markinore
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Posts posted by markinore
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As one who was coming of age in the late '60s and early '70s and who participated in a number of antiwar activities, I can say that it certainly was NOT a fad for me and many others. Many of us were sincere in our beliefs that the war in Vietnam was evil, and this obligated us to vigorously oppose it.
And do you recall how you treated returning American soldiers? I was young then, but I remember....and you should be ashamed.
I have nothing to apologize for how I treated returning soldiers. Many were my friends or my friends' brothers. Two of my friends' brothers did not come back alive. Some came back with their psyches badly damaged. I thought that some of the antiwar protesters I respected most were those who had fought in Vietnam and had the greatest direct perspective about what a travesty that war was. They were inspirations to me and many others. The people who most owe an apology to Vietnam veterans are the ones who sent them there for no good reason and neglected those who made it back.
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I saw on the tube last night that this particular player has suffered some great losses recently. His mother, sister and fiance died in a head-on collision last year and he lost his father this past summer.
And all those unfortunate incidents occurred just in time, because, as we all know, it is illegal to award an Olympic medal to anyone whose life has been free of personal tragedy.
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As one who was coming of age in the late '60s and early '70s and who participated in a number of antiwar activities, I can say that it certainly was NOT a fad for me and many others. Many of us were sincere in our beliefs that the war in Vietnam was evil, and this obligated us to vigorously oppose it.
I do understand, however, why opposing the war was perceived as a fad for some people. The cultural upheaval that accompanied the political upheaval was an attraction for some. For others, there was a belief that the cultural "accessories" (for want of a better term) would somehow lead to political changes.
I don't know what Mark McLemore did, believed, or felt during that time. A close reading of his letter makes me curious. He says, "I remember that opposition to the war was a fad. . . ." Well, Mr. McLemore, were YOU opposed to the war? What did you do about it? His phrasing makes me wonder whether he actually was not opposed to the war at the time, and instead is commenting on what he regarded in others. ". . .almost all of us in Seattle adopted the fashion of pacifism because it was cool and a good way to get chicks." Again, this is a strangely disembodied way to characterize a highly contentious period in history. Did McLemore adopt the "fashion" of pacifism? If so, he did he get any chicks for his trouble?
It has become a cliche to say "If you remember the '60s, you weren't really there." I disagree. I remember them and I was there. The period was fraught with excesses, mistakes, and stupidity, but it was also characterized by hopefulness, idealism, and nobility. Oh, and by the way, we were right about Vietnam.
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The child, whose identity has not been released, is so sensitive that he could have a reaction merely by smelling the breath of someone who has eaten the banned foods.
So how does the kid survive going to the movies? Or to Wal-Mart? It sounds as if his chances of survival are pretty close to zero no matter what precautions are taken. That is not to be cavalier about trying to minimize the chances of someone inadvertently causing his death, but he's only in school for a fraction of the time.
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My angst stems from frustration that we are not killing them with more precision and an eye towards final victory.
Do you sincerely believe that we can kill our way to victory? Can we kill enough people to achieve peace? Security? If we blow up a mosque, a leader, a militia, will be able to get on an airplane without taking off our shoes and having baggage inspectors rip off our luggage? Isn't it more likely that we will inspire more numerous and more aggressive opposition? That is the history of this region of the world for the last 1000 years. You recognize that the politicians are craven and manipulative, and yet you buy into their public pronouncements that America will be safer if we kill enough Iraquis. Please help me understand your rationale.
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Before the Crusades was the Islamic Conquests... Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Africa, Spain, Parts of France and the Byzantine empire were all attacked/conquered by the first series of Jihads.
When making historical arguments, keep things in historical context.
You're absolutely correct about the Arab conquests. The big difference is that those were motivated primarily by the same things that motivated most conflicts in that period--a desire to obtain material wealth. The Crusades, in contrast, were motivated more by religious fervor, specifically Christian extremism. Certainly, other religions and their extremist adherents have committed other notable atrocities. I just thought in the context of the original post--the good or evil that Christianity has done--a brief acknowledgement of the historical importance of the Crusades is worthy of mention.
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CJ, I understand your skepticism. Here is an abstract presented at a meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine that I found interesting:
Sprint Intervals and Muscle AdaptationsAuthors: Kirsten Burgomaster and colleagues from McMaster University
Abstract #: 0152
New research is showing that endurance performance can be dramatically improved with very high intensity anaerobic work. In a previous study from this group, six bouts of very high intensity interval sprinting (4-7 Wingate sprints per session) conducted over two weeks (three times per week for two weeks) improved time to exhaustion at 80% of VO2 max by an almost unbelievable amount (baseline time to exhaustion = 25 minutes; post training time to exhaustion = 51 minutes).
In this study, the same researchers duplicated the prior training protocol and this time measured both metabolic adaptations and changes in time trial performance. In eight men, high intensity sprint training improved resting muscle glycogen by 53%, improved maximal activity of several aerobic and anaerobic enzymes, reduced the amount of lactic acid produced during exercise and improved time trial performance (+10.4%) and average power produced (+25W) during the time trial.
Wingate sprints are the same as the Tabata intervals. If these data are true, it's a phenomenal result.
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I think we would all agree that all those working for the U.S. in a military capacity, whether uniformed or not, should be financially supported in a way that adequately compensates for their service (to the extent that risking your life can ever be adequately compensated) and allows them to care for their families. My take on the data provided by Wirlwind is not that the overall payroll for the personnel is excessive, but that it is massive.
That calls into question whether the American people as a whole benefit from this. If that expenditure is truly required for our defense, that is one thing. On the other hand, if that cost is for the purpose of imperial adventures, as in Iraq, and supporting defense companies profits, that is quite another.
To me, that is why the term "war on terror" is absolutely perfect for the Haliburtons of the world. It is vague enough to allow rationalizing the irrational. Unlike WW II or even the Cold War, it can never be definitively won ("Well, we conquered Iraq, but bin Laden's out there somewhere, so we have to spend billions not just on conventional forces, but nuclear weapons, antiballistic missile systems, and everything else some military supplier can come up with."). Of course, to make people willingly pay taxes to pay for that, you have to keep them scared all the time. You have to hype the real dangers, possible dangers, and occasionally fabricated dangers. Then you have to assert simulataneously that the only defense, in addition to massive expenditures, is the Leader. Bush asserts, "America is safer," as his henchmen issue warnings. Kerry would be no better in this regard, incidentally, just smoother.
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It's impossible in the post-9/11 era to discuss the long-term effects of Christianity without discussing the Crusades. The Crusades began in the late 11th century. At that time, the Arab world had the highest level of scholarship and science, and Europe was the third world. The pope called upon the armies of Europe to attack and seize Jerusalem for no reason other than, well, it's a holy city to us and it's controlled by a bunch of heathens.
That unleashed a 200 year period of destruction, loss of life, and waste of treasure. Jerusalem was ultimately taken and lost by both sides about a half dozen times before the Europeans got the hell out until after World War I.
One interesting episode that perhaps foreshadowed more recent events: In one of the Crusades, when Richard the Lionhearted led his forces to the gates of Jersualem and was about to conquer the enemy, he suddenly stopped. He recognized that the problem was not taking the city, but devoting all of his army to holding it afterward. Naturally, this would have left England poorly defended and economically compromised. So he turned around and hauled ass back to merry old England.
But then Richard the Lionhearted was a smart guy, he wasn't a religious fanatic who believed he was guided by God, and he had better advisers than Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Perle.
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The Tabata protocol was developed by a Japanese researcher who tried to determine the optimum duration, intensity, frequency, and rest periods to improve endurance. He found that the best results were obtained with 20 seconds of exertion performed at maximum intensity with 10 seconds of rest for 4-7 cycles. This is done three times a week. Although this sounds like it isn't a lot of total training, the gains in endurance are said to be significant.
I have been trying this for a little over a month. It is harder than it sounds. I have done the Tabata protocol on a stationary bike. Then I have tested myself on a running treadmill (to avoid confounding the results by a training effect) on non-training days. I do seem to be improving my endurance by both objective and subjective measures, but it is difficult to remove observer bias from the equation.
Anybody else heard of Tabata or tried this type of training?
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A friend of mine has these. I have used them but I don't like them. They are cheaper than buying a whole range of fixed dumbbells, but the weights rattle in their holders and they are awfully bulky. If you can't afford fixed weight dumbbells, you can buy separate bars, clamps, and free weights to achieve the same effect.
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I was in Phoenix last week when Bush was there. They shut down the Scottsdale airport for almost 24 hours. I was told by a local that the Scottsdale airport is mostly used for private jets. So I guess the people who were most inconvenienced down there were those who going to vote for the motherfucker!
A small bit of poetic justice, but a gratifying one.
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Kosovo a quagmire? Do we have over 100,000 troops in Kosovo? Do we have a back door draft of reservists because our army is spread too thin in Kosovo? If you do think Kosovo is a quagmire, must you not admit that Iraq is a far worse quagmire?
Let's face it, in all of America's attempts to "straighten out" other countries since WW II, we've gotten it right exactly twice: Japan and Germany. Both of these countries had the advantages of substantial ethnic and religious homogeneity and long-standing traditions of government, economic stability, and social order. In too many attempts at nation building (regardless of whether that term is used), America fails in one of two ways: either we install a malleable government that is eventually overthrown by a regime that hates us (see Vietnam, Iran) or we install a criminal or fanatic who we then have to deal with ourselves (Panama, Afghanistan). I guess the only question about Iraq now is which type of failure are we going to see?
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No, Matt, Clinton is not running again but Fairweather's point is well-taken: nobody cried foul about Clinton committing troops more than any other president since FDR and his lack of military experience. Not to metion his protests about the Viet Nam War.
Among the big differences between Clinton's and Bush's use of military force is that Clinton didn't use a rationale that proved to be false, didn't get troops bogged down in a quagmire, didn't expend resources that detracts from chasing down Al Qaeda, and didn't serve to augment the recruiting efforts of Al Qaeda. I didn't particularly like Clinton either, but at least he didn't create a mess like Bush.
The jury is still out on whether Kerry "served with valor" or not. Funny you say he served with valor, yet he called himself a war criminal at the time. Which is it? The Bush Administration is not "parading around" John O'Neill and the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth; they are working on their own initiative to right what they feel is an error in Kerry's memory of events that Kerry was involved in. They were a little more involved with Kerry than you claim by saying that they "happened to be somewhere in Vietnam at the same time..." These men were involved in the action Kerry touts, one was his CO, and another was on Kerry's crew.Odd, isn't it, that those who were on Kerry's boat, those who saw him in action, invariably have the highest regard for him, and the attacks are coming from those who weren't even there?
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Combined days in combat of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Perle: ZERO!
Girlie enough for you?
Reagan never saw combat and I wouldn't say he was anything less than a larger-than-life man's man. My opinion on your stupid post.
Obviously, combat is not necessary to prove one's manliness. Indeed, the "Terminator" himself, who doesn't hesitate to use the "girlie man" parody, never fought. I meant to contrast the supposed machismo of the original post, which demeaned Kerry's manliness, with the actual chickenhawk behavior of administration figures. Bush et al. did everything they could to avoid combat when they had the chance. It is disingenuous at best for them to cloak themselves in the mantle of fierce defenders of the country at this time. It is even worse in this context to demean Kerry, who volunteered for combat.
Although, now that you mention it, what made Reagan so manly--aside, of course, from movie special effects?
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Combined days in combat of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Perle: ZERO!
Girlie enough for you?
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I like Mythos, but I have a very narrow foot that makes them not fit so well. About four months ago I bought some Evolv Bandits. The fit is excellent, and the rubber seems even stickier than 5.10 rubber. They have become my smearing shoe of choice. Consider Evolv, especially if your feet aren't real wide.
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Oh, why don't you just admit it? You don't like any journalists unless they back you up. "Instigating" and "creating" news was a charge that has been directed for over 40 years at media in this country that covered civil rights protests, antiwar protests, and any other activities that government authorities didn't want to appear in newspapers or on TV.
If your accusation is that Al Jazeera is biased, you're right. All media are biased. In the Arab world, where the traditions of independent journalism are of miniscule duration compared to ours, Al Jazeera is the only source of news that is not directly controlled by some government. Al Jazeera is unquestionably in a period of rapid evolution, and much of its reporting can rightly be criticized in terms of journalistic thoroughness, ethics, fairness, and other standards. Journalists in this country, with far less personal risk and far longer histories, can be criticized on these grounds as well.
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Have you been saying, "The U.S. invaded Iraq to build a democracy. Naturally, we must squelch any independent media that do not support us unequivocally. That brings democracy."
If that's what you have been saying, damn, you have been right!
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God's rights:
1) God is allowed to go through the 10 items or less checkout line regardless of how much he has in his cart.
2) God is allowed to tell the same jokes over and over, and you have to laugh at them. He can also say "Hot enough for you?" on a hot day, but you don't have to laugh, just steaksauce ruefully.
3) God is allowed to pee in the pool.
4) God is allowed to keep his walkman on when you're talking to him--hey, if he wants to know what you're saying, he can just know, so get over it.
5) God is allowed to bet on football games, even though he knows who is going to win. He is not, however, allowed to change the outcome according to who prayed more before the game.
There are others, but I was one of those Catholic kids who went to public school and only learned the short version at catechism classes.
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We have always been taught that dropping the bombs was necessary because 1) the Japanese were so fanatical that they would fight to the death otherwise, and 2) it ultimately would save American lives. The following suggests an alternative hypothesis (http://www.counterpunch.org/price08062004.html):
In the Shadow of Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Cultural Conditions of Unconditional Surrender
By DAVID PRICE
Today's fifty-ninth anniversary of the United States' bombing of Hiroshima finds most Americans still satisfied that President Truman's decision to use the bomb was a difficult but necessary one designed to bring peace and save lives. It seems unlikely that many Americans will reconsider their positions on this issue. To some Hiroshima has become the paradigm of the very notion of "bombing for peace," and one's variance from this position tends to mark an individual as holding liberal or radical political tendencies. But a few days ago as I was reading through the papers of the late sinologist and cold warrior George Edward Taylor at the University of Washington I encountered some documents which reminded me that questioning the wisdom of using atomic weapons against Japanese civilians to end the Pacific War is not a position reserved for the contemporary left: even at the time of these bombings there were embedded conservative members of the military-intelligence community who viewed the use of these weapons as unnecessary folly.
George Taylor was a classic Twentieth Century international man of intrigue. He ran intelligence operations in Japanese occupied China, during World War Two served as Deputy Director for the Far East of the Office of War Information (OWI), later worked with Rand, State, other articulations of the Twentieth Century's revolving door of American intelligence agencies and universities. During World War Two Taylor brought anti-Communist sinologist Karl Wittfogel to the United States, after the war he helped establish a safe nest for then "useful" Nazi-collaborator Nicholas Poppe, and during the McCarthy era he betrayed his former friend Owen Lattimore before Senator McCarran's Internal Security Subcommittee. His support for the Vietnam War on the University of Washington campus marked him as a Nixonian reactionary. Taylor was a sort of Third Man who shape-shifted through the foreground and background of various Twentieth Century theatres of conflict-and his correspondence finds him holding court with the likes Henry Kissinger, Edward Lansdale and Harold Lasswell.
In 1996 I met Taylor at his spectacular penthouse home atop Seattle's Pill Hill-- overlooking the city and the Olympic and Cascade Mountains--to conduct a lengthy interview covering his contacts with Wittfogel, the McCarthy period and his years supervising a small army of anthropologists weaponizing anthropology against the Japanese at the Office of War Information (OWI) during the Second World War.
At OWI Taylor's team of social scientists studied Japanese culture and created cultural-specific propaganda-primarily leaflets dropped from airplanes on Japanese soldiers and civilians. Because Taylor believed that an understanding of culture was vital to the success of his OWI team he recruited over a dozen anthropologists and other social scientists to work on his Japanese analysis and propaganda campaigns. Among other resources, Taylor's team had access to five-thousand diaries seized from captured and killed Japanese soldiers, and these heartfelt writings were used as important resources for voicing the OWI's successful propaganda efforts. Ruth Benedict's OWI work resulted in her post-war publication of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword which analyzed the culture and personality of the Japanese. Benedict's work focused on the role and importance of the Emperor in Japanese culture and reflected many of the institutional views of Taylor's OWI division.
When I interviewed Taylor I was surprised by his insistence that at the beginning of the war he viewed his psychological warfare programs as a means of ending the war by helping the Japanese overcome all the cultural obstacles preventing their surrender-however, as the war advanced and the American advantage became clear he came to see his job as being to convince U.S. civilian and military leaders that they did not have to engage in acts of genocidal annihilation to end the war. Racist stereotypes of maniacal Japanese soldiers and citizens fighting to the death dominated the War Department and the White House, and Taylor and his staff increasingly strove to battle this domestic enemy as a prime deterrent of peace. It was with great difficulty that Taylor and his staff of anthropologists worked to convince civilian and military personnel that that Japanese were even culturally capable of surrender.
Taylor's papers contain numerous typewritten speeches capturing his efforts to convince U.S. military strategists that the Japanese could surrender. In one such undated speech (probably from 1944) he argued that,
"If we accept, as we must, the view that Japanese soldiers, in spite of their indoctrination, are as human as other troops, we shall be the less surprised at the mounting evidence of their very human reactions to defeat. We are taking more and more prisoners. Two years ago it would have been very unusual for sixty men to allow themselves to be picked up out of the water when their transport had been sunk. In New Guinea and Burma stragglers are coming in out of the jungles to surrender without a struggle. We have known for a long time that many Japanese officers have been evacuated from indefensible positions and that their reaction on places such as Attu, where escape was impossible, was not to fight to the last man."
But it was just this sort of reasoned analysis--arguing against the War Department's pull for a genocidal campaign to obliterate a "race" believed incapable of surrender--that was ignored by the War Department and White House. The OWI had little success in convincing President Roosevelt of the importance on not including the demise of the Japanese Emperor in America's demands for unconditional surrender, but as Taylor told Sharon Boswell in a 1996 interview "fortunately Roosevelt died and Truman came in."
Taylor maintained that Truman understood the OWI's insistence that surrender could be negotiated and he seemed to grasp the importance of exempting the Emperor from conditions of "unconditional" surrender. Taylor said that Truman authorized the OWI to communicate this to the Japanese. As Japan's war effort collapsed there was a growing interest in surrender.
A few days ago I found among Taylor's papers and correspondence some blurry photocopies of declassified intelligence reports from the codename "MAGIC-Diplomatic Summaries." These are translated Japanese diplomatic intercepts that were secretly being decoded and read by American military intelligence during the war. A May 11, 1945 MAGIC intercept supports the views of Taylor, others at the OWI, and elsewhere in military intelligence that the Japanese military were ripe for surrender:
"Report of peace sentiment in Japanese armed forces: On 5 May the German Naval Attaché in Tokyo dispatched the following message to Admiral Doenitz:
'An influential member of the Admiralty Staff has given me to understand that, since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard, provided they were halfway honorable.'
Note [by U.S. military intelligence]: Previously noted diplomatic reports have commented on signs of war weariness in official Japanese Navy circles, but have not mentioned such an attitude in Army quarters."
This mention of "halfway honorable" terms of surrender was exactly why the anthropologists in Taylor's group had been focusing on the importance of the emperor in Japanese society. But such considerations were easily ignored by a War Department whose cost benefit calculations weighed the coming hundreds of thousands dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki against the balance of specifying the acceptable conditions that came to follow unconditional surrender.
Even more tragic is a July 20th MAGIC intercept in which Japanese Ambassador Sato advocated his desire for a Japanese surrender if the United States would assure him that the "Imperial House" would remain in existence. These MAGIC Documents are a sad testimony that in the days before the attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American intelligence had good evidence that Ambassador Sato was close to surrendering to the Americans. But neither the knowledge gleaned from these intercepts nor the general advice of social scientists at the OWI dissuaded American plans to unleash nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians.
Perhaps it is George Taylor's gloomy credentials as a hawk, a dangerously-anti-Communist-conservative, and as an intelligence insider that makes his voice such an intriguing one in the chorus of those questioning the necessity of Truman's deployment of the A-Bomb. While out of the A-Bomb decision making loop Taylor and others at the OWI knew Japan was ripe for (pseudo-unconditional) surrender. Like many others, Taylor later came to believe that Truman's decision to use of nuclear weapons had more to do with "scaring the hell out of the Soviet Union" than it did with saving the inflated estimates of American lives some argued would be lost in a Japanese invasion and occupation.
But beyond the obvious message sent to the Soviet's, Truman's decision to use his doomsday weapon (twice) without presenting the Japanese with the actual conditions of his unconditional surrender revealed elements of an important American post war trajectory-a trajectory of violence where American military force became the tool of preference selected over the promise of diplomacy.
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Who are you voting for? I'm not pleased with either one (is anyone?), but I'm not sure that Kerry/Edwards would do a better job than Bush.
I also am not thrilled about voting for Kerry. I am not sure that he will pull the troops out of Iraq or stand up to corporate greed or repeal the Patriot Act or stop the stupid military programs such as Star Wars.
But I am going to vote for Kerry, and this is why: If Bush is still president, it may not mean a hell of a lot to me or a lot of others on this site. I have a good job and health insurance for my family. My kids go to good schools and will never be forced to join the army to pay for college and risk being shot for doing so. A lot of people in this country aren't as fortunate, and if Kerry is elected, there is a reasonable chance they will have a better shot at getting health care coverage. Kerry probably won't escalate the war in the Middle East. He is probably less likely to start additional wars. He may put more money into education. There's a better chance that the minimum wage will be increased.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but for the least fortunate Americans, that's the best they can hope for.
Nader? I like him, too. He's one of the few prominent individuals who says (accurately), that we don't need a third party in this country, we need a second party. The Democrats and Republicans are both controlled by the same corporate interests and will never turn on their masters. But what are Ralph's chances of winning? Zero. So voting for him if you live in a state that is close will only help Bush. If you live in a safe state and want to do that, go for it. Or if you live in a state that is in the bag for Bush, by all means vote Nader. But if you're in a state that matters, it's hard to defend a Nader vote.
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Where does it mention dinosaurs in the Bible? I must have slept through that part.
"Yea, and Moses led the children of Israel through the desert, and they found in their path a big fucking brontasaurus.
"And the children of Israel said to Moses, 'We're outta here.'
"And Moses said, 'Fear not, for the Lord sayeth continue on this path.'
"And Moses looked closer, and saw that the brontasaurus had a thorn in its paw. And Moses removed the thorn from the paw of the mighty beast. And the brontasaurus left the path, and the children of Israel continued on toward the promised land.
"And the children of Israel said to Moses, 'Yeah, but that was some scary shit.'"
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Roosevelt: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
Churchill: "I have nothing to offer you, but blood, sweat, toil, and tears."
Bush: "I have nothing to offer you but fear."
Bush's approval rating is at an all time low, and the only category in which he gets a majority approval rating is "defending against terrorism." So why shouldn't we be suspicious that last week's Orange Alert was politically motivated, especially when it turns out that the intelligence on which it was based is three years old?
Oh, and by the way, the fact that this crap was bought into by all the TV networks and all the major newspapers should be a nail in the coffin of the idea of the "liberal" media.
Moore takes on GW - Again
in Spray
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Why, if I didn't know better, I'd call that a flip-flop!