BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
"Be sure to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press of the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and in the train."
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Was it you?
You think I forgot
The iron bed
and those yellow sheets
The whiskey bottle on the night table
The quiet music coming from
The next room. Your clothing
on the floor, A fragrance of
only you.
Whispers coming from the leaves
Of the oak tree at the window
And your whispers, too, in my ear,
Did I bite or was it you?
That, at last, I have forgot.
MEK
Aug 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Dear Scott:
Thanks for giving me all these examples of what a billion is. And also thanks for reminding me about all the taxes I might pay if I had any money , liked to go fishing, or were in certain businesses.
But when you tell me that that things were better 100 years ago, and that mothers stayed home and watched the children, I ask you--was that in a beach front apartment at Southpoint or the Hermitage? Are you saying that our grandparents and parents had an easier life than we have?
Did they live on the beach and go out for dinner 4 or 5 times a week? Did your grandparents even have a telephone on which to press 1 for English? Did they take vacations, go to Europe, go on cruises? Did they collect social security checks and did they have medical insurance or Medicare?
One hundred years ago was 1908. The 16th Amendment authorizing the income tax was passed in 1913. Before that we had an income tax during the Civil War and during the Spanish American War.
One hundred years ago we still had the 60 or even 72 hour week, there was no Workmans' Compensation, Child Labor Laws were far in the future, people lived in tenements without plumbing. Many of our grandparents and great-grandparents worked in sweatshops six days a week and seven days during the season--that meant both mother and father. Piece work was taken home where all the family worked on it including five year olds. None of them had tax problems.
If you worked on the railroad and in most other industries, and had an accident you were merely dropped from the payroll. There was no sick pay and no paid holidays. No one even heard of vacations. Children died from bad milk, tuberculosis was rampant, the streets reeked with garbage, and most people were crammed four, five and six in two rooms. The toilets (outhouses) were still in the backyards of the Lower East Side. But there were no tax problems.
It's hard to believe but many Jewish women turned to prostitution. Yes, don't say no. They didn't pay taxes either.
Newspapers were published in dozens of immigrant languages because most immigrants didn't speak English. Not only didn't they speak English, but also they paid no taxes.
Do you really think that things were better when all the taxes that were enumerated didn't exist?
Here's what my grandfather had to say about taxes when I complained to him about all the deductions on my paycheck:
"Michael, in Russia there were no taxes. We paid nothing. But every spring the mud was up to our knees--and that was INSIDE the house. ...Here there's no mud--so pay your taxes and stop your whining."
Mike
Dear Scott:
Thanks for giving me all these examples of what a billion is. And also thanks for reminding me about all the taxes I might pay if I had any money , liked to go fishing, or were in certain businesses.
But when you tell me that that things were better 100 years ago, and that mothers stayed home and watched the children, I ask you--was that in a beach front apartment at Southpoint or the Hermitage? Are you saying that our grandparents and parents had an easier life than we have?
Did they live on the beach and go out for dinner 4 or 5 times a week? Did your grandparents even have a telephone on which to press 1 for English? Did they take vacations, go to Europe, go on cruises? Did they collect social security checks and did they have medical insurance or Medicare?
One hundred years ago was 1908. The 16th Amendment authorizing the income tax was passed in 1913. Before that we had an income tax during the Civil War and during the Spanish American War.
One hundred years ago we still had the 60 or even 72 hour week, there was no Workmans' Compensation, Child Labor Laws were far in the future, people lived in tenements without plumbing. Many of our grandparents and great-grandparents worked in sweatshops six days a week and seven days during the season--that meant both mother and father. Piece work was taken home where all the family worked on it including five year olds. None of them had tax problems.
If you worked on the railroad and in most other industries, and had an accident you were merely dropped from the payroll. There was no sick pay and no paid holidays. No one even heard of vacations. Children died from bad milk, tuberculosis was rampant, the streets reeked with garbage, and most people were crammed four, five and six in two rooms. The toilets (outhouses) were still in the backyards of the Lower East Side. But there were no tax problems.
It's hard to believe but many Jewish women turned to prostitution. Yes, don't say no. They didn't pay taxes either.
Newspapers were published in dozens of immigrant languages because most immigrants didn't speak English. Not only didn't they speak English, but also they paid no taxes.
Do you really think that things were better when all the taxes that were enumerated didn't exist?
Here's what my grandfather had to say about taxes when I complained to him about all the deductions on my paycheck:
"Michael, in Russia there were no taxes. We paid nothing. But every spring the mud was up to our knees--and that was INSIDE the house. ...Here there's no mud--so pay your taxes and stop your whining."
Mike
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Friday, August 15, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Sunday, August 10, 2008
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Dear X,
Because I value your judgement so much I read the libertarian piece more carefully a little while ago. As I am a strict opponent of argument ad hominum I shall not dig too deeply into the rightist hatred of Roosevelt and isolationist hatred of Churchill and the Brits. Just remember who Ludwig Mises and Ayn Rand were.
As I said in my first note some good arguments were made. I have been moved. I see that the arguments against dropping the bomb should have been taken more seriously than I thought. Especially when the statements of military men who were on the scene at the time are taken into account.
Their statements, however, were all based on their sense of the dubious morality of roasting women and children rather than on military necessity. In fact, a careful reading elicits, in me, a suspicion that the writer of the review, was not only anti-Truman-Roosevelt, but also was against our entry into the war.
Apparently some philosophers or theologians believed that our insistence on unconditional surrender was at fault. It was felt that the Japanese did not want to lose their Emperor to a war criminal trial and so they were reluctant to give up a war already lost. The morality balance, therefore shifted from their shoulders to ours, because our terms were unclear to the Japanese.
When Raico, the author, writes "the Japanese," he appears to mean the Japanese public. But the only Japanese in a position to make a surrender decision were Tojo and the very war criminals who would have been tried. Their influence on the Emperor, who might have been tried as well, was overwhelming.
Although it has nothing to do with the Bomb, Raico also drags into his piece our entry into the war against the Germans, complaining that it was 'said that "had we not gotten in then the Hitler would have conquered the world." (a sad undervaluation of the Red Army.)'
Odd, when one remembers that it was American munitions and American food delivered on the Murmansk Run that kept that Red Army on its feet. Raico also attacks Churchill, and quotes JFC Fuller, a British military historian, who if memory serves, was cashiered from His Majesty's Army over a dispute regarding tank warfare after WWI.
Libertarian Raico can't help but quote the laudable conservatives who opposed the bombings. (Usually after the Missouri Battleship Peace was signed.)
He quotes Felix Morley, a founder of Human Events (please don't tell me that you are reading that too.) Father James Gillis of Catholic World and David Lawrence another pre WW 2 conservative are also quoted for their attacks on American atrocities. (If they protested then, on the spot so to speak, why wouldn't we protest in retrospect?)
Coincidently, last night on Air America, I heard the same arguments from Thom Hartmann. A man who deals in half-truths and is very close to Rush Limbo when it comes to lies and deception. Why can't we have Truth coming from the left-progressive instead of propaganda imitative of the right? Goebbels is too much with us, right and left.
Anyway, why is Hiroshima coming up now? It's not an anniversary, as far as I know. What's the tie in?
The Atomic Bomb, as it was quaintly known during the race with Germany to build it, was not thought to be an immoral weapon during its conception and development. We firebombed Germany and caused massive causalities with little demur from the public at the time. We wanted a bomb that would destroy the enemy (originally Germany) and would end the war.
When it became apparent that the war with Germany would soon end the target shifted to Japan. It seemed impossible to negotiate with them-although Roosevelt had some doubts about the use of the bomb against actual people, they were not expressed forcefully, and he did suggest a demonstration with Japanese observers, it seems that his idea was slight and was overlooked. By September 1944 an Air Force group was already being trained to drop the bomb.
A problem that FDR did not have to deal with was the political effect of a two billion dollar secret project that diverted money from other, possibly more effective war projects. Had FDR been alive and strong he might have been willing to deal with the politics--but poor HST, knew nothing of the project except what Stimpson and Marshall told him. He was at their mercy. The Bomb would have to be set off -- on people.
The problem for us, as citizens sixty years after the Bomb, is that we cannot share the hatred and fear that the Japanese Army engendered in us then. We do not know how we would have felt then--except to compare our thoughts today on the Iraqi citizens.
We know that the US is divided into a camp that thinks as little of them as most of American felt about the "yellow, squinty-eyed Japs" in 1945. There was little or no division then. Japanese atrocities against the Chinese in Naking and against our captured troops were well known. Today the gap between the two is very wide, and I would guess that only 10-15% of Americans bear any hatred at all towards the Iraqi civilian. This wasn't the case in 1945.
In any event--I have been moved, and I recognize the argument on the other side.
To bed!
NY tomorrow. I expect difficult days. I'll let you know.
mike
I got most, but not all, of my information from one if the articles quoted by Raices. "Foreign Affairs, Barton J. Bernstein, July/Aug 2000.
Dear X,
Because I value your judgement so much I read the libertarian piece more carefully a little while ago. As I am a strict opponent of argument ad hominum I shall not dig too deeply into the rightist hatred of Roosevelt and isolationist hatred of Churchill and the Brits. Just remember who Ludwig Mises and Ayn Rand were.
As I said in my first note some good arguments were made. I have been moved. I see that the arguments against dropping the bomb should have been taken more seriously than I thought. Especially when the statements of military men who were on the scene at the time are taken into account.
Their statements, however, were all based on their sense of the dubious morality of roasting women and children rather than on military necessity. In fact, a careful reading elicits, in me, a suspicion that the writer of the review, was not only anti-Truman-Roosevelt, but also was against our entry into the war.
Apparently some philosophers or theologians believed that our insistence on unconditional surrender was at fault. It was felt that the Japanese did not want to lose their Emperor to a war criminal trial and so they were reluctant to give up a war already lost. The morality balance, therefore shifted from their shoulders to ours, because our terms were unclear to the Japanese.
When Raico, the author, writes "the Japanese," he appears to mean the Japanese public. But the only Japanese in a position to make a surrender decision were Tojo and the very war criminals who would have been tried. Their influence on the Emperor, who might have been tried as well, was overwhelming.
Although it has nothing to do with the Bomb, Raico also drags into his piece our entry into the war against the Germans, complaining that it was 'said that "had we not gotten in then the Hitler would have conquered the world." (a sad undervaluation of the Red Army.)'
Odd, when one remembers that it was American munitions and American food delivered on the Murmansk Run that kept that Red Army on its feet. Raico also attacks Churchill, and quotes JFC Fuller, a British military historian, who if memory serves, was cashiered from His Majesty's Army over a dispute regarding tank warfare after WWI.
Libertarian Raico can't help but quote the laudable conservatives who opposed the bombings. (Usually after the Missouri Battleship Peace was signed.)
He quotes Felix Morley, a founder of Human Events (please don't tell me that you are reading that too.) Father James Gillis of Catholic World and David Lawrence another pre WW 2 conservative are also quoted for their attacks on American atrocities. (If they protested then, on the spot so to speak, why wouldn't we protest in retrospect?)
Coincidently, last night on Air America, I heard the same arguments from Thom Hartmann. A man who deals in half-truths and is very close to Rush Limbo when it comes to lies and deception. Why can't we have Truth coming from the left-progressive instead of propaganda imitative of the right? Goebbels is too much with us, right and left.
Anyway, why is Hiroshima coming up now? It's not an anniversary, as far as I know. What's the tie in?
The Atomic Bomb, as it was quaintly known during the race with Germany to build it, was not thought to be an immoral weapon during its conception and development. We firebombed Germany and caused massive causalities with little demur from the public at the time. We wanted a bomb that would destroy the enemy (originally Germany) and would end the war.
When it became apparent that the war with Germany would soon end the target shifted to Japan. It seemed impossible to negotiate with them-although Roosevelt had some doubts about the use of the bomb against actual people, they were not expressed forcefully, and he did suggest a demonstration with Japanese observers, it seems that his idea was slight and was overlooked. By September 1944 an Air Force group was already being trained to drop the bomb.
A problem that FDR did not have to deal with was the political effect of a two billion dollar secret project that diverted money from other, possibly more effective war projects. Had FDR been alive and strong he might have been willing to deal with the politics--but poor HST, knew nothing of the project except what Stimpson and Marshall told him. He was at their mercy. The Bomb would have to be set off -- on people.
The problem for us, as citizens sixty years after the Bomb, is that we cannot share the hatred and fear that the Japanese Army engendered in us then. We do not know how we would have felt then--except to compare our thoughts today on the Iraqi citizens.
We know that the US is divided into a camp that thinks as little of them as most of American felt about the "yellow, squinty-eyed Japs" in 1945. There was little or no division then. Japanese atrocities against the Chinese in Naking and against our captured troops were well known. Today the gap between the two is very wide, and I would guess that only 10-15% of Americans bear any hatred at all towards the Iraqi civilian. This wasn't the case in 1945.
In any event--I have been moved, and I recognize the argument on the other side.
To bed!
NY tomorrow. I expect difficult days. I'll let you know.
mike
I got most, but not all, of my information from one if the articles quoted by Raices. "Foreign Affairs, Barton J. Bernstein, July/Aug 2000.
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
G Vine, Gin (France)
Fresh botanicals and ugni blanc vine flowers are infused and distilled individually into the grape neutral spirit made from that varietal. Infusions are blended together and copper-pot distilled for ultimate distillation and perfect smoothness. Each bottle of handcrafted gin is individually numbered to ensure a totally incomparable sensory experience.
Available for shipment or delivery in NY state only
Size: F - 750 ml(Bin 2046)
Case$419.40
Bottle$34.95
Aviation, Gin
Aviation Gin is made in the full bodied Dutch Style of days gone by with 100% rye grain neutral spirit and what can be simply described as a “botanical democracy” of Juniper, Cardamom, Coriander, Lavender, Anise Seed, Sasparilla, and dried orange peel. With its full and weighty mouth feel, rich earthy flavor, and cool finish, Aviation shines both on it’s own, and in one of the many vintage gin cocktails that are, once again, enjoying the insides of Boston Shakers from coast to coast.
Available for shipment or delivery in NY state only.
Size: F - 750 ml(Bin 2019)
Case$359.40
Bottle$29.95
G Vine, Gin (France)
Fresh botanicals and ugni blanc vine flowers are infused and distilled individually into the grape neutral spirit made from that varietal. Infusions are blended together and copper-pot distilled for ultimate distillation and perfect smoothness. Each bottle of handcrafted gin is individually numbered to ensure a totally incomparable sensory experience.
Available for shipment or delivery in NY state only
Size: F - 750 ml(Bin 2046)
Case$419.40
Bottle$34.95
Aviation, Gin
Aviation Gin is made in the full bodied Dutch Style of days gone by with 100% rye grain neutral spirit and what can be simply described as a “botanical democracy” of Juniper, Cardamom, Coriander, Lavender, Anise Seed, Sasparilla, and dried orange peel. With its full and weighty mouth feel, rich earthy flavor, and cool finish, Aviation shines both on it’s own, and in one of the many vintage gin cocktails that are, once again, enjoying the insides of Boston Shakers from coast to coast.
Available for shipment or delivery in NY state only.
Size: F - 750 ml(Bin 2019)
Case$359.40
Bottle$29.95
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
To know the meaning of enough.
It is important to know the meaning of enough.
To know the meaning of enough.
It is important to know the meaning of enough.
Friday, August 01, 2008
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
REGARDING THE FILM, "EVENING"
REGARDING THE FILM, "EVENING"
I think it was last year--maybe a few months ago, that you told me to see "Shadows." As I try to take most of your advice, although not as in a timely a manner as you might expect, I did see it.
I saw it tonight with great appreciation for its painterly quality and for its final wrap-up-scene-and-summing up-theme which was that there are really no mistakes, that we each do what we must, that all is for the good, and that what seems to matter doesn't really matter.
As you will remember it takes place in the home on the Newport shore in which we all should have been brought up and in which we all should have lived out our lives, but the writer of the film points out that it wouldn't have made any difference; that the noble thing was to marry the wrong person for that was the right thing to do, and have children who are brought into the world to make the same mistakes (which don't matter in the end) that we did.
When you are very young and hotly in love it is better to choose a star for your lover than to write a note in philosophy class asking. "what's for lunch" --anticipating a coming lesson on Nietzsche (or was it my Grandfather? well, it was one of them) who said, "Food first, then Philosophy." -- No, it was my Grandfather, and he said it every year during the endless Passover productions that my Aunt Sylvia would put on. He also liked to shout out, while banging his fist on the table, "Too much food, not enough Vodka!" Poor Aunt Sylvia.
It was this Grandfather who taught me the only dictim I know, "Hate the bosses, love the Workers" and who had Patti, and my cousins hold onto our belt buckles while pledging to "Never cross a picket line,"
Another lesson from the movie: If you have two children then one can live the wrong life, the one you would have liked to have led, while the other can live the right life, the one you chose, but which was really the wrong life for you.
Whoops, was it "Shadows" or was it "Evening" that you recommended? But then did it matter?
mek
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