visited 15 years before, as a teen-aged Girl Scout on a sub-budget, Youth-Hostel & Eurail-Pass tour of Europe, and a great many more that I had not, thanks to a slightly higher expenditure allowance (the going rate for the Youth Hostel & Eurail Pass summer vacation trip in 1970, which now seems as far distant as the proud tower of pre-WW1 Europe, was $5.00 a day.)
England— halfway home, deja-vu familiar, Germany— slight distrust, being an enemy and the land of Mordor, metaphorically speaking, for two generations, but won over by overall tidiness and devotion to children .Italy— charming, slapdash and slightly grubby. But France—there was ambivalence.

France meant so much to us, after all, and not just when it came to cooking, and an appreciation for fine food and wines. It meant marvelous architecture and interior decoration, translated into the American landscape, gallery after gallery of paintings, the Impressionists and Moderns and all. France was Monet’s Gardens, salons filled with witty conversation, the fountain of elegance in couture clothing, Madeline and the old House in Paris Covered in Vines, Chartres and the soaring galleries of the Louvre. France was the very last word in sophistication. It was where our aspiring artists and intellectuals went to acquire their training and polish, and American tourists tried for a bit of the same— although always with a feeling that such heights of worldly savoir-faire were well beyond them — and being pretty certain that the headwaiters were laughing at them anyway.

France was my collection of cookbooks, and Peter Mayle in Provence, Van Gogh’s fields of sunflowers, Chartres floating like a stone ship in a field of golden wheat, me negotiating country roads and traffic circles in tiny towns, and Blondie’s Asterix and Obelix comics. It was buying a copper pudding mold at Dillerhain, and carrying a heavy box packed full of porcelain cooking things on packed subway train car, and watching a street musician plug his electric guitar onto a portable amp, play some fast boogie-woogie, pass the hat and dash off at the next stop. France was also fields of lavender in Provence, and fields of crosses in Flanders and Normandy. We had a history with France, after all.

It’s been an on-again, off-again history at that, more troubled than most Francophiles like to admit. France is usually visualized— starting with Henry James– as the elusive and mercurial girlfriend, but it strikes me these days that France is more like an erratic and long-time occasional boyfriend. Most women have had a brush with that sort: the guy who swoops in and sweeps her off her feet, because he is attractive, and lots of fun, sometimes handsome, always cultured, at home in the world. It never lasts, because he starts to make her feel lumpish and homely by tactlessly criticizing her clothes, or preference in books and friends. Or he is denigrating her in front of his friends, laughing at her behind her back, even while he helps himself to anything he pleases of hers. And then he borrows a lot of money— never repaid— or throws a horrendous scene in a public place, and is off again for a good long time, leaving her furious and embarrassed, and wondering if he really some sort of sociopath after all. Eventually, after a couple of rounds of this, she deletes his phone number, and doesn’t answer his messages.

Which is by way of leading up to these essays written over the last half-decade or so, by an American medievalist, fluent in French, who visits often. They make depressing reading; and I look at my collection of cookbooks, and memoirs by people like Peter Mayle, and wonder if that France, of vineyards and old houses, and cafes full of charming people talking about art and history is now a fantasy itself.

Volunteer Fire Departments

25. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Pajama Game

I grew up surrounded by my mother’s family, which included eleven other siblings. Of the males in the clan, there were 3 Navy vets (2 in WW II), and two Marines. This is not about the military service though, but rather about another form of service that, in some respects, directly affected far more lives. It all started in 1947 when Grandpa was heading up the stairs of their modest home in upstate NY. My mother, then eighteen years old and a telegrapher at Western Union in Syracuse (where, by the way, she met my father a year later), was smoking a cigarette in the girls’ bedroom – a practice forbidden by Grandpa despite his proclivity toward cheap cigars every evening. To avoid detection she threw it out the dormer window whereupon it immediately started the wooden shingles ablaze. More »

Sick Call

25. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, Home Front

I have not posted of late owing to the scourge of some sort of, for lack of a better word, crud that has in turn struck down Red Haired Girl, yours truly, and now Real Wife. Fever, chest congestion, nasal congestion, nausea, more fever, diahrea – we got it all. Real Wife (now upstairs in bed with a barf bucket nearby), a fourth grade teacher, reports that last Thursday saw a 25% absentee rate amongst her class. For my part I missed three days with a temp. running 102-103 deg., but seem to be back in the saddle now. To think that it was 78 and sunny just two weeks ago.

Red Haired Girl has completely recovered, but now presents an entirely new challenge. A boy called the other night to just … talk. This is a first. I have been put on notice by Real Wife that she is bound by secrecy and cannot provide further details, but I have been able to learn through other sources that he (a new boy in the community), and she danced together at a recent 6th grade gala event. There is not enough bandwidth on the entire internet or capacity on the Daily Brief servers to fully communicate the range of emotions this has caused in me. A friend of mine, seeing my angst, pointed out that when his son was born 29 years ago, his father observed that the advantage of having a son over a daughter is that with a son you only have to worry about one pr*ck, but with a daughter you have to worry about them all (thanks Hutch). The good in all of this seems to be that she is, all of the sudden, acting older (no tearful temper tantrums during horn/piano practice time, offering to do household chores, etc.). But why do I believe deep down that alligator tears and stomping feet represented the good old days? BTW, can I get GPS tracking information from a cell phone fed to me in real time…

Radar

I, Personally….

25. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, General Nonsense

…welcome our puppycat overlords.

One of the comments noted: “Feh. Call me when they make a dog that acts like a cat.”

Consider yourself called, sir. I have a dog that seems to think it is a cat; the Lesser Weevil spends a lot of time sucking up to the cats, attempting to get the cats to play with her, trying to curl her 50lb body up on the same surfaces and perch on the same spaces that the cats occupy, and spending most of the day sleeping and snoring/purring.

I can’t get her to use the damned litterbox, though. Pity

More Annapolis Grads Choosing The Corps.

25. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General

This from Bradley Olson at The Baltimore Sun:

Despite a war that has entered its fourth year with mounting casualties and waning public support, more and more midshipmen at the Annapolis military college are volunteering for the Marines when asked to choose how they will fulfill the five-year commitment required of all academy graduates.

When the assignments were made official last month for the 992 members of the class of 2006, 209 were placed as officers with the Corps – the most in the school’s 161-year history. And more would have done so if there were enough openings: an additional 45 who sought the Marines were assigned to other duty when the allotment was filled.

[…]

Most academy officials believe interest is high for patriotic reasons – the phenomenon began not long after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Others, including midshipmen, said the enthusiasm could be part of a common trend in wartime at the nation’s service academies, where young students have been eager to bolster their military credentials with combat experience.

Having a surplus of mids who want to be Marines has been a change from the Vietnam era. In 1968, the Marine Corps failed to meet its quota for the first time in academy history.

In the 2006 class, 349 mids were assigned to naval aviation as pilots or navigators; 270 chose to “go SWO,” academy parlance for working on surface warships; 88 went to subs; 21 will train for the SEALs – the Navy’s elite fighting force. Fifteen went to special operations such as explosives disposal, 10 will attend medical school and the rest will fill a variety of military billets, including intelligence, civil engineering and information warfare.

I can certainly understand the desire of warriors to actually see something of war. In today’s world, Navy people, who are not aviators, are unlikely to see much action. There may be another factor, for the young officer: IMHO the Marines are the most dynamically managed service, the Navy the most lethargic.

Hat Tip: InstaPundit, who spends a lot of time on the issue of “mounting casualties.”

New International Capital Market

25. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, Technology

A decade and a half ago, Richard B. McKenzie and Dwight R. Lee wrote Quicksilver Capital: How the Rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the World. This has proven to be one of the most prophetic tomes on contemporary economics written in my adult lifetime.

Yet, capital markets have lagged behind others in employing information age technologies. But, as Hillary Johnson writes here at Samizdata, that is changing:

Should money be as free as speech? After all, it is also a form of communication.

In the past year, the internet has spawned a few companies aimed at helping individuals borrow and lend without bothering to involve a bank or credit agency. Zopa, based in the UK, aggregates individuals into groups for the purpose of making small loans, with a socially conscious slant. In the US, Prosper just launched a sleek, well-designed person-to-person lending site. Borrowers can also form groups on Prosper, for the sake of leveraging better interest rates. I also know of at least one nascent project, Bruce Boston’s Quid St., which aims to aggregate individuals for the purpose of making capital investments (as opposed to loans). I met Bruce recently, and he mentioned what an influence gaming had on his view of how to build an online marketplace. Which put me in mind of the Park Paradigm, a blog about digital markets whose authors think future finical [sic] markets may evolve out of sports book and gambling sites. And not entirely unrelated note, Paypal made it possible just this week for people to send each other money anywhere, via cell phone.

What we are witnessing here, I think, is the creation of a new international capital market.

Many of my libertarian compatriots cling to the antiquated ideal of a commodity (principally, gold) based monetary system. The justification for this is that it prevents abuse by central banks. But the information age is increasingly making the old central bank model, and with it the gold standard, obsolete.

Worth Repeating…

24. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: A Href, General

Sgt Hook posted this – it was sent to him by one of his readers. I think it’s worth repeating. And worth re-reading. The good Sgt called it “Parallel Lives.”

Excerpt:

Your alarm goes off, you hit the snooze and sleep for another 10 minutes.

He stays up for days on end.
__________________________

You take a warm shower to help you wake up.

He goes days or weeks without running water.
__________________________

You complain of a “headache”, and call in sick.

He gets shot at, as others are hit, and keeps moving forward.
__________________________

You put on your anti-war/don’t support the troops shirt, and go meet up with your friends.

He still fights for your right to wear that shirt.
__________________________

You make sure your cell phone is in your pocket.

He clutches the cross hanging on his chain next to his dogtags.
__________________________

You talk trash on your “buddies” that aren’t with you.

He knows he may not see some of his buddies again.
__________________________

Go read the whole thing. And share it.

Sgt Desmond T. Doss

24. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General

Kevin already posted that Medal of Honor winner (and conscientious objector) Desmond T. Doss passed away, and linked to the newspaper article about it. For those who want to know more, this site provides more details. Be aware that it makes numerous mention of Doss’ faith. That might bother some folks, but it was an integral part of who this man was, just as was true for Sgt Henry A. York, a conscientious objector in WWI who also won the Medal of Honor.

From the first day of training everyone could tell he was different. A devout Seventh-Day Adventist, the first night Doss knelt beside his bunk in the barracks, oblivious to the taunts around him and the boots they threw his way, to spend his time talking to God. Regularly he pulled the small Bible his new wife had given him for a wedding gift, and read it as well. Among the men of the unit, disdain turned to resentment. Doss refused to train or work on Saturday, the Lord’s Sabbath. Though he felt no reservation about caring for the medical needs of the men or otherwise helping them on the Sabbath, he refused to violate it. The fact that he worked overtime to make up for it the rest of the week made little difference. Doss was teased, harassed, and ridiculed. And it only got worse.

When it came time for the men of Doss’ training company to begin qualifications on weaponry, Doss refused. He had entered the service as a medic, to heal the wounded, not to kill. As a small boy he had seen a poster showing Cain standing over the body of his dead brother. From that moment on Doss determined that he would never, under any circumstances, take another life.

So what do you do with a soldier who won’t train on Saturday, eat meat, or carry a gun or bayonet? Doss’ commanding officer knew what to do. Paperwork was initiated to declare him unstable, a miss-fit, and wash him out of military service with a Section-8 discharge as “unsuitable for military service.” But Doss wanted to serve his country, he just refused to kill. He performed all of his other duties with dedication, was an exemplary a soldier in every other way. At his hearing he told the board, “I’d be a very poor Christian if I accepted a discharge implying that I was mentally off because of my religion. I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I can’t accept that kind of a discharge.” So the Army was “stuck” with Desmond Doss.

This Obit Worth Repeating

24. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, History, Military

A hat tip to James Taranto at OpinionJournal for pointing to this obituary:

Desmond T. Doss, Sr., the only conscientious objector to win the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War II, has died. He was 87 years old.

Mr. Doss never liked being called a conscientious objector. He preferred the term conscientious cooperator. Raised a Seventh-day Adventist, Mr. Doss did not believe in using a gun or killing because of the sixth commandment which states, “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13). Doss was a patriot, however, and believed in serving his country.

During World War II, instead of accepting a deferment, Mr. Doss voluntarily joined the Army as a conscientious objector. Assigned to the 307th Infantry Division as a company medic he was harassed and ridiculed for his beliefs, yet he served with distinction and ultimately received the Congressional Medal of Honor on Oct. 12, 1945 for his fearless acts of bravery.

According to his Medal of Honor citation, time after time, Mr. Doss’ fellow soldiers witnessed how unafraid he was for his own safety. He was always willing to go after a wounded fellow, no matter how great the danger. On one occasion in Okinawa, he refused to take cover from enemy fire as he rescued approximately 75 wounded soldiers, carrying them one-by-one and lowering them over the edge of the 400-foot Maeda Escarpment. He did not stop until he had brought everyone to safety nearly 12 hours later.

Deaquisition of Illusion.

22. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General, GWOT, Pajama Game, War, World

Well, if we read the polls right, in the light of the port-management imbroglio, it may indicate that there is a sort of sub-rosa, grass-movements, silent-majority distrust of… well, international Islam. Surprise, surprise, surprise. This comes as a matter of slack-jawed amazement or grave concern to parties as various as the Zogby polls, CAIR, and our local congress-critters on both sides of the aisle. The rote insistence on Islam being a Religion of Peace is wearing very thin, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary… evidence that bulks large despite all the heroic efforts of Hollywood, an assortment of well-meaning civic associations, the intellectual strongholds, and last and not least, that final bastion of telling truth to power, those major news establishments.

Whoo-hoo! We must have all been brainwashed by the powers of the major media, at the express bidding of the eeeeeevviiiil Bush administration.
Yes, that would be the major media who have no trouble “disappearing” all those pictures of people jumping from the Twin Towers, tying up the 2004 presidential race in a pretty pink bow and handing it to a favored candidate, and making a mockery of every brave pledge of a free press and all the news that’s fit to print, unless it’s mockeries of Mohammad. The lords and grandees of our established press are powerless to banish uncomfortable suspicions amongst the proletariat, who have latched on to the very infra dig notion that the forces of militant Islam— which might possibly incorporate quite a lot more than the tiny percentage which is always being presented to us as being that which has committed the outrage du jour— presents to us a real and present danger. Despite our marching orders from our betters, we persist in our peasant conviction that the Religion of Peace is something other than advertised. This knowledge is the elephant in the room. Not looking at it’s wide flappy ears, long ropelike tail, and tree-trunk legs and all the rest of it, will not make it go away. The elephant is in the room, and has crapped copiously all over the carpet. Some politicians and pollsters, whose livelihood depends on accurately sensing certain aromas on the breeze are reacting already— an otherwise competent, well-thought of, and efficient port-management concern may have caught it in the neck because of this conviction. Interested and easily offended parties like CAIR are frantically applying the metaphorical room freshener, with less and less effect. It’s all gotten very, very stale, and I suspect that a lot of us are very, very tired of it all.

We are tired, and wearied to death of it all, and the Affair of the Danish Cartoons was the final straw. Or perhaps a sentence of death for apostasy for a Christian Afghan convert is the penultimate final straw… unless there is one absolutely final, ultimately ultimate straw, a Religion of Peace inspired outrage which I desperately hope will not involve a mushroom-shaped cloud over Tel Aviv, or some European or American city.

Whatever the Islamic outrage du jour is, we are tired of it. We are tired of easily-set off mobs, burning and murdering, of hatred preached in mosques and middle-eastern newspapers, of vile insults and lies, of beheadings and bombs, of bullying and threats, of rapes and mutilations and the oppression of women, and the usual slickly-suited creatures oozing justifications for it on the TV and radio afterwards. We are tired of the same old whine about persecution by the same creatures whose co-religionists practice persecution with vigor and keen enjoyment. We are tired to exhaustion of the Islamic worlds’ tattered woobie of the Palestinian people, taken out and shaken about whenever interest flags—never mind that the so-called Palestinian people seem to have suffered more at the hands of their so-called friends than they have gotten from their ostensible enemy. (If we need an example for strategic stupidity, counter-productive behavior and bad choice of friends in the face of misfortune and adversity, the Palestinian State must be Exhibit A through Exhibit-X whatever. But that is material for another rant, another day.) We are tired of being told we have to understand, to respect and to tolerate… and yet to see that that understanding, respect and toleration is not reciprocated in any meaningful way, in most of those places where Islam meets the other.

We are tired of being hectored about getting to know the Koran, and the Islamic street; especially since the more we get to know it, the more we dislike it, all of its works and ways; prejudices, ignorance and barbarities on full display, courtesy of the unfiltered blog media.
We are just tired, tired of being tolerant and calm and understanding and enduring. We want to think the best of people, truly we do— but there is a limit, and someday — probably terrifingly soon– it will be reached. I hope, personally, that it will not be tomorrow or the day after, when the last patient nerve is shredded into microscopic threads, and the limit has been reached. If and when that happens, the going will get really, really ugly.

Note to the Islamic world; please, please do not step on that last un-shredded nerve. Just, please. Don’t. It won’t be worth it. Trust me on this. Just don’t.

Back From The Abyss: Just Had My SSI ALJ Hearing

22. March 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: General

As I told you before, I have spent much of the past few days preparing for an Administrative Law Judge hearing on my SSI disability claim, which just happened today.

Well, the good news is that the ALJ seemed very impressed with what I presented. And even the Medical Expert and Vocational Expert tempered their positions, after I presented my case. the VE even went so far as to say there was a “very small” spectrum of jobs I might qualify for.

None-the-less, the ALJ only saw fit to continue the case, and recommend I retain an attorney, That’s all well and good. It’s just that, this is the attorney’s wet dream – (on top of the government’s intrinsically weak case) all the foot work has been done by me. All the attorney has to do is come in, cross the “i’s” and dot the “t’s” – is that worth 25% – I don’t think so.

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