This is sweet...

This is sweet and well meaning.

But I found a historical error in the video, which I wouldn't mention, except it revealed to me and important underlying truth.

It is only December 1914, and the trenches weren't that deep nor strong as shown, yet.


By the way, the background video is also worth looking at.  (If anyone has any information on whether the French/German lines had any truces, I would be interested in knowing.

I am so glad we caught this in time.

Tilda Swinton's Email To Margaret Cho Is Textbook White Feminism

It is so good that when we can focus on important problems, even it wastes energy, divides allies, and is about a FREAKING MARVEL MOVIE.

Political Choices

 A Message on the GOP Platform from Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory T. Angelo

 

While some people I know have been viewing this with schadenfreud I find this is an interesting example of political strategic choice.

I know a good number of gay people, black people, and others who fundamentally agree with the Republican economic theory -- which I characterize as economic royalism: what's good for the rich is good for all of us -- who have not voted for the Republicans since Goldwater or Nixon, and have come to hate the party.

This son (pardon me child, let's be PC) of the Southern Strategy, which Patrick Buchanan defined is splitting the country in half to taking the bigger half to rule (which gives you some idea of Republican command of math and science).

They feel the need to confirm this segment of the population, and, in the tradition of Southern politics, to limit other voters.

This also means, while elections might matter over some rights issues, some regulatory issues, and some law issues, we have no real choices in issues of economic destiny.



And it works.

It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death...

The title of this note comes from Mary Renault's The Praise Singer.

The novel, which is a good one, covers the politics of ancient Athens, somewhat prior to the start of the Persian Wars.

One of the circumstances it relates – the assassination of Hipparchos (brother of ruler of Athens) by the lovers Harmodios and Aristogeiton over what were (essentially) personal reasons.

This story was later re-written as being the killing the reigning tyrant by a pair of democrats seeking liberty is one of the earliest known examples of conscious, self justified distortion history for political ends (see Thucydides). 

The mention of conscious distortion is poignant, for me at any rate, of feelings I have at the moment.

You see, I find the conscious distortion objectionable, because regardless of the virtue of a political position, historical truth is more important: to disregard is to me evil. That is a small thing, and I only mention it as an example.

Similar actions by people I have known for sometime, people that might be allies to my political goals – albeit on considerably to right of my own positions.

For one example, how should I think of someone who can take joy in 'our' mob closing down a rally by 'their' side (specifically the cancellation of a Trump rally in Vancouver).  Dismissing principals of in the interest of some greater politics: there is the kind of speech that makes a point that this just isn't acceptable.
In another instance, what do one say to a person whose response to criticism of the current president's failures leading up to 2014 elections, is to embrace expediency and the Führerprinzip: what we've got is pretty good and should only be defended.

I could point out how privileged some people are, to live in regions and situations where they have support, and perhaps even majority political status.

Or I could raise the practical issues: consider the reverse situation. I wonder if they could bring themselves to extend such feelings to the person who refused to provide road side service because they disapproved Sanders for President stickers on the care.

I'd like to write off the behavior of these people I have known for some time as political naivete, but I cannot.

I feel I have lost them to evil, an evil which I see more around me.  And I feel ashamed.

Is it hate speech....

...just because you don't like what is said?


Article critical of transgender movement sets off debate about 'The Antioch Review'


Surprised cudos to the administration of Antioch College for standing behind the Antioch Review and free expression.  A positive change from my days there.

The Shoah: Some thoughts from Raul Hilberg

I find Hilberg the most interesting Shoah (Holocaust) historian, and pass on some of his comments on the events and the history:

On how to conduct history...

I have never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers.

As Josephine Tey said, the truth is in account books, not books of accounts.

As to "how it could happen"...

As the Nazi regime developed over the years, the whole structure of decision-making was changed. At first there were laws. Then there were decrees implementing laws. Then a law was made saying, "There shall be no laws." Then there were orders and directives that were written down, but still published in ministerial gazettes. Then there was government by announcement; orders appeared in newspapers. Then there were the quiet orders, the orders that were not published, that were within the bureaucracy, that were oral. Finally, there were no orders at all. Everybody knew what he had to do. [Emphasis added]

As to "why it could happen"...

The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.

As to how our role in our own destruction in Europe -- such as the actions of the Juenräte (Jewish Councils) -- was rooted mistake assumption of European Jews:

I had to examine the Jewish tradition of trusting God, princes, laws and contracts... Ultimately I had to ponder the Jewish calculation that the persecutor would not destroy what he could ...exploit. It was precisely this Jewish strategy that dictated accommodation and precluded resistance.

On where the Shoah fits into the world's history:

The 20th century merits the name "The Century of Murder." 1915 Turks slaughtered 2 million Armenians. 1933 to 1954 the Soviet government encompassed the death of 20 to 65 million citizens. 1933 to 1945 Nazi Germany murdered more than 25 million people.... At present times genocidal strife is underway ...

The people of the world have demonstrated themselves to be so capable of forgetting the murderous frenzies in which their fellows have participated that it is essential that one, at least, be remembered and the world be regularly reminded of it.  [Emphasis added]

On forgiveness (summarized from memory):

On existential level, for the survivors, forgiveness may be beneficial.

For the rest of us, it is presumptuous.

Too late, too late.

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said  

The article,  I lied to myself for years about who my allies were. No more in redstate.org by Ben Howe (a contributing editor for Red State and right wing media producer), despite its provenance, is not worthless to read.


It attempts to cautionary about the bloody obvious, still:

“It's always too late for sorries, but I appreciate the sentiment.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

April 23, 1564-1616

A historian belives that this is the only surviving image of William Shakespeare produced in his
lifetime. To the right of the head is a cipher, which translates as William Shakespeare.

I received a clipping from my mother's mother, Eudice Bernstein -- the
original Yuie (as she shares a cognomen* with my daughter Eugenia) -- in 1978.

Arthur Weyne’s sister used to take the Avenue A bus from 10th Street to Houston almost every work-day morning. "At Fifth Street," he recalls her telling him, "almost every morning, a short, frowzy, chunky shlump of a woman would be waiting for the bus and board it with groans, glowers,protests, and have exertions. She carried bundles – always. They were of a clumsy dimension, varying sizes and divers degrees of vulnerability; there were never fewer than four."

"She always paid her fare grudgingly, then flopped into a seat at the front, sometimes commandeering one with an authority no one ever disputed, and sat there frowning, creaking and giving off emanations of menace. Since she had started her cascade of complaints on the step of the bus, and went on from her seat, haranguing the driver: he stopped too far from the curb; the step was much too high; the fare was unreasonable; he drove like a wild Indian. She went on beyond Houston, so my sister never knew whether she ever stopped caterwauling.

"One day in April, as my sister's bus was approaching Fifth Street, she was relieved to see that Complaining Cora – as of course she known: her name was Cora – was
not at the curb.

But a woman was waiting for the bus, and the driver stopped to take her on. Lo and behold! – my sister insisted this was the only way to express it – the woman was Cora: bundleless, dressed in a lovely frock, a flowered hat and long white gloves. More startling than her costume was her face. She was beaming – pleasant, jovial, gay.

"Cora didn't merely board – she made an entrance. She paid her fare, even the coins tinkled gaily. Then the startled passengers began to call out, 'Is that you, Cora – really you?' The driver pulled the bus to the curb, stopped and faced her, 'What's "hoppen", Cora?'

"'Nothing is "hoppen"', she said, as though proclaiming an amnesty. "'Today is Shakespeare's birthday.'

--Lawrence Van Gelder New York Times,
The Living Section, page C2, June 27, 1979.

-----
*Look it up

Cleaning for Passover: Removing Chametz

Those who know me best, often accuse me of being obsessed with tidying up.

Mind you this is largely because I am the one telling them to pick things up.

But I have been enjoying cleaning up for this Pesach (Passover). 

We will be hosting both a first and second night Seder again, but the second night will be somewhat special, as invited the cast from the play I was participating in will be joining us.

Despite the play being put on by the Seattle Jewish Theater Company, half the cast were not Jews, and the Jews mostly had other plans, so it will be for me an ecumenical affair.

But back the to the cleaning.

The idea of cleaning before Pesach is to remove Chametz – leavened items (also to get the gook out of the shelving). 

Anthropologically, this may relate to an older festival of restarting the bread yeast at the turn of the seasons, which was coupled with a lambing holiday.

There is a rabbinical teaching (some older than Corinthians I 5:8), that this makes Pesach a useful time to think of what is metaphorically old and tired dough, and remove it.

Sort of making the holiday (which is also a Jewish New Year) do double duty.

So, between contracts, having finished the play, and I suppose I should give this some thinking* on what I should/need to clean up in my life.

I try and get rid of bad habits, or figure out what do with my life.

There is also garden weeding, the family filing system, and the front gate.

Taking advice from the cats, nap first.




--------
*Queue the dog standing on its hinder legs comments.

He who troubles in his own house....

The article, Why populist uprisings could end a half-century of greater economic ties - The Washington Post, is somewhat pedestrian, as are most the the comments in it.

One stood out to me, for its cluelessness

"There’s a sense that it [trade policy] hasn’t delivered,” IMF chief economist Maury Obstfeld

You think?


It is not a sense, but a fact that it has not delivered for a lot of people


One would expect in a democracy, that if a lot of people had a serious problem with a policy, we would call it a valid point -- at the very least.

Instead these people get:

“Trying to go back in time, trying to safeguard the achievements of the past will backfire. Because we cannot do that,” said Hans Timmer, the World Bank’s chief economist for Europe and Central Asia.

Not only does that beg the question, it misses the point.  Going forward as we have been has backfired for lots of people.

As a response, this is just as bad as:

“This movement toward isolationism and the movement away from trade is very bad for poor people,” Kim [World Bank President Jim Yong Kim] said last week in Washington.

Gee, losing your way of life, too bad, but in the long run it will help people you don't know -- and the very rich.

I have often wondered if the extreme hard turn toward 19th Century liberal economics and the end of the Soviet threat as and economic, and then a political model, may have some relation. It would make an interesting doctoral thesis question 100 years from now.  Assuming we still have history.

Social Media Etiquette and the future God-Empress of the Universe.

April 1, 2016, Eugenia Montsaroff -- for reasons sufficient unto to this day, known to her father as the future God Empress of the Universe – left Seattle to spend the next two months living in the commune of Lalinde of the Dordogne department in the southwest of the French Republic.

Her grandparents generously will be hosting her. They also moved some some of the French school bureaucracy, and she will be attending a local ‘college’*, for which we can’t thank them enough.

Social Media Etiquette is germane here because I wrestled with the appropriateness of posting this new item.

It is not that I am concerned about violations of Eugenia or my folks privacy, but rather a desire not to be intrusive to members of my social media “network.” 

There were similar concerns in my mind about mentioning the time I dislocated my shoulder, or Eugenia’s bat mitzvah, and similar items.

I have some difficulty being sure that people actually want to know about the content of other’s personal lives.

Generally, I post about political or social issues, or humor.  These I consider, perhaps wrongly, to be of general interest and annoyance**.

However, I decided, that for selfish reasons, I do want people to know about this trip – whether they want to our not.

But how much to tell?  I am, perhaps to the surprise of many, an intrinsically private person.  It isn’t in me to post a snap of a meal, or a lovely scene – not only is it generally no one else’s business, I can’t conceive of their interest.

Currently I am swamped by posts, most of which I ignore, though that some times means I miss things like – my husband had a heart attack, or I am going in for surgery.

So, should I say that Sam (younger brother, and up and coming bear of all trades) just got his yellow belt in Aikido, or that the run of my play has ended and how I feel about it, or that my buffer colored tabby is trying to sit on my hands as I type? 

Do people want to actually know no more about other people’s lives, and what should they be told?












-------
*We had to work the Seattle School bureaucracy, which was harder and less satisfactory.
**The level of response suggests that not that much interest, but still.

It's a poor sword that cuts but one way.

I have a feeling that the latest campaign news, Bernie Sanders plans short hiatus from New York campaign trail to speak at the Vatican, will make so people happy.

I am not one of them.

Whatever virtues the current Pope has, to my mind this is inappropriate.

The Pope is a foreign leader (Prince Bishop of the Vatican City State), so he (like Netanyahu) should have no role in American elections.*

The United States is supposed to be republic of laws accepted and applying to people of fundamentally differing views**, and issues are supposed to be decided in conversation over the merits of the creation and enforcement of those laws.

Even a domestic a religious leader should no more role than that of any citizen, and appeal to religious argument is in and of itself dangerous to a republic.

I may be motivated by my religious upbringing to form certain political and economic positions one thing.  I cannot, and will not expect anyone (even my own people) to accept that as a valid political argument.

That one might (as I do to some degree) agree with the Pope's conclusions, does not validate the appeal to religious authority in public discourse. 

If it did, what of the Pope's other pronouncements, or the positions of the President of the Church of Latter Days Saints, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, or the Lubavicher Rebbe?

I will not lift this sword, as I do not want it lifted by my enemies.


-----
* I am no more willing to believe that this invitation was extended without consideration of American domestic politics that Netanyahu's speech to Congress.

** A paraphrase of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: 'A Constitution is made for people of fundamentally differing views'.

Not an Arsenal for Democracy

Before it gets completely out of date, I thought I would let the world know what I had learned at my local Washington State caucus.

I could simply say how these caucuses aren't as good as the ones I participated in when younger, back home, which for me is in Minnesota.

This will make me sound like a cynical old man*.

But something about these proceedings struck me as fundamentally wrong.

From my perspective, a precint caucus is supposed to be a face to face a meeting of persons committed to a party and its idea.  That is a grass roots event.

It should occur more frequently than every four years, and be more than a tool of a presidential campaign.

I did not attend a precinct caucus, but attended a number of caucuses held in a moderately sized multi-purpose, Gymnasium basketball.

This denotes a certain lack of serious as a grass roots event.  We might have almost have been face to face but:

1. No one could hear.
2. The convenor didn't really know the rules 
3. Information wasn't shared (I didn't find out the date for the convention for which I was selected as a noncommitted delegate until I googled)   

Worst of all, the only thing accomplished was vote on a presidential candidate.

We have an open congressional seat and an open state legislature, but we didn't discuss those.

We didn't select precinct officers, discuss party organization, or (shudder) the platform. should've been discussing those issues we should've been electing our precinct officers.

We didn't discuss how to get together and divide work for the election.

We didn't function as a party meeting.

What did happend was to fall into the tramp of personality cultism, which seems to permeate the American left.  Neither Sanders nor Clinton will govern without an effective political infrastructure.  The other side has it.

I don't know how to fix this locally.  Even if I thought there were those about me who thought this congenial, I am not a person who could rally them**.  Mind, even if I tried, literally no one would have heard me in that room.

To change the political system, an organized party, with some discipline, is required.  Not a hero culture.


-----
*"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -- GBS

**Contrary to what many people think, I am not unself aware, and know the limitations of my personality.

Incredibly insulting piece: Bernie Sanders: a Jew With a Christian Politic

Here is a wonderful piece of work Bernie Sanders: a Jew With a Christian Politic

Please explain to me why describing a Jew as being Christian is supposed to be a positive?

Is it not arrogant to think that any people, but particularlly Jews, require Christian approval for our politics?

Or to tacitly limit progressive as "a Christian politic: one that cares for the poor and outcast."

One must ask, what is the author and those who proudly repost this, thinks is a Jewish politic?  

Would one see such comparison about another people, without charges of cultural theft, microagression, or priviledge.

Why does a discussion of politics in America require the injection of religion, and why one religion rather than another.

Never forget, there are those of us who love this country and work for its good despite any of its Christian heritage.

All Extremists are Cousins

I find this article in the Washington Post,
Ga. parents, offended by the ‘Far East religion’ of yoga, get ‘Namaste’ banned from school, amusing.

Given that we recent banning of a Yoga class banned over 'cultural appropriation' in Canada, more proof that all extremists are cousins.

We are becoming Pakistan, two.

I  often hate it when events prove me right.

However, an article by Sally Koln: Thank Government Appeasement of Wingnuts for the Oregon Standoff , echos the brilliant blog posting of April 2015 (We are becoming Pakistan).


Rather than wasting time with hollow gestures about gun control, President Buchanan Obama might actually spend time enforcing the law against those who seek to destroy our state.

Note the language in support of terror

Clever use of language by Fox, no: Armed protesters at national wildlife refuge say government force would risk lives.


By all means, it wants to portray its (Fox News') terrorists as protesters.  I might go so far as to say, its (Fox News') traitors.

My usage of the term traitor is not hyperbolic, because I believe in supporting the police and according to the Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward:

"These men came to Harney County claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers, when in reality these men had alternative motives to attempt to overthrow the county and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States,"

I commend the reactionary movements and Republican Party's Völkischer Beobachter, on its skill.

Interesting technical point, Fox News' title for this article on its web site is "Armed protesters at national wildlife refuge say government force would risk lives", though the metadata means that a direct post to facebook would referred to "Armed Militia".