Three generations of my family have endured a family member going to war. As a Marine, I've left my family to go to war (Afghanistan, Iraq). It was the toughest thing I've ever done. And when my Dad went to war (Desert Storm) it was tough on me (probably tougher on him). Both my Mom and Dad remembered vividly their fathers leaving during WWII, even though they were both only six.
This video, and the young girl's reaction, captures all of the extreme emotions a family endures in such circumstances.
I can see my parents as young children in her. That memory never leaves you.
But now it is worse, when the deployments repeat over and over again, and weigh so heavily on one small part of our population, it is traumatizing beyond description. It makes it worse that the rest of the country goes on as if nothing is happening.
The price of war can be seen all over that young girl's face. Can you imagine if she were finding out not that her father had come home early, but that he would never come home again?
A leopard gecko is displayed in an aquarium tank during the annual
Taiwan International Aquarium Expo at the World Trade Center in Taipei
on November 7, 2009. More then one hundred tanks of fishes from nine
asian countries can be seen during the exhibition. By Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images.
You ask, what it is about sunlight and open debate that Palin is afraid of.
My guess is that it isn't fear. (Though she knows on some level that
she's not capable of debate with her dismal language skills.) I think
that it's because the debate isn't the point. Because she doesn't want
debate. Her sole objective, and that of the neocons who back her, is to
continue consolidating a rabid right wing base, to reinforce the views
they already have and then send them out to keep their fellow members
of the base in line.
"Maddie knows if this bill passes, she knows her mom’s health care will go away and won’t be around for five years. If the bill passes, then no more health care for her mom, because it has to change," - moronic John Shadegg, holding up a baby, fanning unsubstantiated fears and engaging in ideological abstractions.
Republicans are the party of the South these days, and sure, the GOP
will regain power eventually. But will they be able to do it if they
remain a party dominated by the culture of Dixie? Demographics suggest
pretty strongly that they can't, which means that eventually the South
will have to come to grips with the fact that they no longer hold the
whip hand in American politics and probably never will again. This
means acknowledging that they're just another region, one with
influence that waxes and wanes but basically corresponds to their
population. I wonder how long it will take for them to do that?
I just watched the video of the young girl who is surprised when her
father is home from the war. Watching the expressions on her face, I knew instantly what she
felt. I've been in her shoes. My father spent time in the Middle East
during the first Gulf war. I didn't see him for six months. I was about
the same age as this girl is now.
At ten years old, you are old enough to understand that when your
father leaves for war, he is not leaving by choice. It is duty, honor,
and obligation. But abstract notions like war and duty are overshadowed
by the stark reality of one parent not being home. And so at times, you
get angry at your father for not being there, even knowing it's not his
choice. But even the anger comes and goes. The strongest part of the
complex emotional bundle is worry and fear; at ten years old, you are
old enough to understand that if your father is off to war, he might
not return.
So when you see him again, what you feel is complicated. First is
joy. Soon after the joy follows anger. But the tears come from relief.
I
remember the the moment when my mother brought my father home like it
was yesterday.
Carl Hulse has an interesting report on the Republican clusterfuck that led to their losing a safe seat in an off-year election. They were outmaneuvered by the Dems:
Democrats planned to make mischief in the district from the moment Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, approached John M. McHugh, who held the seat, about becoming Army secretary. Democrats smelled opportunity.
They put in place an extensive field operation that has become a hallmark of the House Democrats. Operatives say the party, which spent $1.1 million on the race, had workers knock on more than 101,000 district doors and make more than 108,000 phone calls. The White House dispatched Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to help in the campaign.
Jonathan Martin snuck into the Palinfest in Wisconsin and reports that the crowd was not so wowed:
While she drew applause during her remarks, Palin’s extemporaneous and frequently discursive style was such that she never truly roused a true-believing crowd as passionate about the issue at hand as she. Not once during her address did they rise to their feet.
In a closing exhortation, she urged the audience, “Don't ever let anyone to tell you to sit down and shut up.”
She then got a standing ovation from most of the crowd, but a few had begun to leave before she even finished and within seconds of her concluding, scores more got up and put on their jackets as they walked away.
But they were half a mile long in line to see the Immaculate Misconception beforehand. It seems to me like a Mass. Her very divine presence is all that matters; what she says is largely irrelevant. There's some small news in her re-telling of her fifth pregnancy story (more on the latest version tomorrow), but what strikes me from Jonathan's report is that she has been watching Glenn Beck closely. To wit:
No great comedian is ever amused by himself. Billy Connelly could have been a great comedian had he not taken to collapsing
hysterically during his own routines. The seal on David Brent's
prattishness was his laughing at his own jokes. Then it turned out that Ricky Gervais, who created him, laughs at his own jokes too. Self-satisfaction is an
unpardonable crime in a comedian because his role is to remind us that
nothing is satisfactory. Hence the necessity of keeping a straight
face. It affirms the seriousness of his calling. Which is to make
people laugh, not because life is funny but because it isn't.
Remember the good old days? The days when you could turn on prime-time
television at 9:00 or 10:00 PM and catch an arresting hour-long drama
mid-season and feel thoroughly entertained? Oh sure, maybe you didn't
know all the character's names on ER or what exactly was going on between Harry Hamlin and Susan Dey on LA LAW but, you could pretty much tune in any night and enjoy a well-constructed program. Other shows required even less dedication; The Twilight Zone, Quantum Leap or Law & Order
(in any of its many incarnations) could be watched in whatever sequence
one wished-you always knew Jerry Orbach's mordant one-liners would be
the same. The model made sense; after all, television viewing was a
casual activity - prone to whims of channel surfing and audience
distraction (not to mention toilet breaks). Dramas that forced a deep
commitment of time and mental energy on the viewer simply selected
themselves out of candidacy for Neilsen glory. Not any more.
The Atlantic's Ben Schwarz also explores the "megamovie" in his recent review of Mad Men:
In thinking through the rather good ads that eventually came out in Maine, many are arguing that future marriage campaigns need to go negative against the anti-gay forces. Steve Hildebrand tells Rex Wockner:
We are fools to have spent all this money and time and not have defined
the opponents. It's not enough to answer their charges. We need to hit
them back and not let up on it until voters don't buy their lies
anymore. Malpractice in my opinion.
We can, of course, do both. A campaign that in future took on the Catholic hierarchy for its tolerance of child abuse while denying grown people marriage rights would be a promising start. Ads reminding people of the Mormon church's long, long history of racism would also be salient. We're new to this, and we're learning.
Jim Windolf explores the science behind adorable animals:
“It’s part of our DNA to react to cute things,” says Meg Frost, who
founded Cute Overload in 2005. “What makes me post certain pictures is
if I have an audible reaction—a squeal—when I see the picture. I’m kind
of annoyed at myself for having no control over thinking these things
are so cute. [...]
Specifically, [biologist Melanie] Glocker’s series of experiments demonstrated that the act
of looking at baby pictures stirs up an ancient part of the brain
called the nucleus accumbens. “It’s in the midbrain,” Glocker says, with a slight Teutonic accent,
“which is an evolutionarily older part of the brain involved in reward
processing. This region has also been shown to be activated by a
variety of rewarding stimuli, including sexual stimuli, food stimuli,
and drug stimuli.” Dr. Glocker is too much of a scientist to say so, but her experiments more or less prove that cuteness is physically addicting.
FU Penguin fights the urge to cuddle with the cute dog above:
Moshe Halbertal, a professor who helped craft the Israeli army’s ethics code, picks apart the Goldstone report and critiques its "overall biased tone." Nevertheless, he calls the siege of Gaza "morally problematic and strategically counterproductive." Money quote:
Radical groups such as
Hamas start their struggle with little support from their population,
which tends to be more moderate. They increase their base of support
cynically, by murdering Israeli civilians and thereby goading Israel
into an overreaction (this is not to deny, of course, that Israel can
choose not to overreact) in a way that ends up causing suffering to the
Palestinian civilians among whom the militants take shelter. The death
and the suffering of the civilian Palestinian population, in the short
run, is a part of the Hamas strategy, since it increases the sympathy
of the population with the movement’s aims. An Israeli overreaction
also leads to the shattering of Israel’s moral legitimacy in its own
struggle. In a democratic society with a citizen’s army, any erosion of
the ethical foundation of its soldiers and its citizens is of immense
political and strategic consequence.
I suspect in due course that Gaza will be understood as immoral, and counter-productive. It repelled me in a way that nothing Israel has done repelled me. It was an act of anger and vengeance and cruelty. And it will come back to haunt the Jewish state.
DiA notices that the leaders of both parties are no longer overwhelmingly southern:
Southerners haven't lost their country, but they have lost power—a
power they disproportionately enjoyed for nearly the entire
Clinton-Bush II era..."I want my country back," has become a conservative-populist rallying
cry. They have not truly lost their country, but have seen a wild swing
of power north and towards the coasts. It won't last, either. But it's
a painful reality right now for a region that once revelled in
separatism, then dominated the country as a whole for an oddly long
stretch.
But the South's control of the GOP has never been tighter.
The second thing Thatcher told Gorbachev, according to the transcript, was: “A destabilization of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests.” Why might she have said this? Why would not say instead, “We are fomenting the destruction of the Warsaw Pact in the hope of swiftly burying you?”
For the answer, recall that in September 1989, no one imagined that within two months, the Iron Curtain would dissolve without a drop of blood.
Much more easily envisioned was a Soviet crackdown and a brutal bloodletting, which had happened, within living memory, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and which the Chinese had just perpetrated months before in Tiananmen Square. Reasonable observers were worried that East German leader Erich Honecker was about to massacre thousands of people on the streets of Leipzig and Dresden—a step for which Honecker was preparing by stockpiling body bags. It was equally reasonable to fear that Gorbachev was on the verge of sending in Soviet troops.
The transcript suggests that Thatcher’s goal was to reassure.
A less convincing version of Fox News? Greenwald continues the scrutiny:
The Post today has two former Bush officials, one former Reagan official, two right-wing politicians, a Fox News neocon, the CEO of America's largest oil and gas producer, a defender of the right-wing Honduran military coup leaders, and one liberal columnist.
John Williams reviewsThe Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History by John Ortved:
Disclaimer: Like many people born in 1974, I’m incapable of writing a purely objective review of anything related to The Simpsons.
The 1990s may have been a decade of peace and prosperity in the U.S.,
but it left much to be desired on the pop-culture front. The 1960s had
the British Invasion, the 1970s had the golden age of American film,
the 1980s even had its goofy-but-inimitable mix of MTV, early
Letterman, and John Hughes movies. By comparison, Soundgarden and Singles seemed like a raw deal. But my generation in its youth had The Simpsons in its
youth, and more than just the best thing ever made for TV (Homer’s clan
was practically redeeming the existence of the entire medium when The Wire was but a twinkle in David Simon’s eye), the show’s glory days look more and more like the last gasp of eloquent mischief.
A few fascinating bits of Simpsons history after the jump:
The former vice-presidential candidate and leader of the GOP base gave a speech last night in Wisconsin. From the scattered notes of someone who was there, it seems like it was a good speech, and rehearsed some serious applause lines on abortion, and revealed a new sophistication on the subject. I'm not sure how much time Palin has spent reading John Paul II, but she sure knew how to quote him. Here's a passage as written down by an attendee going rogue:
Those who believed in the sanctity of life were told to sit down and shut up. Well, Wisconsin, you went rogue! Women who are protectors – protectors of the womb – you can’t just
get over it and sit down and shut up. You’re changing hearts and
changing minds. We’re dealing with the truth. The gift of knowledge lets us see truth with life. John 16:13: “spirit of truth.” Spirit of truth is being poured out on the country today and people are getting it.
But here's the weird thing: no press was allowed. Here were a few of the restrictions:
Jonah Lehrer reviews some research showing the cognitive benefits of arts education:
The current obsession with measuring learning certainly has some
benefits (accountability is good), but it also comes with some serious
drawbacks, since it diminishes all the forms of learning, like arts
education, that can't be translated into a score on a multiple choice
exam.
I have loved--and love--many people in my time. Many of them were
bigoted against some group, somewhere. This expectation that "good
people" won't be bigots is rather amazing. I came up in a world where
it was nothing to hear the word "faggot" bandied about. Where those
people awful human beings? Nah. Where they bigots? Yep. And I will tell
you, without a moments hesitation, that I was one of them.
I teach at a large university in a conservative part of the country, and I think a large part of this fear of children learning that - gasp - people can be attracted to the same sex, has to do with the religious right's emphasis on marriage as a primarily sexual institution. They would not agree with that, of course, but look at how they teach sexuality education to their children: "Abstinence til marriage. Nothing else need be said." (Thus sending the message that sex and marriage are yoked at the hip.
The conservative youth group "Young Life" is very active where we live (high schools and college), and I cannot tell you how many young people (18-21) I know who have gotten married because they simply cannot hold out sexually any longer. They get married in order to have sex. They don't get married because they love the person; they may be deeply in love, but that's not why they're getting married at that particular time -- they're getting married before they finish college, before they have decent-paying jobs, before they have health insurance, because they are afraid they won't be able to control their sexual urges any longer.
Sex is intrinsically linked to marriage. Sex=marriage=sex.
Mr Nagl writes that the world's greatest security threats in this
century come not from states that are too strong, but from states that
are too weak to control their territory. That's true, and it is
probably the single fundamental thing that the Bush administration
failed to get. He writes that the most important responses to the
challenge of such instability are economic and political-diplomatic,
not military. And that's right too. But he then wants to build a
massive organisational capacity to solve the problems of global
underdevelopment and instability through heroic expeditions. At that
point, you need to stop and ask yourself whether that $60 billion a
year might buy a lot more successful development, and hence a lot more
stability, somewhere else in the world, where nobody would shoot at
your Nebraska agricultural expert while he tried out a few types of
bioengineered seed stock that might work in the local climate.
Aren't here many places in the US that could do with a bit of economic-political development? Like the Deep South or parts of rural America that have been left behind by the global economy? We understand those places a teensy bit better than we do Afghanistan.
By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million
authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of
the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has
grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
Today on the Dish we focused on Fort Hood. We found footage here and here and first-hand accounts here and here. Major reax here. Bruce Bawer addressed the Muslim factor, Andrew warned against targeting Muslims, Greenwald grew frustrated over the media coverage, and Mark Noonan called for torture. We looked back at the other major massacre to hit Killeen, Texas, and there was another shooting today, in Orlando.
Andrew took a look at the unfortunately timed right-wing rally held in DC. One reader worried about the protestors and another pointed the finger at GOP leaders, such as Cantor.
Today's best email recounted a reader's experience growing up with a gay father. We also watched amazing montages of returning vets and movie titles.
Even though carbon pricing ought to make nuclear power profitable on an
operating cost basis, it would be prohibitively expensive to raise the
capital necessary to construct nuclear plants. I think you could
resolve this by having the state step in and do the financing. He
thinks, I guess, that some counterfactual private utility could do it
if it were far larger than any existing utility. But how would you make
these mergers happen? That sounds to me like you need an active state.
If you don't think Bush's and Cheney's embrace of torture-as-policy has not had a profound effect, check out this instant response to Fort Hood from Mark Noonan in the neocon camp:
A terrible event - but I don’t want anyone to call it an “act of
violence” or “a terrible tragedy”. It was an attack - one or more men
decided with malice to attack a US military base. We need to get right
down to the bottom of this - and, liberals, if the stories of
accomplices in custody are true, this is where harsh interrogation
might be needed: whoever was involved in this most emphatically does
not have a right to remain silent.
So we go from torturing a foreign terror suspect who may know the whereabouts of a WMD that is about to go off imminently (the original Krauthammer position) to torturing American suspects in a shooting spree (suspect, I might add, that subsequently turned out to be mirages).
This is not a slippery slope; it's a well-greased waterslide to throwing out the entire American system of government.
According to a Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey,
which polled 2,512 adults, the dawn of new technology and the Internet
has not caused people to withdraw from society. In fact, the study
found that "the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since
1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has
tripled since then." Pew said that 6 percent of the entire U.S. adult
population currently has "no one with whom they can discuss important
matters or who they consider to be 'especially significant' in their
life."
Greenwald asks a question after reading Allahpundit's live-blogging of the news reports from Fort Hood yesterday:
Isn't it clear that anyone following all of that as it unfolded would have been more misinformed than informed?
The scale of the errors and misinformation was unusually high. The number of shooters and the actual fate of the prime suspect were both wrongly reported. Like Glenn I can see the benefits of live-blogging breaking news. We do it here all the time. But it seems to me that live-blogging speculation about news we don't yet know is a bit of a mug's game. I'm glad we took a breather and waited to see what actually happened.
Economix rounds up reaction to the unemployment numbers. Nigel Gault, IHS Global Insight:
We expect job declines to continue to ease, since we expect that productivity gains will slow, and firms will find that they must bring in new workers to keep output growing. The extra boost provided by the hiring of Census workers should probably be enough to turn employment growth positive by March.
Bradford Plumer addresses the conservative love of nuclear power:
Many projections for a low-carbon future do envision a supporting role
for nuclear power--indeed, a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases,
by making fossil fuels pricier, could help usher in the first new wave
of reactors in the United States since the 1970s. But that's not enough
for the GOP, which wants to put nuclear into overdrive. The party's
energy plan, released in July, calls for a whopping 100 new reactors
built by 2030. That's twice as many as even the most optimistic
industry forecasts envision, and, given that the plants are estimated
to cost at least $6-$10 billion a pop and have difficulty attracting
private investment, they would likely need hefty subsidies--something
the right is supposed to frown at. "For reasons I don't fully
understand," says Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress,
"nuclear power has a magical place in the hearts of conservatives."
A Cottontop Tamarin monkey (Saguinus oedipus) born in captivity one
month ago is seen beside its mother on November 6, 2009 at the Santa Fe
Zoo, in Medellin, Antioquia Department, Colombia. By Raul
Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images.
A new blog gets a jump start on summing up the cultural milieu of the millennium, cataloging the "100 trends, fashions, memes, personalities and ideas that shaped the first decade of the 21st Century."
So why the decade and not the quarter-century? The digit change
inherent with calendar progression is a superficial but not wholly
trivial reason. The real truth, however, lies in the light-speed shifts
that zeitgeist transformation can now undertake. Once upon a time,
centuries divided eras of change; the 20th Century though pushed even
ten year demarcations to their breaking point, so drastic were the
upheavals in social reality that modernity hath wrought. Ten years time
was more than enough to alter the course of history, leaving America
and the world a different place than it had been just ten years before.
Ambers reports on the administration's smoke signals about the debt:
There will be talk of real, across-the-board limits to discretionary
spending. There will probably be a bipartisan deficit-reduction panel
set up, along with, perhaps, another Social Security reform commission.
Talk is cheap. And commissions are often ways of avoiding, not expediting real cuts in entitlements and defense. For this independent supporter of Obama, the key issue in the next year will be seriousness about reducing long term debt. If he cannot do it, or fails to make it a priority, he will lose me and many others. I understand why circumstances and inheritance have propelled the debt up right now. But circumstances cannot explain away the long-term crunch. A real leader tackles that. A phony leader ducks it.
The video we posted yesterday of the girl weeping at her father's return from war is not the only one. Here's another of a son and his dad - a surprise reunion in class. A Montage of several after the jump:
November 1, 2009 - November 7, 2009
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