James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

We've heard about the traffic in Atlanta. One of the considerations on our list, if we move there, is finding a place to live where all the places we'd need to go on a routine basis - my wife's work (my office is at home), grocery shopping, etc. - would be close by so we could avoid that traffic as much as possible. A couple of the factors that led us to look at Atlanta are the presence of a number of good inpatient/residential mental health facilities where my wife could work (she's a clinical social worker) and a good VA hospital for me.
Our daughter and grandkids recently moved to Florida, but she's staying away from Miami - she wants a safer, quieter place for the kids - so they're out in the Keys.

For me, the alternate history stories are fascinating if they're well done. Harry Turtledove's prose is nothing special, but his background research is deep and thorough and he does a very good job of portraying the ordinary day-to-day lives of people in other times. He also puts a lot of thought into the implications of the changes in events he posits and explores them in detail.
Turtledove has studied the personalities of people who shaped events, too, and often incorporates them as characters, intermingled with fictional characters who wouldn't have been famous but are often leading players in his narratives.

There are also a couple of excellent books titled What If and What If 2, which are collections of essays by military historians on how things might have been caused to turn out differently and where those different outcomes might have led.

Changing your behavior when the situation changes or you get new information - hmmm, I think I heard another word for that - what was it, what was it? Learning? Adapting? Self-correcting? Growth? I guess any of them would have to be synonyms for "flip-flopping" for reactionaries. They might as well disconnect their sense organs at birth, because they have no use for new input.

People who are incapable of changing their minds are not resolute or strong. They're rigid, brittle, fixated, full of false pride. The most useful measure of intelligence seems to be the capacity for learning and adapting, and by that standard, the neocons are abysmally stupid.

We're going to take a vacation in Atlanta soon, checking out the area because we're considering moving there. Sounds as if we should be ready for people to ask us what we think of the U.S.

Does anyone else remember how, back in the late 60s/early 70s, the villains in the cartoons so often had Southern accents? Except when they were sinister communists or crazed veterans - oh, wait, that last was more of a live TV cliche.

I wonder what definition of Socialism George Will had in mind. When I think of things like Social Security, Medicare, and the VA, I see success stories that are ongoing, although they wouldn't be if the Republicans had succeeded in privatizing them.

The things that are dead appear to me to be the neocon agendas of gutting social programs and building an American empire in the middle east and southwest Asia.

Likewise, I agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes when he said "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization." But not when they're misused, squandered, due to either malfeasance or incompetence.

Yes... once when some relatives from Ohio came to visit, they showed up with several loaded guns in their car - we asked why, and they said those had been in case they were attacked by bandits or Apaches. I could just see that - Geronimo ambushing people on I-40.

Jim, you're right about fire being nature's way of cleaning up and rejuvenating the flora - if the forest's healthy, though, and it's allowed to burn when it burns (sorry, Smoky, but over 90% of forest fires are caused by lightning, not careless people), then the ground cover stays limited enough that it can burn off without reaching the crowns or killing mature trees. The fires in Yellowstone were so devastating because so much stuff had grown up due to suppression of fires that they did wipe out everything - when the trees are dead due to bark beetles, they go up like torches too. At that point the best way to deal with the issue may be to use controlled burns to clear out the dead stretches so new growth can start. Gotta watch those controlled burns, though - about ten years ago, a forest service supervisor who'd been urged to postpone a controlled burn because the wind was too strong for it to be safe ordered the burn to be done on schedule, it got out of control (of course) and destroyed a lot of the town of Los Alamos. Not long after that I took a job with the state health department, and ended up sharing a small office with a woman who was coordinating relief efforts for the people who had to evacuate and lost their houses and everything in them in the fire. She had a souvenir of the fire on her desk - it was an egg; it looked like an ordinary egg, but somehow the heat had rendered it rock solid. A lot of the people who were made homeless by the fire developed serious symptoms of PTSD, although they'd gotten out of town just ahead of the fire.

The variation people from New Mexico often get is the assumption that it's either part of Mexico or its own country. People contact the state tourism bureau asking things like what language is spoken, what the currency is, what shots they need - they got one letter from a teacher in NYC asking for posters or other souvenirs she could put up in her high school classroom as part of a unit on foreign countries - and she was a geography teacher. A lot of people seem to think Texas borders directly on Arizona, too. Kind of funny - in square miles, NM is the fifth largest state in the country, and Arizona's sixth. (1 through 4 are Alaska, Texas, California, and Montana.)

I went to a restaurant once in Northampton, MA, that billed itself as serving authentic New Mexican food (a subset of Mexican food, you could say; it's distinctive.) I knew I was in for a disappointment when all the decor was Native-American-themed. The server asked whether we wanted chips and salsa, and I thought maybe it would be okay, but what she brought was potato chips and seafood cocktail sauce. The closest thing to actual Mexican food in that town was Taco Bell.

Maybe the problem is that (it seems to me anyway) the only legitimate functions of government are to do things for us that we can't do for ourselves - large-scale infrastructure and R&D, keeping food and drugs from poisoning us, defending us from invasions, policing and firefighting, quality education, etc., but the way government typically starts and evolves is as a glorified combination of protection racket and religious tyranny.

I'm willing to pay taxes to do those things we can't do for ourselves and to help people; in some ways you could probably call me a socialist - although I'm not religious I do believe that we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers. The unrestrained capitalist philosophy of "greed is good, look out for #1, screw everyone except me and my family and friends" is nothing but sociopathy with a pretty coat of paint on it. But those justified functions of government have nothing to do with bringing religion into government, fighting wars for the sake of connected corporations and the egos of insecure and dimwitted politicians, trying to regulate people's love lives and marriages, and so on.

Newt Gingrich is the guy who tried to shut down the government because his feelings were hurt when they made him use the back door instead of the front one on Air Force One. He's not a public servant - he doesn't put the good of the country first; he puts it about third, behind his own gratification and then the Republican party.

On the other hand, by current "conservative" standards, Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon would be called pinko liberals, and somebody like Limbaugh who dodged the draft in Vietnam would be scorned by Republicans. So by all means, let's send him back if we can figure out how.

I avoid Limbaugh - like Coulter, between the stuff that doesn't make sense and the stuff they just make up out of thin air, it's just venom and fantasy. Because of that, it seems pointless to waste time or attention on them - they're like that kid we all knew in school who was always making stuff up so anything he/she told us was likely to be crap.

I would have more respect for a conservative commentator who started with facts and then proceeded honestly and logically to make his/her arguments, but I've never heard of one. Not to say there isn't one out there, but if so, he/she is hiding.

America when we were young... let's see, that would be when minorities got lynched if they tried to vote, women had to put up with blatant sexual harassment and sexual assault and got blamed for it if they said anything (unless the offender was a minority, in which case see previous note about lynching), child abuse was rampant and considered no one's business except the parents' so no one intervened, no one cared about the environment so we were busy creating Love Canals and rivers that could catch on fire, we were doing nuclear attack drills in grade schools because we were sure the Soviets were about to nuke us and they feared the same from us, and gays had to stay in the closet or be persecuted or murdered... yeah, good times, I can see why somebody would want to go back to them.

The Great Gamble may mention the Romans still - I'm only about halfway through. Hasn't yet.

The Russians and the British kept edging in and out of Afghanistan in what people called the Great Game in the 19th century; the tsars were in an expansionist mood and south looked like a good way to push their frontier. The Brits were terrified of either the Russians gaining the use of a warm water port on the Indian Ocean, or messing with the monopolistic control of commerce in India enjoyed by British corporations.

The Russians cooled it with Afghanistan late in the 1800s, being more worried about the growing tangle of treaties and unstable royals and terrorist groups that ultimately led to World War I.

After the Communists won their war against the Czarist government (and against the U.S. Army forces Wilson sent to Russia after WWI was over, to fight the communists and try to prevent them from taking power); the Soviet Union was the first nation to recognize the independence of Afghanistan - ironic, as they were destined to be the country that did the most to wreck Afghanistan and reduce it to a failed state.

Pakistan is a whole order of magnitude scarier. It's slipping toward a society like the Taliban made in the parts of Afghanistan they controlled - oriented toward religious fundamentalism, jihad, and martyrdom - and Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

Myself, I use a Lent remover, one of those tape roller gadgets; it gets the stuff right off. Between that and the Lent traps on the washer and dryer, not that much gets onto us or our clothes.

If you turn something over to someone else for safekeeping so you won't use it during Lent, would you say you lent it for Lent?

Oh... maybe that qualifies for the "it wasn't funny when it happened" string too!

Has anyone ever decided to give up their faith for Lent?

The Taliban were brutal but were incompetent at running the country. They never did really fully control it; some of their internal enemies were still fighting them - their strongest opponent, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had held out with his faction in the Panjshir Valley until Al Qaeda assassinated him as a favor to their Taliban hosts two days before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington. The Northern Alliance were still alive and kicking and available for us to ally with against the Taliban when we invaded.

I'm reading The Great Gamble right now, a solid history of the Soviet war in Afghanistan that also briefly covers the previous failed occupations of that country by the Persian Empire, the Macedonians, the Mongols, the Brits, and the pre-Soviet Russians. Every time any army from elsewhere has ever gone into Afghanistan, the people living there have dedicated themselves to killing them and bleeding them dry, no matter the cost to their own people, until they left, after which the various tribal groups went back to fighting each other (not that they completely stop when they're invaded.)

Has anyone in either the Bush or Obama administrations been told that Afghanistan is nicknamed "the graveyard of empires?"

It made sense to go after Bin Laden and Al Qaeda after 9/11, but we should have done it faster, more selectively, and finished it, then gotten out. It was then, and is now, a job for the Seals, Delta, Green Berets, and the CIA. About the only successful tactic the Soviets found was to use their Spetsnaz special forces, their equivalent of the Seals or Delta, disguised as locals. But they were too prideful to stick with that and stop their indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, and they went limping out of the country with their tails between their legs after a decade.

As for Gitmo and the CIA's little shops of horrors, when you have a prisoner you really want to give you the truth, there are effective interrogation techniques, but they don't involve torture. The things we've done there have been more helpful in recruiting for militant Islamic fundamentalism than anything they could have done themselves.

We should still carry on trials, but legally - if we have legitimate evidence against people, we'll get convictions.

I also have to laugh at the Republicans' sanctimonious bleating about the deficit. First Reagan, then Bush I, created the biggest deficits this country had ever seen - Reagan (Mr. "government is the problem") tripled it! - then Clinton came in, and even with the Republicans who controlled Congress from 1994 on sabotaging him every way they could, turned it into a surplus. Then Bush II - the so-called "CEO/MBA president; in light of recent events, that was a warning - blew that in record time and ran the deficit back up to a level that outdid his father and Reagan. Obama couldn't possibly mismanage it worse than they did.

I have to laugh at their dogged determination to misread any feedback from voters or events that tells them they've blundered. They figure out that since they've crapped all over women's rights since forever, women (except for fundamentalists) don't vote for them - so do they change those policies? No, they tell themselves, "We gotta get us a wimmin on our ticket too!" and pull Sarah Palin out of their hat. When women note that she's an enemy of women's rights even though she's female, they blow that off. Then they note that minorities, and a lot of white voters, are offended by their record as the party of racism since Nixon's "southern strategy", so do they change those policies? Noooohh - they tell themselves, "We gotta get us some of them minorities!" and out pop Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal as two of the rising stars of the GOP - never mind the fact that they're just as fundamentalist, intolerant, mean-spirited, and hostile to the interests of anyone who isn't rich as the WASPiest Republican who ever got inducted to Skull and Bones.

It's like that scene in The Jerk where Steve Martin is frantically dodging bullets as a guy shoots at him, tries to take cover behind a pyramid of motor oil cans, and the guy keeps shooting at him through the cans - does he say "he's after me?" No! He shrieks, "He hates cans!" They should make that character their mascot.

Three Bible items that are often repeated but that many Biblical scholars think are errors of translation:
1. That parting of the Red Sea thing. The pre-translation phrase was "Yam Suph" - it has often been translated as "Red Sea", but at the time also referred to the "Reed Sea" or "Sea of Reeds", a shallow lake near the Red Sea that was still there until they dug the Suez Canal.
2. The quote attributed to Jesus about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. Aramaic had far fewer words than modern languages and words often had multiple unrelated meanings - the listener could figure out which one was meant from the context. The word meaning "camel" was also used to mean "rope". That would make a lot more sense paired with a needle in an analogy than a camel.
3. The repetition of the number forty - forty days and nights of rain, the Israelites spending forty years wandering in the wilderness, Jesus spending forty days alone in the desert. At that time it was common to use "forty" units of time as a metaphor for a very long time.