Entries from November 2008 ↓

A mother, a wife, a gifted musician and director of music, Kathy finally lost her year-long battle with cancer this morning. She used to direct the bell choir, both youth and adult, at church. She and her husband, Bob, and their children, Amy and Bobby (both of whom attend Illinois Wesleyan in Bloomington), are all gifted musicians, who offered their gifts without price to anyone who would listen.

Kathy loved children. She was a second mother to little Alex Saavedra, another child of our church. She would insist on having Moriah and Miriam over for a night, and she and Bob would entertain them. They have a pool and an outdoor jacuzzi, and the kids would swim and luxuriate to their hearts’ content. We would all go over, just us or several of us from church, for parties.

Her husband retired two years ago to spend time with his wife. Now, she is gone.

As the mystery is solved for her, the pieces still lie around for all of us who knew her and loved her. I pray all of us, most especially her family, but also the Saavedra’s little girl Alex, find the comfort that comes to those who mourn.

Original post by progxian@northboone.com (Geoffrey Kruse-Safford)

The only thing I tire of more than hearing Britney Spears’ “Womanizer” is reading the folks at American Descent talk about how America doesn’t torture. It’s tiresome because it’s demonstrably false, but no matter how much evidence piles up, no matter how many testimonies come out, not just from the victims but the perpetrators, it lands upon their ears like snow in the Sahara.

Think Progress notes another first-hand account.

I am quite sure that there will all sorts of verbal gymnastics and intellectual contortions employed to “prove” that the writer (a) isn’t who he claims to be; (b) is overstating the use of various torture techniques; (c) admits there is no way to prove that torture has hurt the pursuit of our interests anyway, if it were used. Since folks who manage to employ each and every one of these arguments are impermeable to reason, I’ll leave it to the rest of you to make of it what is obviously there:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. … It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

It is obvious that this soldier is an enemy of the state and should be shot immediately.

Original post by progxian@northboone.com (Geoffrey Kruse-Safford)

It’s either trivial, or perhaps quadrivial (to quote James Joyce), but it don’t mean much at all. Except fun. BTW, ER, consider yourself tagged.

1. Five names you go by:
a) Geoffrey
b) Geoff (mostly family)
c) Mr. Kruse-Safford
d) Geoffrey Stephen (my mother still does this!)
e) Dad

2. Three things you are wearing right now:
a) Green carpenter’s pants
b) White Rugby shirt
c) Steel toe boots

3. Two things you want very badly at the moment:
a) More money (pedestrian, I know, but it doesn’t make it not true)
b) Peace of mind (not necessarily in this order?)

4. Three people who will probably fill this out:
In all honesty, the only one I think will do so is ER, whom I’ve already tagged.

5. Two things you did last night:
a)Watched A Christmas Story for what will surely be the first of a hundred times
b)Drank two Leinenkugel Creamy Dark Lagers and fell asleep (such a cheap date)

6. Two things you ate today:
a) Nothing yet, unless coffee counts as an “eat”
b) Certainly not the pet food I put out for our menagerie

7. Two people you last talked to on the phone:
a) The wife
b) The mother-in-law (God, that’s awful; how domesticated is that?)

8. Two things you are going to do tomorrow:
a) Awaken to an empty house
b) Spend my time at work wondering what I’m going to blog about the next day

9. Two longest car rides:
a) Waverly, NY to Hattiesburg, MS, with a side trip further on to New Orleans, LA
b) Jarratt, VA to Sycamore, IL in one day . . . twice in a week!

10. Two of your favorite beverages:
a) Lemonade on a hot summer day
b) Welch’s Cherry Burst cocktail

Finally, two scenes put together from the best movie of all time, Pulp Fiction. Obviously, there is strong language, and a pretty graphic shooting. I know it’s wrong, but I laugh every single time Marvin gets shot, and Vincent’s nonchalant reaction, “Oh man, I just shot Marvin in the face.” Can’t help it, it’s just . . . funny.

Original post by progxian@northboone.com (Geoffrey Kruse-Safford)

In the movies, zombies can only be killed by shooting them in the head, or cutting their heads off. You can destroy their bodies, remove limbs, etc., but as long as the head is intact, it still poses a danger. In the world in which we live, political-historical lies continue to live even after they have been definitively disproved. The reason is simple. There are enough people willing to hear these lies and consider them as possible that they keep the waters muddied.

Such is George Will’s column today.

Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. “Yes,” he replied, “it was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted 400 years.” It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal.

The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America’s biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending — President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt — unemployment was 17.2 percent.

“I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started,” lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.

It’s all here in this long quote. The invocation of the “Roosevelt Recession”, a reliance on the Dow as a measure of economic health, mentioning President Hoover as the real father of the New Deal, and the rise of employment during Lend-Lease and the build-up to war.

Except, of course, these are “facts” that are stitched together not by the slender threads of insight and keen analysis, but the heavy hemp rope that’s only good for keeping a ship tied to a dock. In other words, Will is citing facts, but he is putting them together the way Frankenstein built his creature. As such, it is not a revived human being, but something monstrous.

Two weeks ago, Will tried to use this same right-wing “historical interpretation” on Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman (not a good idea, George; you both might have Ph.D.s, and Krugman may teach at your alma mater, but he has the Nobel, and you have an op-ed column in the Post, so there is a difference between you), and Krugman schooled him on the way real history, especially real economic history works (the important part comes at the end).

While it is true that it took World War II to lift the US out of the Depression, it is also true, as even conservative historian David Kennedy has written in his massive history of the times, Freedom From Fear, that Roosevelt was essentially a very conservative politician. He disliked the deficit spending he was forced by circumstances to adopt. He preferred the higher taxes, especially the way his tax plan progressed, and limited approach to federal welfare through public works, but also knew that circumstsances did not allow it. His problem, as Krugman notes in the linked video clip and Kennedy explains in detail in his book, was that he took too much heart from the way the economy was improving through the first year and a half of his second term. While unemployment decreased, investment started to tick upward, and banks seemed stable, the underlying structural impediments and deficiencies of the system had yet to be fully rooted out. Another part of the problem, which Kennedy does address and Krugman did not (a TV appearance would hardly be a place to do so) was the stupid Smoot-Hawley tariff, which placed such high tariffs on imports that it, for all practical purposes, shut down our foreign trade. This was made worse by the rising tide of Japanese imperialism in the Pacific, where the Japanese navy, rather than the Royal Navy of Great Britain, controlled the sea lanes. Nervous about antagonizing the Japanese, trade across the Pacific was curtailed, except to the Japanese themselves, who continued to buy our scrap steel to build its war machine.

In other words, a combination of political timidity and historical circumstances were as much a part of the lengthening of the Great Depression as anything. It certainly was not the fault of the New Deal that the Depression lasted as long as it did; nor did the New Deal “fail” to end the Depression, since that was never the plan in the first place. Will is just repeating nonsensical lies that only anti-historical conservatives love to repeat in order to discredit Democratic policies.

It is necessary to repeatedly call these lies what they are, even though it is quite tiresome to note that Will is lying. Repeating them doesn’t make them true, and an honest, truly informed review of the historical record bears that out.

Original post by progxian@northboone.com (Geoffrey Kruse-Safford)

I have started the laborious process of going back through my archives for this year, checking for the rare gem and the quite-frequent clunker, and right there on the very first day of 2008, I managed, in the midst of a whole mess of errors, to call the general tone of post-election analysis.

At the time I was leaning towards Edwards, although I really hadn’t settled on a preferred Democratic candidate. In essence, I predicted the media would claim that, even the a Democrat had won the Presidency, there would be an emergent narrative that would declare the him a loser of sorts. He would be crippled by ideological battles, by circumstances, by a nation not ready for a Democratic President, etc., etc.

On the very day after Barack Obama won the election, Tom Brokaw started the ball rolling with the invented-from-whole-cloth notion of ours being a “center-right” country (whatever the hell that means). I noted on November 12 that some lefty-types around the internet were declaring the Democratic party defunct in two and four years because Barack Obama inherited a mess from George W. Bush. Mainstream journalists are giggling over other lefty-blogger types who are whining about this or that or the other cabinet choice, noting that the lefty-bloggers feel left out and cheated, thinking they won the election for Obama.

All of this emerging narrative of an embattled President-elect, hampered by ideological struggles within and disastrous conditions without, and the resulting emerging notion that Obama has no chance to govern effectively was predicted, despite a whole mess of details being wrong, by me. In January.

I’m doing the happy dance right now.

Original post by progxian@northboone.com (Geoffrey Kruse-Safford)

It might just become an on-going series. Where else would it be from?

Personally, if you agree with European leaders, communists, terror-supporting nations, and Dope-dealing Latin-American leaders and hate America as well (because…if you believe that others have a right to hate America then certainly you must hate her too), then you are an enemy of America.

Obviously, if I believe others have a right to think for themselves, then I must be anti-American. Because America isn’t about freedom . . .

Oh. Wait.

Original post by progxian@northboone.com (Geoffrey Kruse-Safford)

I was going to get ready for work, but on one last go ’round, sending out my Thanksgiving greetings, I happened upon something that made me laugh, cry, vomit, fart, and fall asleep all at the same time. It took Michael Savage a whole bunch of words to rip meaning from the English language. Displaying his keen grasp of Ockham’s Razor, Neil manages it in one simple “sentence”.

Predictably, the Abortion President is putting together a seriously anti-life, anti-family Cabinet.

As compared to a lame duck responsible for many deaths in war, in federal executions, in the hungry and homeless here in America, and the dying abroad from lack of access to our many resources, including simple things like medicines to help stave off childhood diarrhea and malaria.

Obviously, a man with a happy marriage and two beautiful children is anti-family. Because they are all black.

Original post by progxian@northboone.com (Geoffrey Kruse-Safford)

I hope it goes without saying that I will be computer-free tomorrow, due to a whole bunch of relatives, something about turkey, and then a night of getting ready for the biggest bunch of crazy people . . . I mean the biggest shopping day of the year (here’s hoping, anyway).

To all and each and every person who visits this site, whether it’s your first time, or you come here every day to peruse my words of wisdom (cough!cough!) I wish a very Happy Thanksgiving. Maybe, on Friday, exhausted from work, more turkey, and anticipating a weekend recovery, we can get back to our regularly scheduled program, eh?

Original post by progxian@northboone.com (Geoffrey Kruse-Safford)

What the hell is going on in India’s movie capital?

Original post by progxian@northboone.com (Geoffrey Kruse-Safford)

Like the whole chicken-egg thing, or whether or not a tree falling in a blah-blah-blah, one of the great mysteries for which there may never be an answer is how Glenn Reynolds gets so many people to read him. I have only read his stuff that other people comment upon, and I refuse to link to him, if for no other reason than I don’t want anyone that stupid to know I exist, but I gleaned the following from someone who does pay attention:

I feel a little sorry for Martin Luther King — his enormous accomplishments got less attention than they deserved because of the cult of Malcolm X, and now he’s being eclipsed by Barack Obama.

When one thinks of all the chance occurrences in time and history that led to his conception, birth, education, and all the little decisions that led to him typing that particular sentence, and it makes one want to drive off a cliff.

With his house at the bottom.

Original post by progxian@northboone.com (Geoffrey Kruse-Safford)