Truth in Recruiting. America Online hilites today an AP story about a disabled Vietnam vet who has become the focus of a controversy over his display of a sign in a storefront in Duluth, Minnesota that tallies U.S. military deaths, casualties, and the number of days the Iraq war has been going on.
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I have been to Duluth, briefly. In fact, one of my favorite names of all time was on a store near the waterfront in Duluth: "The Last Place on Earth". I would be delited if Duluth led the Nation into giving our young people the complete picture they need to make an informed decision as to whether to enlist in the military — or not.

[Scott Cameron's] sign ... rests feet from the local Army recruiting office, and Cameron's refusal to take it down despite Army requests has drawn national attention. The fuss is giving the Vietnam veteran a chance to air a view he wishes he'd expressed long ago.

"The way veterans have been treated in this country is shameful".

Is a "request" from the military that someone take down a small sign inside a building on private property even constitutional? Doesn't the military have the power to cow some people into obeying an unlawful order camouflaged as a "request"?
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The military pretends that it is upset only at the emotional impact of the sign on recruiters, not the sign's possible effects upon recruiting itself.

His tribute has irritated the military recruiters next door, who dislike the daily reminder of friends lost. Staff Sgt. Gary Capan, the post's commander, requested that the sign come down for his colleagues' benefit.

"They're saying, 'Why should we have to look at that? We lost people over there,"' said Staff Sgt. Gary Capan, the post's commander. "It's not just a number to them."

Ah, but that's the point, isn't it? It's not just a number when it could be people you know — or yourself. But in reality, how likely is it that any of those recruiters has 'lost a friend' in Iraq? The U.S. death toll in Iraq is a tiny, insignificant pittance out of the Nation's 1.4 million and more standing army (not counting reservists but only Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines) and additional hundreds of thousands of reservists. I suspect that never in human history has one country invaded and taken over another that actually resisted, with so trivial a death toll for the invader. But trivial in numbers does not equate with inconsequential for families or society.
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Still, military men are supposed to be inured to the death of their peers, since death is an expected risk of military service. We can't have our fiting men collapsing in sobs at the death of the guy next to them, now can we? Isn't that one of the implied reasons for opposing inclusion of gay men in the military, that they'd form excessive attachments to their peers and be rendered useless in combat by grief?
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If military recruiters are upset by the death of people they or someone else recruited, maybe they shouldn't be recruiting anybody.
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The claim, however, is that:

the sign hasn't hurt recruiting: "We had three people sign up just today," [the recruiting post's sergeant in charge] said earlier this week.

How many might have signed up had the sign not been nearby? Three, we are to believe. I don't.

"You're a young kid and you see those stark numbers, you might realize there's a cost you didn't consider," said Gary Tonkin, a Vietnam veteran.

The military's recruiting efforts so completely gloss over the dangers of being killed or permanently maimed in the service as to constitute fraud. I have never engaged in conversation with a recruiter, so must rely on others to report the cautions they do or do not utter, but at least TV commercials and print advertisements focus exclusively on the benefits of military service, the educational payments after completion of service, the training within the service, and bolstering immature kids' sense of manhood.
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One notorious ad now running on television shows a young black kid telling his (presumably single) mother, "I found somebody to pay for college. ... And besides, it's time for me to be the man."
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Another shows a white kid playing pool with his father. The father resists the idea of his son enlisting in the military, and the kid argues that he will get valuable training that will better prepare him for life. The father asks, 'Is it good training?' The kid answers "It's the Army."
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That doesn't answer the question, does it?
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I have seen reports that recruits are told they will get excellent training in a field of their choosing but once they are captured and held in restraint, many are told that the program they wanted isn't available right now, but as soon as a spot opens, they will get the training they expected. 'In the meantime', they will be trained in this other, altogether different area they had no interest in and which may not be transferable into the private economy after they leave the military.
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So a kid enlists in the military with the expectation of being taught how to operate a computer and is instead shunted into computer repair or wiring workstations or putting up satellite antennas — or cooking or dispensing supplies in the quartermaster's unit or washing jeeps and changing tires. And that is the great training and experience they get from the military.
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In 1968 Congress passed the "Truth in Lending" act, also known as Regulation Z. It's time for a "Truth in Recruiting" act. We could call it Regulation A for "army" or Regulation M for "military".
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Kids really need to know what they're letting themselves in for. Promises made during recruitment, as for instance regarding the specific areas of training a recruit will receive and what jobs in the private economy that training will really be useful in, must be fulfilled. The dangers of death and dismemberment must be made very plain to every potential recruit, and the possibility that they will not be given lifelong medical care or financial support for debilitating lifelong injuries should also be made plain.
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Kids tend to feel themselves immortal and indestructible. Only other people get killed or maimed in war. They will come thru it whole, physically and emotionally, and with training and job experience, and money for college, to boot. Optimism is an admirable quality, but it shouldn't lead naive, trusting young people to take unnecessary risks with their life, body, or economic future.
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Enlisting in the military is a very dangerous act, and everyone should be on stark notice of that fact before they sign anything.
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The AOL story included a reader poll. As of around 3pm Eastern Standard Time, the poll results were thus:

What should Scott Cameron do with his sign tallying U.S. Iraq deaths, casualties?
Leave it up 77%
Take it down 23%

Is it an effective way to spotlight the treatment of veterans?
Yes 66%
No 34%

Total Votes: 88,932

Americans are patriotic, not stupid. The realization is growing that the war in Iraq, and other wars that the Republicans keep getting us into, do not advance our national security but actually put us more at risk. Recruiting is way down, and depriving the military of this human capital may be just the restraint the Nation needs to rein in the neocons' ambitions of world domination without representation.
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Reagan argued that by cutting government receipts, he would force government to stop spending. That didn't work then and isn't working now. Reagan tripled the national debt in eight years, and Bush is adding to it in higher absolute numbers than ever before. But a corollary of the smaller-government-thru-smaller-income rule might actually work: fewer and fewer recruits, a smaller and less-aggressive military.
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Then again, a smaller military of higher quality made up of more highly motivated recruits might be more effective in using the technology that has put us on top of the world militarily.
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A case can be made either way, for or against militarism and about what makes for the greatest military effectiveness.
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No case, however, can be made for lying to our young people about the risk of dying in the army or being so seriously injured that they will be gravely disabled for the entire remainder of life — and that future (Republican) Administrations will want to save money (for the rich) by cutting benefits to disabled veterans.
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Fidel Castro was once asked why he hadn't told the Cuban people from the outset that he was a Communist. He answered bluntly, "If I had told them where I was leading them, they wouldn't have gone." We're supposed to be better than that.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,177.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:40 PM

 
Kwanzaa Silliness. This is the fifth day of the seven-day artificial black holiday "Kwanzaa", which runs from December 26th to January 1st. A week or so ago, I was in the post office to send a package and decided to get a booklet of stamps before I left. The (black) gentleman behind the counter asked 'Any particular kind?' I said no, being willing to take my chances, there being various commemoratives available for the holiday season. When I examined the stamps outside the post office, I discovered that he had given me Kwanzaa stamps! Since I am very white, especially in winter, I got quite a chuckle out of that, and wondered how my friends and relatives would react to a Christmas card with a Kwanzaa stamp.
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A week or so later, I got a Christmas card with a Kwanzaa stamp, from an Italian friend in Queens!
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Actually, there's no religious problem with a Kwanzaa stamp on a Christmas card:

[I]t is important to note Kwanzaa is a cultural holiday, not a religious one, thus available to and practiced by Africans of all religious faiths who come together based on the rich, ancient and varied common ground of their Africanness.

And I suppose one could argue that ancestrally we are all Africans, assuming the premise that humanity originated in East Africa is correct. And the stamp is colorful and cheery. But Kwanzaa is bull, a completely phony holiday rooted in ignorance and alienation.
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The official Kwanzaa website claims that:

Kwanzaa is an African American and Pan-African holiday which celebrates family, community and culture. Celebrated from 26 December thru 1 January, its origins are in the first harvest celebrations of Africa from which it takes its name. The name Kwanzaa is derived from the phrase "matunda ya kwanza" which means "first fruits" in Swahili, a Pan-African language which is the most widely spoken African language.

If the word in the phrase is "kwanza", why an extra-A? AA suggests a stressed sound of some sort, probably short-A as in "at". But the vowel of the last syllable of "Kwanzaa" is unstressed, a simple schwa, like the A in the same position in "America". We don't spell that "Americaa". So the invented spelling of this name of an invented holiday is foolish. That is not the only foolish thing about Kwanzaa.
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Aside from the sloppy etymology, there are several things wrong with the paragraph from the official Kwanzaa website quoted above. First, we in the United States, where Kwanzaa was created and its official organization is located, don't write dates "26 December". That is an affectation or mark of alienation. Date order in the United States is "December 26(th)".
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Second, there is no such thing as a "Pan-African" language — or much of anything else, for that matter. The closest thing we have to a "Pan-African" anything is the international organization now called (since "9.9.1999") the African Union ("AU", which was founded as the Organization of African Unity in 1963).
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The idea that Africa is a single racial or cultural entity is naive, romantic, and, alas, ultimately ignorant nonsense, an aspiration that some black Americans may hold high but which has little support in Africa itself. Moreover, despite complete freedom of movement, almost no black Americans have moved to Africa. They 'love' Africa at a distance. As one female black comic said years ago, "I've been to Africa. But I came right back."
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The romantic nonsense about "Mother Africa" reaches extremes that are at best laughable.



The red, black, and green flag of black unity (as above) is explained this way at the Kwanzaa Information Center on MelaNet:

The colors were established in 1920 as the banner of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) [Marcus Garvey's organization], and adopted as the symbol of Africans in America at the convention of the Negro People[ ]s of the World. It is a symbol of the devotion of all African people to the liberation of the African Continent, and the establishment of a Nation in Africa ruled by descendents of slaves from the Western World.

In addition, with the formation of the Republic of New[ ] Africa, it has become the symbol of devotion for African people in America to [a preposterous project to] establish an independent African nation on the North American Continent.

Thus, the colors were not chosen at any limited convention of Black persons; but, have been, in centuries past [Oh? Which centuries? By whom? Where?], and are now the emblem of true Black hope and pride, as embodied in all theories of Pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism.

Pledge

WE PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE RED, BLACK, AND GREEN, OUR FLAG, THE SYMBOL OF OUR ETERNAL STRUGGLE, AND TO THE LAND WE MUST OBTAIN; ONE NATION OF BLACK PEOPLE, WITH ONE GOD OF US ALL, TOTALLY UNITED IN THE STRUGGLE, FOR BLACK LOVE, BLACK FREEDOM, AND BLACK SELF-DETERMINATION.

I guess these people haven't heard: there are a whole bunch of black-ruled ministates in the West Indies (part of North America) — to which black Americans have also not moved in any significant number, and which have not united, politically or even economically, around their Africanness.
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Interestingly, the African Union's colors, incorporated into its flag, are green, gold, and white. There are also other proposed black-unity flags shown at the Flags of the World website.
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I also find it Interesting to note that the Anthem of the AU, which you can listen to at a link at the bottom of the "AU Symbols" page of the AU's website, is distinctly Western. No one would hear it as having any relation to Africa. (At least the AU has an anthem. The Organization of American States, which is much older, has none. But, then, the OAS does not aspire to continental union.)
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As for Swahili, it is not remotely "Pan-African" but is spoken in only a small part of the continent, embracing little more than 5 of Africa's 53 countries. A map of the area in which Swahili is spoken appears at Wikipedia's article on Swahili. That same approximate area is shown in the larger African context in a map at http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/l/c/lcc145/aboutme.htm.
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In no event was the Swahili-speaking area of Africa a significant source of people taken as slaves to the English colonies that became the United States, nor to the United States itself thereafter. (The importation of slaves was banned effective January 1, 1808, so there was only a 32-year window in which slaves were brought into the United States — or 27 years if one considers that the U.S. had effective independence no sooner than 1781.)
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A map of the sources of slaves for the United States appears at http://www.homestead.com/wysinger/mapofafricadiaspora.html.
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Notice that, as is explained in words at http://www.africanamericans.com/Origins.htm, no significant number of Africans from Swahili-speaking areas ever came as slaves to any part of what is now the United States. Ever.
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(Note: the designation "Central and Southeast Africa (Cameroon- N.Angola)" on the African Origins webpage should really be "... Southwest ...". But even if it were properly "Southeast", which it is not, it would still not include the Swahili Coast.)
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Essentially no one in the U.S. who descended from slaves has so much as a single ancestor who spoke Swahili. So why did a California-based African-American choose an East African language for a celebration of origins for black Americans whose ancestors all derived from West Africa?
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The phony identification with East Africa promoted by Kwanzaa disserves black Americans by misleading them about their real origins, mainly in West Africa (meaning the huge bulge into the Atlantic Ocean that starts at Cameroon) and the west coast of Central Africa. There is no one language spoken across the real original homeland of black Americans, but that is no reason to grab a language from East Africa to fill in. To suggest that Swahili has or should have some deep cultural and emotional meaning for black Americans is like suggesting to Irish-Americans that they should feel specially connected to Russian language and culture.
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Most of the slaves transported to (what became) the United States were brought by British slavers, in British ships, from areas the British colonized and from adjoining coastal countries. Today, the bulk of that area has English or French as a co-official national language. Indeed, if there is anything like a "Pan-African" language today, it is English, not Swahili. Many Africans feel as much ownership of (their version of) English as Americans do.
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The suggestion that Kwanzaa is a worldwide celebration for the entire African diaspora is puffery at best and pitiful nonsense at worst. There are about 850 million black people on Earth; at most 28 million people (the highest figure I found on the Internet) celebrate Kwanzaa. Even assuming that all those celebrants are black, that means that about 97% of the world's black people do not celebrate Kwanzaa. Nor should they.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,178.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:24 PM

 
"Safe" from Government. The Radical Right seems to think that only other people are watched by Government and their own freedoms will never be imperiled, no matter how large the Government gets. How foolish.
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Big Government is almost synonymous with the Left, and the Republicans are making Government ever larger and more intrusive, despite campaigning endlessly on rhetoric about shrinking government down to size.
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A prime example is an Associated Press story hilited on AOL yesterday.

Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith has an unusual bedfellow in the Supreme Court fight over her late husband's fortune: the Bush administration.

The administration's top Supreme Court lawyer filed arguments on Smith's behalf and wants to take part when the case is argued before the justices. * * *

A federal bankruptcy judge sided with Smith in the fight over her late husband's estate, awarding her $474 million. That was reduced to about $89 million by a federal district judge, then thrown out altogether by a federal appeals court.

The issue before the high court is one only lawyers would love: when may federal courts hear claims that are also involved [in] state probate proceedings. Smith lost in Texas state courts, which found that E. Pierce Marshall was the sole heir to his father's estate.

The Bush administration's filings in the case are technical. Without getting into the details of the family squabble, Solicitor General Paul Clement said that the justices should protect federal court jurisdiction in disputes.

Hmm. A former Texas governor is causing his Solicitor General to side with the Federal Government to invade the jurisdiction of Texas courts and overrule Texas courts as to the disposition of the estate of a Texan. That's conservatism?
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Bush I instigated the Americans with Disabilities Act, which enormously increased the power of the Federal Government to tell states and localities what to do as regards "disabilities", permitted fat people to claim that being gluttonous pigs is a "disability" that entitles them to special treatment, produced billions of dollars of frivolous lawsuits, and required states and localities to spend tens of billions of dollars on "accessibility" improvements to infrastructure, none of which have been reimbursed by the Federal Government.
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Bush II instigated the "No Child Left Behind" law that has invaded an area of exclusive state jurisdiction, education, and saddled states and municipalities with many more billions of dollars of "unfunded mandates".
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Since localities, counties, and states are largely dependent upon property taxes for their base revenues, these unfunded mandates — a favorite tool of the Big Government, Federal empire-building people: states and localities are to pay for their own subjection — such infrastructure improvements have contributed, in some places substantially, to a sharp rise in property taxes.
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The Bush II spending spree has produced the largest budget deficits in the history of the world, which means that in future years more and more of the Nation's wealth will be devoted to interest on the national debt, and the Feds will divert an ever-larger share of the Nation's resources to unproductive interest payments.
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All the while the Bushies are making Government ever bigger and greedier of both money and power, they talk the talk of "smaller government"!
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Radical Rightists of the fiscal-conservative camp are horrified but have allowed themselves to be co-opted into co-conspiring in the growth of Government by the marriage of fiscal profligacy to social conservatism. The cost of stopping homos from marrying is to see the Federal Government grow ever bigger, ever richer, ever more irresistible.
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Indeed, the whole gay-marriage issue is a case in point: regulating marriage has always been a state power. The "conservatives" want to take that power away and substitute a uniform national (that is, Federal) marriage law! Yet "conservatives" don't see this is a power grab against the states. Amazing.
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Equally amazing is the apparent 'understanding' of the Right that they will always control the national government. Elections make no difference. The stupid will always be conned successfully, and Republicans will always control the White House and Congress. Alternation in power between Republicans and Democrats is a thing of the past. The Democratic Party is a spent force that will never get its act together, never find a way to show the poor white-trash base of the Republican Right's primacy that they have been played for fools by people who hate them. We will have one-party rule forever, and that one party will be the Republicans. Well of course it will.
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Never mind that the Supreme Court, even under a conservative majority, might strike down redistricting plans that entrench incumbents.
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Never mind that throughout our history the two major parties have always alternated in power. The Republican Right seems to believe in "the end of history".

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." (quoted from "The End of History?", 1989)

The man who coined the phrase "The End of History", as above, Francis Fukuyama, found that the phrase was often misunderstood (as well it might be), so clarified it three years later:

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.

For Rightwing Republicans, it is plain that they have bestowed upon mankind "a form of society that satisfie[s] its deepest and most fundamental longings", and there will be no backsliding, no alteration of their utopia: Republican-dominated electoral democracy in politics and free-run capitalism in economics will always rule the world.
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"Liberal democracy" as generally understood is not the same as "liberalism" — the Republican Right will be relieved to hear — but it does give Western societies the mechanism by which problems of economic and social inequality can be addressed and fixed. But the Republican Right loves inequality, the starker the better! Unfortunately for them, the greater the gap between The Rich and The Rest of Us becomes, the more likely it becomes that there will be an electoral revolt, and a new group of people will be installed to correct the imbalance.
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Even if the present Democratic leadership is feeble and unappealing, who says they will remain in the leadership? And even if the Democratic Party should indeed prove to be a spent force, there is nothing to prevent it from being replaced by a new party. Remember the Whigs? They were the other major party in our two-party system before the 1860s, but vanished into history. That did not mean the two-party system and alternation between parties vanished. The Republican Party replaced them, and the alternation in power continued.
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I cannot believe that the Liberal Left will always be feckless and useless, disorganized, divided, and permanently in the minority. If they (we) have to abandon the Democratic Party wholesale and create a new, aggressive party filled with new people and new ideas, we will do so.
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And when that new group, be it a reinvigorated Democratic Party or a new major party, comes into power, it will have a vastly more powerful Federal Government to use to crush the Right with. Warrantless searches thru bank accounts, domestic and offshore, telephone conversations and emails, computer and paper files; arrests without warrants; incarceration without trial or attorney for years — all the powers of Huge Government that the Radical Right is using and entrenching now can be turned against them in the future.
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Don't you just love the future?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,172.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:14 PM

 
Mr. Sharon, tear down this wall! Pictures of Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem broadcast in yesterday's evening newscasts showed Bethlehem's mayor and others dwarfed by the 'security fence' that Israel has built to 'protect itself from terrorists'. ABC News gives the height:

[A] reminder that peace is not around the corner lurked at the edge of town[:] a 25-foot barrier Israel built to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out of Israel. Palestinians complain it has cut them off from Jerusalem.

The Australian newspaper The Age described, December 10th, Israeli 'security' measures against tourists to Bethlehem:

Foreign visitors leaving the city through the terminal are now required to get off their buses and pass through a network of metal barriers and turnstiles to be searched and have their passport checked. * * *

"Before, the soldiers would get on the bus and check who they were, and that was it. Now the guests complain that it takes a lot of time, and it's humiliating and now some guests don't want to come to Bethlehem any more." The Israeli Government says that the new complex of concrete buildings and metal control cages is one of 16 being built around Jerusalem to "facilitate" Palestinian travel.

It would seem that in Israeli English, "facilitate" means "block".
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Last year, before the 'fence' was completed, it was described thus:

Israel’s "security fence" has arrived in Bethlehem. It snakes through the suburbs, close to the old stone houses. But the term "fence" is misleading. The section built in Bethlehem is made up of a triple layer concrete wall and two metal fences, one equipped with electronic sensors. The space between the two fences is [wide enuf to be] patrolled by Israeli army jeeps. Israel is building hundreds of miles of fence across the West Bank.

A website titled "Photos of the Separation Barrier from Israel and the Occupied Territories" contains a picture captioned "Israeli version of the british Pillbox", which is very telling. (Oddly, its caption appears only on the index page, about halfway down.)
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This is not a "fence". It is a wall.
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Alas, I can't find online any photo of the astonishing height of the barrier at Bethlehem that I saw last nite on either NBC or ABC (I switched between them), but if you did not yourself see it, you should try to picture it in your mind: steel beams laid on their end, side by side, rising more than 4 times the height of a full-grown man.
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Rather than condemn a structure that dwarfs the Berlin Wall, which conservative Americans supposedly hated, American conservatives say not one word about Israel's 'barrier', unless it be to justify it, and indeed want to create a similar structure on our own Mexican border.
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Communist wall, bad. Democratic wall, good. Wall to keep people in, bad. Wall to keep people out, good. "Good fences make good neighbors." Fortified walls with pillboxes and machine-gun turrets make people even better neighbors.
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We already have "gated communities" sprouting up like mushrooms all over this country. What next? Walls between "bad neighborhoods" (black) and "good neighborhoods" (white)?
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We're not talking white picket fences here, folks, but wrought-iron fences with spiked tops, razor wire, perhaps even electrified barriers, here at home, and a massive Maginot Line in Palestine.
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When I did a Google search on "maginot line israel", I found an interesting column from the August 12, 2004 edition of Israel Insider ("Israel's daily newsmagazine") by Moshe Feiglin, described as "head of the Jewish Leadership faction in the Likud".

To the question "Will the State of Israel continue to exist in another 30 years?" most of those asked answered in the negative. This is something unique to Israel. Most Israelis regard their country as a fleeting incident, and the great efforts made to acquire foreign citizenship are evidence of this. Such a popular feeling of emptiness considerably worries the leadership. * * * When it becomes impossible to prevent the public from sensing the approaching disaster, the leadership begins to resort to magical solutions, such as inventing an enemy that can be easily pursued. It's always a good idea to send the ignorant masses to hunt down witches, Jews, or the extreme Right.

Or, alternatively, you can hide the enemy from the people. You can build a Wall of China, so that the Mongols disappear, or a Maginot Line behind which the Germans will simply evaporate, or a Bar-Lev Line, behind which the Egyptians will vanish and every Israeli will feel secure under Golda's apron. And now, of course, we have the separation fence. * * *

A real solution actually exists, but it is associated with a totally different concept.

What solution might that be? A quick look at the home page of the Jewish Leadership website shows nothing but insistence that Israel must become more authentically Jewish (religious). I don't see how that will solve the security situation Feiglin complains about. Does he anticipate that God (oh, sorry, "G-d", as the ludicrous Orthodox Jewish convention writes it) will intercept Arab missiles mid-flite if Jews become devout?
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I don't recall God stopping the Gestapo, nor Polish and czarist Russian pograms, nor the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. (Palestinians might want to compare the elimination of Israel to the expulsion of Jews from Spain: no mass slaughter, just expulsion from which the Jews rebounded handily. Palestinians might even say that, unlike Spain, they don't even demand that Jews leave or convert, just that they consent to be merely Jewish citizens of a religiously neutral United Palestine who receive no special treatment and are content to live in peace with their neighbors of all faiths.)
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In fact, the last instance I can think of in which God (is said to have) divinely protected the Jews dates to the time of ancient Babylon, when an angel protected from a furnace Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, "upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them." (Daniel 3:27). The Nazis had no trouble cremating the bodies of Jews who died in concentration camps, however, so perhaps God abandoned "His people" sometime between 603 B.C. and 1945 A.D.
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What else you got? Let's look at the "talkback" discussion board at the Israel Insider. One "sanguine" from the U.S.A., offers this take under the heading "Purge the Land of the Enemy":

I keep coming back to declaring war against the terrorist Palestinian "people" as the US did against the Taliban "people". Both surely are on the same crazed Islamic magic carpet to hell.

Since "Palestinians" house lots of terrorists (possibly the most varied on the planet--and certainly the most per capita rodent) Israel has a perfect right to decimate them.

Israel must elect a government who will take care of business. Until that day occurs lets prep the Pals and give them notice their days are surely numbered.

They're all 'living' on borrowed time like the zombie rodents.

Isn't that charming? And so realistic.
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I'm reminded of a scene from a German anti-Jewish propaganda film in the Hitler era, in which dozens and dozens of rats are shown streaming out of a sewer while the narrator compares the Jews to rats. Maybe "sanguine" can get a copy of that scene, colorize it for today's audiences, and substitute "Palestinians" for "Jews" in the soundtrack.
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It is 'people' like "sanguine" who gave rise to the need for the term "zionazi". And I see, late, that "sanguine" (which ordinarily means "cheerful" and "optimistic") might really intend his moniker to be perceived as "sanguinary" (bloody) or "sanguineous" (accompanied by or requiring bloodshed).
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Can anyone with a functioning brain really believe that Israel could systematically kill off the Palestinians and the world would do nothing?
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The premise seems to be that U.S. would stand idly by, like Sharon at Shatila, and permit genocide, then actively intervene to defend Israel against the missiles that would fly like massed arrows in medieval warfare against every city of Israel from all its neighbors, and every single one of those missiles would be intercepted and destroyed before killing any Israeli, because, of course, God will protect them.
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Zionists are the stupidest people on Earth, possibly the stupidest people who have ever 'lived'.
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In 1997, Canadian (and presumably Jewish) commentator Eric Margolis used the term "Jewish Maginot Line" to refer not to the 'security barrier', which had not yet been started, but to the hardened settlements created over the last several decades by Jews on land that all the world except Zionists regard as Palestinian:

Immediately after the 1967 war, Israel began building `housing projects' on a broad arc from NE to SE of the Old City. `Housing' is really a misnomer. As a specialist in modern fortifications, I instantly recognized the massive housing projects for what they truly were - a Jewish Maginot Line.

These massive, ugly apartment blocs form a nearly unbroken wall, cutting off Jerusalem from the West Bank. Constructed of large stone blocks protected by earth revetments, and thick, steel-reinforced concrete, many are capable of withstanding 155mm howitzer shells and even direct fire by 105-130mm flat trajectory shells. Narrow windows resembling pillbox embrasures face the enemy. These fortress blocs have underground shelters, magazines, and independent water supplies. Their residents are armed and organized to defend the complexes.

The residential forts are designed, like Israeli border settlements and forts along the Golan, to delay an Arab attack, shelter civilians, and serve as tactical strong-points, or `schwerpunkt,' upon which offensive armored formations can manoeuvre.

Margolis understood, however, that this policy of steeling (not a typo) Palestinian land thru fortified settlements "assures decades more hostility between Israel and the world's 1 billion Muslims" but added:

Alas, logic stops on the road to the Holy City, over which Jews, Christians and Muslims often seem more eager to fight than pray. This is a case for King Solomon.

King Solomon is not around. King George is. I can't see Dubya the First declaiming for the multitudes and for history, in his most stentorian Reaganite tones, "Mr. Sharon, tear down this wall!"
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,166.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:22 PM

 
Petty Extortion. America Online offers its visitors "The Definitive Tipping Guide" to tell Americans what types of people should be bribed to do their job, in what dollar amounts or percentages. When will Americans revolt and put an end to tipping?
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Every customer deserves good service. Every service employer deserves a decent and secure income.
+
It is wrong for customers to feel they must bribe someone to do his or her job, or risk getting lousy service.
+
It is wrong to make people in service industries — some service industries, in some positions, but not others — feel they must grovel and fawn in order to be paid. The institution of tipping should be abolished by law.
+
In much of the world, a service charge is included in the price people pay, in all industries, or is automatically added to the check (at a restaurant, for instance). There's no question how much you should pay. It's right there on the bill. If you have bad service, you complain to the manager.
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But the retention of tipping by the United States has contaminated service industries in many countries where Americans travel in substantial numbers, because some of those tourists do not inquire whether they should tip or not tip, but simply tip as habit. That's got to stop. And to stop it abroad, we must stop it at home.
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Beyond the corruption of other societies and the pressure that Americans feel to leave a tip even if they get atrocious service, there is the obvious fact that many people whose income derives mainly from tips cheat on their income tax by underreporting their tip income. There are insufficient checks on this very common form of cheating, and the rest of us, who have income tax deducted from our checks so can't fudge the numbers, make up the difference. We are involuntarily paying higher taxes to make up for tip-dependent tax cheats. That's got to stop too.
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Ideally, the Federal Government should abolish tipping as a national labor-law and tax-law matter, and require all employers to pay their employees a living wage and report their employees' total income to the taxing authorities. But if the Federal Government won't do it, then state or local governments should do it.
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Enforcement would be very simple: proclaim very publicly that any tip left is the property of the state, and any private person who appropriates a tip is subject to arrest and punitive fine and/or imprisonment. Fines should be at least three times the size of the total of government moneys stolen, with a minimum of $500. Judges would be authorized to impose jail or prison time for egregious thievery, be it by waiters and taxi drivers or their employers. Periodic, random "stings" and infiltration of suspect establishments by police or tax agents posing as day laborers, busboys, waiters, taxi drivers and the like, could produce very public embarrassment for violators. It wouldn't take long at all to break the tipping habit by instituting a uniform service charge.
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In this way we can end the extortion and tax cheating that the present system of tipping involves.
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Petty bribery is still bribery, petty extortion is still extortion, and the tax cheating that people who make tips commit is anything but petty.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,163.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:11 AM

 
Bigotry and Fear. Two items.
+
Anti-Catholic Bias. The Associated Press reports that:

A federal judge in Texas ruled Thursday that Pope Benedict XVI enjoys immunity as a head of state and removed him from a civil lawsuit accusing him of conspiracy to cover up the sexual abuse of minors by a seminarian.

America Online's version of the story included a poll of readers' reactions:

Should the Pope be immune from a trial alleging sex-abuse and a subsequent cover-up?
No: 64%
Yes: 28%
Unsure: 8%
Total Votes: 29,422

This pretty closely matches the proportion of non-Catholics (mainly Protestants) to Catholics in the United States today and suggests that anti-Catholic bigotry is alive and well in the United States. (The CIA World Factbook 2005 gives the religious breakdown of the U.S. as "Protestant 52%, Roman Catholic 24%, Mormon 2%, Jewish 1%, Muslim 1%, other 10%, none 10% (2002 est.)".)
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Anti-"papist" Protestants assert a right to sue a man 6,000 miles away, across an ocean, in a separate country, for supposed sexual wrongdoing of some individual in Texas whom the Pope knew nothing about. Craziness.
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There is also a lot of self-righteous idiocy about "victims" of "molestation" and other forms of sex in this country. The United States retains a public puritanism that causes most people in the industrialized world to look down upon Americans as prudish, hypocritical bumpkins. Our media are filled with sex, but our laws and public pronouncements on sex are priggish. Can you say "hy-poc-ri-sy"?

The three boys [in the Houston case], identified in court documents as John Does I, II and III, allege that a Colombian-born seminarian on assignment at St. Francis de Sales church in Houston, Juan Carlos Patino-Arango, molested them during counseling sessions in the church in the mid-1990s.

The mid-1990s. They didn't complain about it then, it seems, but only now, when thousands of long-silent "victims", some of them involved in years-long consensual affairs with priests and teaching brothers, have dollar signs dancing in their eyes. They not only get to have had sex — which public pronouncements in this society seem to think is a horrible, horrible thing everyone would rather die than do, but which essentially all men and boys crave desperately and pursue aggressively — but they also get to be paid for it! What do you call someone who has sex for money, again? Oh, yes: prostitutes. Unlike the case with your typical street hooker, however, the identity of these "victims" is hidden from public view, while the name of the alleged "criminal" is exposed to the entire Nation.
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I recently served on a grand jury that once a month heard cases brought forward by the Sex Crimes Unit of the county prosecutor's office — an office that is apparently far too large and has much too much time on its hands. It brought some ridiculous cases before us, but the hypocritical, puritanical jurors indicted on every single one of them, including the most preposterous: a young woman known to like group sex downed six shots of Hennessy cognac and six Corona beers in order to get herself drunk enuf to lower her inhibitions about group sex, then went off to a motel with three guys and gladly participated in an orgy. One of the male participants at one point took her cellphone camera and took a video — which we had to view! yuch! — of some of this activity and left the camera with her as a souvenir. They offered to take her home right after, but she wanted to sleep in. The next day she saw the video and decided a while later to mention the videotaping incident to her father, who insisted she file charges against the men.
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The young men, when contacted by the police, openly admitted to the acts but said they were completely consensual. Advised by the police that they were entitled to have an attorney present, they said they didn't need one because this was absolutely consensual; the girl was known to like group sex; they had done it with her before; and the only difference this time is that someone videotaped it. The video was shown to no one outside the group, so her 'reputation', such as it is, was not adversely impacted and she was not thereby subjected to public disapproval. (Quite the contrary, it is only her insistence (or her father's insistence) on pressing charges that caused that video to be seen by strangers.)
+
In preparing the evidence for prosecution, the police tested her (two days after the event) for alcohol and drugs, to try to make a case that she was incapable of consent. They found no residual alcohol, but did find traces of marijuana!
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In the grand-jury discussion after the evidence was presented, I said that the 'victim' was obviously a wild child who was fully a participant in a consensual group activity. But the stupid, shocked-little-girl jurors said "They took advantage of her" and voted an indictment.
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I am so tired of whores posing as innocents, of women asserting a right to change their mind even after they have completed a consensual sexual encounter, charge their partners as "attackers", and prosecute. Now, men are to understand — which of course no one knows — that not only does "No mean no" but "Yes also means no"! We really need a men's-rights movement to blast this conspiracy of hypocritical lies out of the water. Men admit that they do things from lust. Why can't women?
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It would seem the only legally safe sex men can have nowadays is with other men. Any woman can turn on any male partner and accuse him of sexual assault at any time, and police with nothing better to do will investigate, district attorneys with time on their hands will prosecute, and stupid, hypocritical losers on grand juries will indict. Let's hope judges and petit juries will show more honesty and integrity, and end the persecution of men by acquittal.
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"Terrorism" Nonsense. I have been trying to get permission to take photos inside the distinguished Old Essex County Courthouse here in Newark, and have been hassled by police for trying to take pictures of buildings on public streets, privately owned as well as publicly owned. One reply, from the City of Newark, denied my request with this rationalization:

Unfortunately, after Newark was put on "alert" the taking of photographs of government and private office buildings has been restricted.

To obtain pictures of the buildings you mention below, you might find photos online at government and private websites such as: www.gonewark.com. [My photos are better than theirs, and in any event, I have the right to take my own photos.]

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Make that 'sorry for taking away long-established, traditional rights of citizens to take photographs in public'. What a bunch of useless, worthless cowards Americans are. The Government claims that the-bogeyman-will-get-us-if-we-don't-watch-out, and Americans will buy it. They will lay down all their rights to be "safe", even if they were never in danger to begin with.
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There has been no — repeat, no — terrorist attack in Newark, New Jersey, ever. Not ever, in its 339-year history. Not one. But tourists and website developers are to be restricted as to the photos they can take on our public streets. What inexcusable nonsense.
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It's time to strike the phrase "the home of the brave" from our national anthem.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,163.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:56 AM

 
Playing Patty-Cake with Hackers and Spammers. America Online today includes among its "Welcome" screen hilites "How This Hacker Ended Up in Prison":

[Joseph] Konopka, also known as "Dr. Chaos," was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for a variety of offenses, including arson, disrupting radio and television broadcasts, disabling an air traffic control system, selling counterfeit software and damaging the computer system of an Internet service provider.

Federal prison="country club". Seven years for "disrupting radio and television broadcasts, [and] disabling an air traffic control system" among other offenses? Why don't we just slap his wrist with a ruler and say sternly, "That was very bad! Don't ever do that again!"
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Another person hilited in that story is from my area. He was treated even more litely:

In a Monmouth (NJ) County Superior Court, [David L.] Smith pleaded guilty to one count of computer theft in the second degree. In a Newark, NJ, District Court, Smith ple[ ]d guilty to one federal count of computer fraud and abuse. As part of a federal plea agreement he acknowledged that the Melissa virus [that he unleashed] caused more than $80 million in damage to businesses across North America.

Smith's sentence, originally 40 years in federal prison, was reduced to 20 months and a $5,000 fine after he agreed to an undercover role with the FBI, which contributed to the capture of numerous perpetrators.

From 40 years to 20 months, less than 2 years? Why not just legalize attacks upon computers and have done with it?
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Another miscreant hilited is Howard Carmack:

From 2002 until his arrest, Carmack used 343 false e-mail accounts to send unsolicited e-mail advertisements for get-rich-quick schemes and sexual enhancers, among others.

In March, 2004, New York prosecutors succeeded in demonstrating that Carmack had distributed 825 million spam e-mails[.] A jury pronounced him guilty of forgery, identity theft and falsifying business records. Carmack received a sentence of seven years, of which he must serve a minimum three-and-a-half years.

Carmack also lost a civil lawsuit before a federal court in Atlanta. For defrauding EarthLink, eight men from New York, Ohio and Washington, D.C., he was ordered to pay damages in the amount of $16 million [yet he was] initially freed on a bail of $20,000[.]

I'm amazed he didn't flee. Perhaps the police in his jurisdiction kept him under surveillance.
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And where is he going to get $16 million? He's not. So the verdict is utterly empty and meaningless. The harm he did will never be undone, and no one will ever be made whole. Some of them may still be recovering from the harm he did when he is released from prison in little more than three years.
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The only one of the examples of "Internet villains" that AOL hilited who might be treated severely is Scott Levine,

the owner of a now defunct e-mail marketing contractor called Snipermail.com. He was arrested in Palm Beach, Fla., and extradited to Arkansas on charges of stealing by means of the Internet (hacking), private account information maintained by Little Rock-based Acxiom Corp.

The indictment [123 counts] included theft of 8.2 gigabytes of private data. He was convicted of all counts in a Little Rock federal court and is currently released on bail pending sentencing. Federal guidelines would allow up to 136 years in prison.

No sentence has in fact yet been handed down. Perhaps the Government will take theft of account information (the brief AOL story does not say what kind of information Levine stole, nor what he did with it) more seriously than it does sending out malicious viruses and spam. We'll see.
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As most of the examples hilited by AOL today show, however, the bulk of the malicious misbehavior that tens of millions of computer users suffer every day is not taken seriously by government. Uncounted Internet users have had huge amounts of data destroyed, their computers altered so badly that they had to pay hundreds of dollars each for professionals to fix them, even had their hard drives erased as caused the loss of everything on them. The Internet is clogged with spam, and attempts to defraud us arrive in our inboxes every day, but government does pretty much nothing about any of this. Why not?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,159.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:52 AM

 
Before They Go. My sister sent me a link to an online song of appreciation for the veterans of World War II, who are now dying off at the rate of 2,000 a day. The transmittal email that she passed along observed that one son of a veteran says that:

only after his father consumed several glasses of wine would he discuss "the unspeakable horrors" he and other soldiers had witnessed in places such as Anzio, Iwo Jima, Bataan and Omaha Beach.

I listened to the song and watched the slide show that accompanies it, at http://www.managedmusic.com/beforeyougo.html, and can certainly recommend it. I was born during the Battle of the Bulge, 61 years ago today. (My mother joked "I won that one", but the actual Battle of the Bulge was grim, not joyous.)
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While watching the presentation I could not help but think of the kinds of "unspeakable horrors" our soldiers in Iraq are witnessing and which are searing themselves into their brains. Militarists ignore the terrible toll that war places even on the victors, even decades later, to the end of life.
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"Before You Go" is a reminder to all of us that sooner or later, we too will go. The victors of World War II left a legacy of great value — tho that does not make them "The Greatest Generation", despite Tom Brokaw's assertion to the contrary. That honor would have to go to the generation that founded the United States in writing the Declaration of Independence; fiting the Revolution; and framing the Constitution. The second-greatest generation would be the one that preserved the Union and abolished slavery. The generation Brokaw lauds, which suffered the Great Depression and fought World War II, would be, at best, the third greatest.
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But they left so much work unfinished. In watching the slide show, I was struck by a picture of a black soldier in front of a white officer. The military was segregated in World War II. And the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union produced the takeover by Communists of all of East Europe, then the Cold War in which the Soviet Empire tried to defend its gains and expand Communism ever outward.
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The society that black heroes returned to was in many places, not just the Deep South, segregated and unfair. It took another generation, mine, to fite and win the civil-rights war and Cold War, and to open society to accept the presence and contributions of Hispanics and homosexuals, and empower women to define for themselves their role in life.
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The United States that the heroes of World War II, most of them conscripts forced into temporary slave armies to fite permanent political enslavement, came back to was almost unrecognizable from the United States today. For each good thing about 1950, the height of the postwar good life, there was a bad thing.
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You could leave your door unlocked in most of the country. But blacks couldn't vote or win political office in large parts of the Nation.
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Wholesome entertainments abounded and television became a nearly universal institution. But some books were still "Banned in Boston".
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Marriage was strong, but the return of millions of GI's pushed millions of women out of jobs.
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Suburbs sprang up; but cities collapsed as racism propelled white flite.
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Harry Truman desegregated the military, but did nothing about antihomosexual discrimination, in the military or more widely across society.
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And on, and on. Tho many white, heterosexual, middle-class people today would be perfectly comfortable in the United States of 1950, there's no way in hell that blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals would go back.
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Still, all the progress we have made as a society would not have been possible had we lost World War II, so we can properly praise and sincerely thank the generation that is now vanishing into history, a history they nobly advanced. But let us not pretend that there were no atrocities on our side during World War II, no hypocrisy in our indignation at Nazi and Japanese racism. Gratitude does not require blindness.
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At least the war in which those atrocities were committed was a Just War, and the world is incalculably better off because the Allies won than it would have been if the Axis had won.
+
I truly hope we can salvage some honor from the current war, by creating a democratic, multiethnic, and tolerant society in Iraq, and changing U.S. attitudes toward Arabs as to end the one-sided, anti-Arab unfairness that alone has made us targets for Moslem terrorism. But we must remember that things got worse in some ways and places after World War II — a Cold War of international nuclear terror between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, with tens of thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles being ever at the ready to fly and kill hundreds of millions in World War III; regional wars in Korea, Southeast Asia, Angola, the Horn of Africa, Central America, and elsewhere — before they got better.
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My generation's "permanent war", against Communism, isn't really over yet. There are still Communist insurrections in Nepal, South America, the Philippines, and elsewhere, and the Butchers of Beijing are still in power, executing a bedrock minimum of 3,400 people a year, not all of them common criminals. (By contrast, the U.S., with almost one fourth as many people, has had a total of just over 1,000 executions since the death penalty was restored in 1976, almost 30 years, and none of those was of a political prisoner.)
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Now we have embarked on a second "permanent war", against "terrorism".
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Unfortunately, this second war is perceived, quite rightly, both here and abroad, to be a war against Arabs in particular and Islam more generally. No good can come of it unless and until it becomes a war against injustice.
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As long as we pretend that this isn't about Israel, and continue to slaughter Arabs for Zionism, that long will we be deprived of the honor we won in World War II. And this permanent war will continue, never to be won, because you can't really win a war against a billion people without devoting a lot more than 160,000 soldiers to the task.
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If we really intend to win "the war against (Moslem) terrorism" without changing our fundamental stance of uncritical support for Radical Zionism, we will have to invade, occupy, and transform every Moslem country on Earth. I don't think we are ready, willing, or able to do that.
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Are we ready, willing, or able to do justice in Palestine? That would be a lot easier, wouldn't it?
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As we bid farewell to the veterans of World War II, we should turn our thoughts to our own legacy, to the consequences of our own present acts and those we take in what remains of our lives. One is never too young to think of how we will be remembered — and many of us aren't young. Will we leave our children and their children "permanent war"? Or will we accept that the only way to end this particular permanent war is to do justice in the Middle East?
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Let us do justice before we go.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,157.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:56 AM

 
No Warrant. George Bush says he has the Constitutional authority to violate the Constitution. I have read the Constitution. Nowhere do I see authority of any officer under the Constitution to violate the Constitution. Only an idiot could believe the Framers intended a Constitution that incorporated a Bill of Rights to permit the Government they set up to violate those rights.
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George Bush is just begging to be impeached. Alas, he is more likely successfully to set the Constitution aside than to be impeached, because he is using what men throughout history have used to become dictator: fear of violent death (from outside, first; from the Government, second) and promises of "security".
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No people has ever chosen freedom over security unless gripped by some mindless religious zeal that persuades them that death means nothing because eternal Paradise awaits. Americans don't believe in eternal life, not really. So they will consent to permit people who talk about "limited government" instead to carry off the greatest expansion of government in our history, from democracy to dictatorship.
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Dubya speaks of defending freedom by taking away our rights, and of violating the Constitution in pursuit of the Government's Constitutional authority. And Americans will buy it, as long as it doesn't strike too close to home. It's the old "and then they came for me" bit.
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You'd think we'd have learned from history. But Americans don't know history. And don't want to. All that matters is now and the future. History is heavy baggage. We travel lite, into a future of as much "freedom" as Government wants to grant us.
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So, enjoy today, because tomorrow is looking ever more grim. That minority of you who vote, use that vote to stop the Republican Dictatorship Machine. Use your freedom to write emails, make telephone calls, and send letters while you still have it. Urge your representatives at all levels to stop the Republicans while you are still protected by the Constitution. Because otherwise Guatanamo awaits us all.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,157.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:35 PM

 
The Duh-Diet. Steven Hawks, a health-science professor at Utah's Brigham Young University, has come up with a "no-diet diet" that he calls "intuitive eating". It has just two rules: (1) eat only when you're hungry and (2) stop when you're full.
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This is the way most people have always eaten until very recent times, historically speaking. A few things came into play to alter that behavior. One was schedules for work and school that put restrictions on when one could eat, so forced us to eat at only certain times. Another was sedentary entertainments, such as television in one's own home, such that one could place snacks and beverages within easy reach of one's seat and eat not from need but from habit — and to have something to do with one's hands. You can't do that with active entertainments, such as sports (except maybe bowling). Coaches look askance at the guy eating when he should be guarding first base or fiting for a rebound.
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Obvious as this approach to eating may be, it plainly won't work for some segments of the overweight population, such as people who use food for psychological reasons and those who experience a change in activity level or metabolism but continue to eat the way they have always eaten. It may take the latter group of people a while to realize that they aren't really as hungry as they used to be, and cut back on calories. If they heed their needs and understand that being accustomed to being hungry at a given time or being accustomed to feeling the need to consume a given quantity is not the same as actually being hungry or actually needing to consume as much as one has in the past consumed, they too should be able to adjust their consumption around actual hunger.
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That requires, however, awareness of food as a thing in itself, not just part of the environment. That means no bowls or bags of snacks, no glasses of drinks by the recliner when you're watching television. If you feel hungry, you go to a table and eat as a purposeful activity, not an unconscious behavior. And if you're full but there's something left on your plate, give it to the dog or cat, or put some plastic wrap over it and put it into the frij for when you become hungry again later.
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It's sad that we seem as a society actually to have to be told to eat when hungry and stop when full. Duh!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,154.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:43 PM

 
"Happy Holidays". The ugly, dishonest evil at the heart of the Radical Right has once again revealed itself, this time in phony indignation at the use of the expression "Happy Holidays" in place of "Merry Christmas". Posing as victims of a newly militant "multicultural" attack from enemies of Christianity, the Radical Right is actually attacking the true religious and cultural diversity of this magnificent society.
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Theirs is not a desperate counterattack but a new, one-sided crusade against a long-established tradition.
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Their pretense of late is that the White House, corporations, and other people who should know better are newly disrespecting Christmas by sending out "holiday" cards and wishing people "Happy Holidays". That is a baldface lie.
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The White House, including the Bush White House, has been sending out "holiday" cards for a very long time, probably generations. And "Happy Holidays" has been with us since before my birth. I am soon to be 61 years old.
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When this phony indignation came to the fore this season, I remembered very clearly an old movie tune, "Happy Holiday", and tracked it down today on the Internet. It comes from the movie Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Marjorie Reynolds — in 1942!
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Essentially everyone in this country knows that song, because it has been with us so very long, as pop songs go. Here are the lyrics.

Happy holiday, happy holiday
While the merry bells keep ringing
May your ev'ry wish come true

Happy holiday, happy holiday
May the calendar keep bringing
Happy holidays to you

In looking for a sound file for readers of this blog to listen to, I came across a commentary by someone else who knows full well that the expression "Happy Holiday(s)" has been with us for a very long time and is not a new attack upon Christmas. 11 days ago, Suzanne Cassidy of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Patriot-News also pointed out that the song "Happy Holiday" appeared in a major movie in 1942. (In fact, it was copyrighted in 1941, yet another year into the distant past.)
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Apparently the Bill O'Reilly's of the Radical Right think their audience is so ignorant that they don't know about the song "Happy Holiday" and will actually believe that there is some sinister new 'plot against Christmas'. And perhaps O'Reilly's audience really is that ignorant. But the Nation is not.
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When I was growing up, in the 1940s and '50s, I saw and heard the phrase "Happy Holidays" all the time, and assumed it referred to Christmas and New Year's: one card, one greeting, for two holidays exactly one week apart. Oh, no. That's not the significance of the greeting, we are now told. It is not to cover New Year's as well as Christmas, but also Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and every other conceivable holiday — pagan Rome's Saturnalia, for chrissake — in derogation of Christmas. What a bunch of bull.
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I yield to no one in my hostility to Judaism, but I'm a little surprised that Radical Rightwingers, who are usually also stridently Radical Zionist, militantly object to a greeting at this time of year that might accommodate Hanukkah. We have sent 160,000 soldiers and spent over $300 billion (and climbing) to defend Israel, but won't accommodate Hanukkah in our "season's greetings"? That seems to me more than a little bizarre.
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The movie Holiday Inn's song "Happy Holiday" was written by Irving Berlin, an American Jew born in Russia. I thought the Radical Right loved Irving Berlin. But apparently Berlin's writing a "holiday" song that enabled Jews to see themselves as Real Americans was subversive of the Nation's Christian identity. Who knew?
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Radical Rightists love to portray themselves as the hapless victims of aggression from the nearly insuperable forces of atheism, godless liberalism, etc., and use that asserted aggrievedness and desperate defensiveness to aggress against nonbelievers. Every year they try to push the nonreligious more and more to the fringes of society and impose compulsory religion upon the unwilling. And all the while they are initiating new predations upon nonconformists, they pretend that what they are pushing is not innovation but tradition.
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They pretend that we have always had "In God We Trust" as our national motto, when in fact the Founding Fathers chose "E Pluribus Unum" ("Out of Many, One").
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Rightwingers imply that "In God We Trust" has always been on our money, paper and metal, but in reality it did not appear on any currency of any kind until 1864, a full 88 years (about 4 generations, in those days) after the Declaration of Independence ('four score and eight', one might term that year — a year after Lincoln's dedication of the burial ground at Gettysburg) — and did not appear on any paper currency until 1957! That's 15 years after "Happy Holiday" debuted onscreen.
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So which is our tradition? "Happy Holiday" and "E Pluribus Unum"? Or "In God We Trust" and "Merry Christmas"?
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Whose tradition is it that we are supposed to enthrone? At what cost?
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A poll this month shows that 94% of Americans believe that God exists, tho they are not necessarily certain of that belief, and only 1% are sure there is no God.
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How can anyone, in this scientific age, be certain that something does not exist? We know that many things we cannot see, such as microbes, or hear, such as dog whistles, do exist nonetheless, so it would be rash in the extreme to assert certitude that something else we cannot see nor hear does not exist. But we can believe that all evidence we have seen to date compels the conclusion that God is a fantasy — for some, a benign fantasy; for others, an extremely malign fantasy.

Conservatives are more likely to be convinced than liberals (87% vs. 61%), women a little more likely than men (82% vs. 73%), and residents of the South more than those in the East (88% vs. 70%).

However, you don't have to believe in God to celebrate the birth of Jesus.
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Even atheists can honor the teachings and thus the memory of Jesus of Nazareth, and therefore celebrate his birth, albeit with sadness for what happened to him when he ran up against intolerance from the religious authorities of His day. (We can even capitalize any pronoun that refers to Him, out of respect for His moral majesty, if not his godhood.)
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The crucifixion of Jesus may, indeed, be the most powerful argument against religious intolerance that anyone can make.
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Jesus said things that the high priests of the established religion of His place and time did not want to hear, and indeed did not want any Jew to hear. They silenced Him, by killing Him. But they didn't silence His followers, tho the Jewish leadership of the day did indeed try to kill all of them too.
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The disciples of Jesus believed themselves to be Jews — true and devout Jews. They weren't. Rather, they were the first Christians, believers in a doctrine completely at variance with and irreconcilable with Judaism, tho it sprang from the same intellectual roots. Their God of Love was not the Jews' God of Wrath, tho they tried to believe that the two plainly different gods were one and the same.
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Maybe they understood, privately, that their Trinity comprised the God of Wrath (the Father), the God of Love (the Son), and the intermediary and redeemer (the Holy Ghost, or Spirit) who was able somehow to make sense of nonsense: that the God of the Jews was (that is, could be) the God of the Christians. Who knows?
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That's not how the doctrine came down to us, but you have to wonder why Christianity had to posit a God of three natures, if the natures were all the same.
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In any case, we who are ethical tho not religious Christians have enormous respect for Jesus. Not just for His sacrifice, which was horrible and painful — tho we don't for an instant believe that somehow His dying on the Cross magically cleansed the human race of Original Sin (which no sane person could believe in to begin with), nor that when He ascended to Heaven He took with Him all the sins of true believers — but for His magnanimous and brilliant teachings on forgiveness.
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Jesus understood, tho He may not have presented His understanding thus, that when we hate and hold on to rancor, we consign ourselves to pain, and to diminution of the value and quality of our own lives. Jesus understood that when we forgive, we lift a burden from ourselves, and let the ugliness and anger pass out of our lives. Jesus understood that when you refuse to return one evil deed with another, you end the war between individuals that the one deed could otherwise produce. That, in not fiting back, you give permission to your attacker to discontinue his attack, and give him the chance to ennoble himself in breaking off the attack. When you "turn the other cheek", then, you shame the conscience of the person who would strike you, and his conscience, which is the voice of God within his head, might then be heard.
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No, it doesn't always happen. Unfortunately. And sometimes there is no choice but to fite or die. But Jesus taught us to "give peace a chance" before we go to war.
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For that, and for His many other ethical teachings, even atheists are deeply grateful to the memory of Jesus of Nazareth. We honor Him. We love Him.
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You don't have to be religious to understand the brilliance of the positive inducement to "do the right thing" that Jesus propounded in His Golden Rule: "As you would have others do to you, so too do to them." He gave us a single rule — consider that: one rule — by which we could make tens of thousands of decisions throughout life. And that is reason enuf to want to bring Him presents on His birthday. If we can't give those gifts to Him, Himself, we can at least give them to others knowing that, in His value system as He told it to us, what we do to the least among us, we do to Him.
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For ethical Christians, Christmas is a terribly sad time, because we acknowledge at once the birth of hope and the vicious attempts to extinguish hope. The joyous birth of the baby Jesus is tinged by the sadness we feel that the world was not ready for His message. And isn't ready still.
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The United States can become a gigantic Lebanon or India at Partition, in which religious communities are literally at each other's throat, stabbing and slashing, blowing people up, shooting them, killing everyone who does not believe what the violent lunatics among us believe. Or we can pull back from that particular precipice and let Santa Claus (not "Saint Nick"), Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer unite us in a merry time of year filled with bells and carols.
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I prefer happy holidays to civil war, don't you?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,152.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:40 AM