Some Lessons from WW2

I was eight when my late afternoon kid's program (either Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy, or Uncle Don) was interrupted by the news flash that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. Our lives from that time on rapidly changed pace and direction.

We personally had an aircraft warning station in our front yard (we lived in the foothills of a mountain a few miles west of Hartford, Connecticut) I became an expert on friendly and enemy planes (I got to assemble the model plane kits demonstrating same) and would show nervous beginners how to make the 8 part aircraft reports by phone to Washington, DC -- "One, bi, high . . . "

My father, as one of many businessmen, tried to take on an extra night factory job as a volunteer -- they were dropped shortly as they were generally more nuisance then help.

Our family became one of many to plant a victory garden -- the rabbits prospered as lettuce and such came up, but my mother did can and store both vegetables and fruits in season. We also adopted Butch and Betsy -- a little ram and baby sheep for later meat supply. Big mistake to name animals, as they become family pets and who could eat one's dog or cat!? They went back to where they had derived, but did a great job of trimming and fertilizing our lawn while they were with us. Tiny, our pig for a year, also went to a pig farm -- was a great garbage disposal unit while he was with us. Again the family pet syndrome -- have you ever experienced the happy greetings of your pig as you delivered breakfast to him?

Things that did work and which lasted for quite some time after the war were car pooling and hitchhiking. I was traveling hundred of miles as a teen by simply sticking out my thumb and picking up a ride. I had only one hand laid on my knee and told the old dude that I was getting out at the next cross road. Sadly there were some much reported violent incidents finally about hitchhikers and that practice stopped as quickly as it had begun. However, in this era of massively high gas and oil prices it seems reasonable that we might set up formal ways to arrange car pooling and rides again in those parts of the country in particular which do not have adequate public transportation. There are other things that might be figured out to reduce the burdens of the war costs and the energy emergency. We used to burn wood in our fire places to cut the amount of oil that we would use. Possibly electric heaters might help reduce heating costs by targeting areas of need in a home? They are obviously not safe with small children. But others might find them offering savings?

Enough for now. Do others have ideas here for drawing on our community resources to reduce the pain?
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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Brother Boy

[This article brings back sad memories of the days when I worked with children in West Harlem while a divinity student and later a summer job with the Protestant Council of the City of NY. The latter organization was pretty much a fraud set up to do little more than to raise funds to support its employees (with the exception of the Brooklyn branch), but I learned of the uneven treatment of kids in need there.

In those days in the late 1950s adoptions and other arrangements for children in need were run on strictly racist and religious grounds. The upshot was a tremendous differential in the treatment that children received. Jewish kids were best served by the Jewish agencies. Second best were Catholic kids. The leftovers were classified as Protestants who had little or no agencies or other means of caring for children. Particularly excluded and placed in this category were African American kids.

One case that particularly got to me was a 12 year old, Brother Boy, with whom I had worked at the Manhattanville Community Center. I was there when a mad social worker threatened his mother to take away her children if she had another. So she tried to abort herself with a coat hanger and was hospitalized in serious condition, leaving her young children to fend for themselves. Brother Boy wanted to escape to his grandmother somewhere in the South -- where he was not sure. So I tried to get agency help for him. I was told that the only facility available was the Orangeburg State Mental Hospital which was housing several hundred such kids. So I drove Brother Boy there where a riot in the men's violent ward had just broken out. A psychiatrist told me that they were terribly understaffed to care for the kids, but they did the best they could.

A few years later Brother Boy contacted me and expressed his regret that he had been rejected from military service because he had a mental hospital on his record. Still a few years later the FBI contacted me to locate Brother Boy, now considered to be a draft dodger (the military had gotten desperate enough to take mental hospital grads). He had given my name and address as his contact point. I wrote the FBI and explained the circumstances, but got no response.

Some years later I learned that Brother Boy was one of the members of my little gang of kids who had died violently as had 3/4 of them.

And so it went for minority kids in the not too distant past. Ed Kent]

............................

De-emphasis on Race in Adoption Is Criticized
By RON NIXON
A report says that minority children in foster care are
being ill-served by a federal law that plays down race and
culture in adoptions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/us/27adopt.html?th&emc=th
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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Neo Fascist Roots of American Conservatism

George Packer in a New Yorker piece dates the origin of conservatism back to 1966 When Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon:

FOCUS | George Packer: The Fall of Conservatism
http://www.truthout.org/article/the-fall-conservatism

Having lived a bit longer, I press the date back to an earlier era when Bill Buckley was launching his particular revision of Spanish fascism at Yale and thereafter in this country. The current Yale Alumni Magazine has a 20 page feature on Buckley. We encountered him personally during our student days in the 1950s when he was prowling around Yale looking for and ensnaring young converts. My only indirect and direct connections with him were a course with one of his intellectual mentors, Willmore Kendall whose Spanish experience had made him a fanatical anti communist and who wrote for the National Review until he and Buckley had a falling out. And my wife to be and I witnessed together in 1955 the Ten Million Americans for Joe McCarthy rally at Madison Square Garden where Buckley sat uncomfortably on the podium with a general or two and older ladies in white tennis shoes. Lyn and I wrote up the event for our student papers, respectively at Sarah Lawrence and Yale and I received a scorching response letter to the Yalie Daily from Buckley. I later declined one of his invitations to visit his family estate at which he would typically capture young acolytes.

One has to track Buckley back both to his Texas oil roots and to fascist Spain where the family vacationed regularly to understand the peculiar mixture of Franco's Spanish fascism and right wing McCarthyism that Buckley combined. He was a brilliant orator and could usually unsettle liberal critics with debating techniques which alternated between comic mockery and brutal ad hominem attack. The victim was never quite sure which Buckley would be coming at him/her and was usually wrong footed by Buckley who could shift the attack accordingly -- a sort of advance version of the TV right winger attacks that one sees in sound bites that shut up the speaker and shift topic before an answer can be given.

Frankly, Buckley's phony British accent gave me a pain. I don't know where he picked it up between Texas and Spain. He was entirely fluent in Spanish which he taught to undergrads as an undergrad himself and presumably a superb mimic.

May he rest in peace and may our country recover from the satanic political philosophy that Buckley launched that has been doing vast damage in its climax this past seven years in Bush's neocon version of American dominance of the world out there. Senator Joe Lieberman was assisted into office by Buckley who helped him defeat his liberal Republican predecessor. Buckley is said to have been unhappy with Lieberman's support of the Iraq war and current militarism on behalf of Israel. As an undergrad Buckley was alleged to be an anti-Semite.

Beware, however, as there are still some 300 well funded right wing think tanks cranking out ever new slogans to entrap the unwary. The subject title here suggests that the roots of American conservatism are a bit more ominous than the emergence in the late 1960s of a counter reaction against such liberal efforts as the civil rights movement.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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To Reassure Aging Brains

[The following was passed along by a friend and should be reassuring to some of us oldsters who find our recall delayed. I fortunately taught a geriatric psychology course on a dare (out of a text) many years ago which also explained the delay in recall with the image of down hill skier who hits an up slope that he has to get over to get all the way down the hill to the idea being sought. Google is also a great boon. Jotting notes to ourselves helps, too. Ed Kent]

.......................................

NYT, May 20, 2008
Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
By SARA REISTAD-LONG

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, "Progress in Brain Research."

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer's disease, for example, strikes 13percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

"It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing," said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. "It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind."

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

"For the young people, it's as if the distraction never happened," said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. "But for older adults, because they've retained all this extra data, they're now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they've soaked up from one situation to another."

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others' yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker's real impact.

"A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what's going on than their younger peers," Dr. Hasher said. "We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser."

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students' ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.

Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in itsproper place - wisdom.

"These findings are all very consistent with the context we're building for what wisdom is," she said. "If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they're then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they're going to have a nice advantage."
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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Polygamy? Yes or No?

[I served for several decades on the ACLU Church/State Advisory committee and so this one has had me pondering. On that committee we were constantly trying to balance off against each other free exercise versus no establishment. As the polygamists are arguing, about as many countries do as do not tolerate polygamy. And certainly much of the 'serial monogamy' (trading in mates for the latest model as practiced by the great host of our nationally prominent figures), as well as the pattern of forming families without marriage, as I gather, is happening in much of Europe, would stand on the side of the polygamists. The only sticking point would be forced or induced sex with minors. Apparently no more than five such cases were found in the Texas group and this may have been a late practice permitted by its primary guru. So it would look as though the bulk of the 400+ children being separated from their parents are having their basic rights violated?

Needless to say there are still problems with this practice such as holding spouses accountable for support of each other and their children, dividing out benefits such as Social Security. I don't see medical care or Medicaid as an issue because there are other religious groups and individuals who use such routinely.

One big problem would be the fact that apparently the children and practitioners are taught to lie to officials and other outsiders. Also one wonders whether the rights of those trapped in the system are being violated? We separated native American children from their parents back when to benefit them and the Australians have now regretted that they did this with their native inhabitants. So an issue becomes what sorts of abuses and deprivations are being imposed upon children by the polygamists? There is no clear picture here and most likely things will have to be sorted out through the fog on an individual basis. I would not want to be a Texas official undertaking this task. Getting hard data seems almost impossible here.

I will add that during my two ACLU decades I saw just about every conceivable kind of abuse being committed by religious groups -- many of them financial and sexual. I became ever more skeptical about the phenomena of religions in the modern world. There are some good people and good moral values still to be found. But they are mixed in with what seem to be some pretty deadly evils as well.

What thoughts do you have on this subject? Ed Kent]

..................................

Court Says Texas Illegally Seized Sect's Children
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
The ruling said that the state had failed to show immediate
danger of abuse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/us/23raid.html?th&emc=th
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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Women Have Gained, Minorities Still Struggle

[I had the good fortune to spend my first seven years teaching mainly women -- at Vassar, Hunter, and Barnard. The span was from 1963 to 1970 when the women's movement was beginning to support equal opportunities for women, but had not yet opened up higher education generally to minorities. At Vassar we had 3 lonely African American students of 1,700. I had one African American and two Latino students at Hunter. I don't recall any at Barnard. Part of my role in teaching women was encouragement in believing that they could compete with men -- which they were more than ready to do -- and I am proud of the many that subsequently distinguished themselves as lawyers, judges, professional philosophers (a field that had virtually no women when I began), etc.

The year I moved on to Brooklyn College, 1970, open enrollment in the City University of NY was just being launched. And it was a delight for me to be able to encourage my minority students and see them thrive. When I had first worked with African American teens in West Harlem in 1956-7, they were routinely being told by counselors that they were "not
college material" and should seek out jobs such as pushing wagons around the garment district. Many of my minority college students, too, moved on to distinguished careers in a wide variety of areas. I don't want to brag, but one develops a parental sense of pride in one's students' accomplishments -- a distinguished doctor here or a Wall St./Brooklyn law firm started by two women who met in my philosophy of law class.

Nevertheless, with all the advances for women and minorities this past half century, we are still aware that women are not quite accorded equal treatment in the market place, although many do well. And tragically half or more of our minority students in all too many locations do not make it out of high school before they head upstate to our prisons. We have not yet granted the equal educational opportunities presupposed as the outcome to be sought with the Brown desegregation decision.

The article below does not spell out all the details. But anyone who knows anything about educating children, is aware that their education must begin at the earliest possible age, particularly for those who are culturally deprived. Many of the European countries have made the jump to universal early childhood education. We have backed away from some of our earlier Headstart efforts with our 'cut your taxes' policies. One hopes that our new president and supporting legislators will rectify this terrible flaw in our American democracy in which the majority still tyrannizes over our minorities!

We shall see in the near future whether we can begin to make up for lost time. A McCain, living on hundreds of millions of dollars with 7-8 reputed personal residences, will not do it. Ed Kent]

.................................

Girls' Gains Have Not Cost Boys, Report Says
By TAMAR LEWIN
A new report says the largest disparities in educational
achievement are not between boys and girls but between
those of different races, ethnicities and income levels.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/education/20girls.html?th&emc=th
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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How Rail Travel Was Sabotaged by the Oil and Rubber Lobbies

[The vast replacement in the U.S. of our railroad and trolley systems by highways did not just happen by accident. It was vehemently lobbied for by the rubber, oil, and automotive and trucking industries back in the 1920s and 1930s I happened to discover when I first started looking as property dispositions back in the 1960s. I don't remember the experts who were commenting on this potentially disastrous redirection of American transportation, but I was myself aware of the differences between us and Europe from my several years of study in Britain and travels there and on the Continent. I also noted the remnants of rail systems abandoned along highways and the tracks of trolleys here, there and elsewhere buried under paved roads.

After WW2 the trucking industry pressed hard for a system of national highways crisscrossing the country and one could no longer count on long distance passenger rail travel as the airlines moved in. Trains and trolleys (and subways) run on electricity and can draw this energy from a wide variety of sources. Highways and roads require costly maintenance, particularly as they are battered by trucks and busses -- the heavy vehicles. The cost of air travel is escalating with the energy crisis.

The upshot is that far too many Americans are now trapped in their overpriced cars and cannot afford essential travel. There is no friendly bus and train service outside of some of our major cities. We personally live in a location with four bus lines and a subway within a block's walking distance of our home. We gave up our car back in the late 1960s and started renting same for long distance trips and summer vacations. We much have saved many thousands of dollars in driving and insurance expenses over the years and now as we age feel free to take a cab as necessary. There is a lesson, I think, to be learned here. An unwary population may find itself done in by interest groups mobilized to subvert the public interest with their own narrow profit motives.

Beware! The world is now moving into an era of scarce resources and competition to dominate those that still exist -- witness the Bush wars in the Middle East. And be glad if you live in a city with adequate transportation and are not stranded somewhere that you can no longer afford! Krugman reports this end of this road below. Ed Kent]

...............................

Stranded in Suburbia
By PAUL KRUGMAN
With rising oil prices leaving many Americans stranded in
suburbia, it's starting to look as if Berlin, a city of
trains, buses and bikes, had the better idea.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/opinion/19krugman.html?th&emc=th
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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With a Friend Like Bush, Israel . . .

{As I read the Israeli newspaper responses to Bush's speech to the Knesset, I would venture the observation that he has set off a near panic among Israelis with his high praise of Israel combined with threats against Iran and American Democrats. It does not take much imagination to see that praise and encouragement to attack one's neighbors from one of the world's least popular national leaders is no feather in one's national cap. This is a delicate time in Israel's history. Its political leaders in too many instances have become suspect as common crooks. It is a nation divided between wanting peace and those demanding the Eretz Israel that Bush suggested is Israel's due -- I wonder whether that goof was Bush's or some speech writer's? One could go on in this vein, but how depressing it all is. May we elect a better leadership than the current one that can think only of guns and cares little for the increasing price of butter. Ed Kent]

......................

The President Goes Negative
It is damaging for America when President Bush's penchant for slash-and-burn politics is put on display abroad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/opinion/17sat2.html?th&emc=thwITHA
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--
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Gay Rights -- We've Come a Long Way

[We have come a long way towards full respect for the rights of people who prefer establishing close personal relationships with loved ones of the same gender. I recall having to be educated myself and the ironies of persecution of gays by such as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who turned out apparently to be gay himself as was McCarthy and a number of the Nazi leaders who persecuted gays back then.

The sad fact is that a so-called Christian saint unleashed the vicious attacks on both gays and Jews by his horrendous and hateful characterizations -- See Paul's Letter to the Romans. The ancient Hebrews also opposed same gender relationships -- to distinguish themselves from competing cultures and religious which tolerated and even sometimes featured such relationships -- read the Socratic dialogues -- particularly the Symposium which discusses varieties of love. Here again this ugly prejudice is a hangover from primitive ancient religious and cultural roots. We no longer execute children who disobey their parents and a host of other draconian punishments for alleged crimes.

Let us hope that the attempts to outlaw gay marriages will fail. This nation is too much obsessed with sex which is not the issue here -- it is the right of people to form loving relationships. Given the number of people left out of the marriage game, such relationships protected by law are the only way to go. We now have many gay couple friends and know of many who have formed such relationships in older years when a marriage has been ended by death or divorce. No one should be obliged to live alone without full legal protections for that relationship.

May the bigots and haters be rejected in their efforts to abuse their neighbors! Ed Kent]

.....................

California Supreme Court Overturns Gay Marriage Ban
By ADAM LIPTAK
The ruling, striking down laws limiting marriages to unions
between a man and a woman, would make California the second
state to allow same-sex marriage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/us/16marriage.html?th&emc=th
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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U.S. could hit Iran this year

[The prospect that Bush might attack Iran (or use Israel as a surrogate) is what worries all of us. He has not been stopped before, as we all know from the illegal Iraq war, and there looks to be an ugly look in those squinty eyes. This man is neither intelligent nor well educated and the power of being president looks to have gone to his head. Needless to say such an action would compound the chaos already created in the Middle East and now to be expanded globally? For those not familiar with it, Haaretz is the more peace oriented of the Israeli dailies. Ed Kent}

................................

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/984045.html

Last update - 12:07 16/05/2008
Report: Jerusalem sources believe U.S. could hit Iran this year
By Barak Ravid and Shahar Ilan, Haaretz Correspondents and Haaretz Service
Tags: Iran, nuclear weapons

Sources in Jerusalem believe that the U.S. administration could carry out an operation against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime over the next year, Army Radio reported on Friday.

Officials in the Prime Minister's Office said the possibility was discussed in closed talks between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and U.S. President George Bush, during the latter's visit to Israel this week.

The officials said that Bush wants to deal with Iran on a root level, to weed out the negative influence aiding militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, the radio said.
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Meanwhile, senior officials in Jerusalem said Thursday that Israel is fully satisfied with the results of Bush's visit, including policy on Iran's nuclear program.

"In talks with the president of the United States during his visit it was made clear that Bush's statements on the subject of Iran's nuclear program are fully backed in practice," a senior official said.

The president's attitude on Iran was well known in Israel, and the expectation had been that he would use forceful language against Tehran, both during talks with Israeli officials and in his address to the Knesset, not only on the nuclear question but on Iran's role in the region.

During meetings with Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, more data was presented to back the desire for a reassessment of an American intelligence report which concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program.

One Israeli source said that it is hoped that the new information would influence the administration's stance on Iran's nuclear program.

The source said that Olmert would discuss the subject during his visit to Washington in two weeks.

President Bush ended his three-day visit to Israel on Friday and headed for Saudi Arabia.

The president and First Lady Laura Bush flew out of Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport after a morning at Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, where they viewed artifacts from the time of biblical writings and spoke with young Israelis about hopes for peace.


Bush: Masada shall never fall again

In his address to the Knesset on Thursday, Bush promised unflinching U.S. support. "Citizens of Israel, Masada shall never fall again, and America will always stand with you," he said.

Bush added that calls for negotiations with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are akin to the efforts to appease Hitler before World War II.

The president opened his speech by saying in Hebrew: "Happy Independence Day." His address focused on the alliance between the U.S. and Israel.

"Israel's population may be just over 7 million. But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because America stands with you," Bush said.

"You have raised a modern society in the Promised Land, a light unto the nations that preserves the legacy of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And you have built a mighty democracy that will endure forever and can always count on America to stand at its side."

He noted that Israel's Declaration of Independence "was the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham, Moses, and David - a homeland for the chosen people in Eretz Yisrael."

The president also presented his vision of Israel in the next 60 years. "Israel will be celebrating its 120th anniversary as one of the world's great democracies, a secure and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people."

His address was interrupted no less than 14 times by loud applause.

"America stands with you in breaking up terrorist networks and denying the extremists sanctuary. And America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon," the president said.

Bush accused Ahmadinejad of seeking to return the Middle East to the Middle Ages by calling for the destruction of Israel.

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," he said. "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is ¬ the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

After the speech made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the Knesset in March, it was hard to expect a more pro-Zionist speech. But as a former Knesset speaker, MK Reuven Rivlin, put it Thursday, "I wish our leaders would make speeches like this." Rivlin described Bush as "manifesting the Zionist vision."

Contrary to the applause Bush received for his address, the speech by Prime Minister Olmert was less popular and stirred considerable controversy.

Olmert promised that when there is a peace agreement it "will be approved by a large majority in the Knesset and it will be supported by the vast majority of the Israeli public."

Two MKs from the National Union, Zvi Hendel and Uri Ariel, left the plenum in protest, complaining that the event was "used to promote a political agenda that is opposed by most of the Israeli public."

Hendel issued a statement calling on Olmert "to learn from the president of the United States what Zionism is."

MK Aryeh Eldad (National Union) called out during Olmert's speech, "in your dreams."

He later proposed that Bush should replace Olmert.

Throughout the exchanges amount the rival Israeli politicians, President Bush appeared to be enjoying himself. When Knesset speaker Dalia Itzik finished her speech, he offered his hand in a "give me five" kind of love.

Olmert diverged from his speech and said that "we will bring before the Knesset an agreement that is based on the vision of two states for two peoples. This agreement will be approved by a large majority in the Knesset and the entire nation."

On Iran, Olmert said that "the seriousness of the threat demands that no means be discounted." However, he made it clear that "a uniform international political and economic front against Iran is currently in place, and tougher and more effective sanctions are a necessary stage, even if it is not the final stage, on the right way to block the Iranian threat."

--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Empaths, Psychopaths -- and Polar Bears?

[Having entered retirement after a long teaching career and with fading vision that steers me away from the books that I would enjoy reading and towards the computer and TV station for basic information, I am constantly struck by the casual and even smiling way that reporters of both genders represent horrendous events terribly afflicting people -- those numbers of Iraqis or Palestinians killed this past week or month, the latest discovery of a mutilated body of a woman or young child, the displacement and deaths of hundreds of thousands, the riots of starving people ....

One of the images that has particularly haunted me is the weeping parents of the hundreds of teens who were cruelly crushed by the heavy concrete unleashed by the earthquake -- a few had escaped their school by defying their teachers and getting out in time rather than hiding under their desks as instructed. What was eventually reported, which was known by any who have followed events in China, was that the parents weeping had only the one killed with China's one child only policy of recent decades.

I taught many a course in ethics over the years and more and more began to accept David Hume's suggestion human morals are determined by "sentiments" (emotions) rather than rational philosophic or religious principles or moral mandates. Kant in his less well read works seemed to have no compunctions about killing people. Locke justified slavery under the right circumstances. And some of our most deadly types have been guided by "principles" or the alleged demands of their religious faiths.

The bottom line from my perspective is that we humans are divided along a spectrum between those who feel great empathy for others at one extreme and those who actually enjoy killing and torturing at the other.
In between are all too many who can be enlisted either in doing good things or murderous ones -- witness Abu Graib and Guantanamo -- and, unhappily the American criminal justice apparatus generally.

Sadly again, in a democracy 'public opinion' all too often overrides simple human fellow feeling. I am constantly disconcerted by the smiling young women who report the most horrendous events daily on our TV screens. I tend to steer towards npr for this reason where common human decency prevails. I am afraid that the constant barrage of horrible happenings delivered with the ever present smile is doing horrible things to us Americans. Our consciences are being anaesthazized by the repetitions of horrors And the entertainment fare and ads are not much better -- a feast of murders mixed with what looks to be a Lolita type obsession with prepubescent young girls. One would almost think we are becoming a nation of murderous rapists and pedophiles?

Where do the polar bears come into this picture? They are one of our notorious predator species. Yet we look to be giving them more empathy than our own human children -- denied proper medical care in too many instance as well as adequate nutrition and educational opportunities!!

So where are we Americans going to go now? I hope the coming elections will make a difference for the better. Ed Kent]

...........................


Polar Bear Is Made a Protected Species
By FELICITY BARRINGER
The decision may be less of an impediment to oil and gas
exploration in Alaska than environmental groups had hoped.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/15/us/15polar.html?th&emc=th
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Tyranny of the Majority?

Both Alexis de Tocqueville who greatly admired the U.S. and John Stuart Mill warned that democratic majorities were as dangerous as -- perhaps more so than -- repressive authoritarian regimes. At least the latter are subject to rebellions whereas oppressive democratic majorities can do horrendous injustices to minorities or others subject to their powers without checks.

We Americans are incredibly ill informed about the harms we have inflicted on others by our depredations upon their lands -- and particularly grabs of their resources. Latin American nations almost without exception have been targeted by U.S. corporations backed up by the U.S. government. Google United Fruit for a good example of damage done when nations had the temerity to challenge their domination. 60 Minutes did an update on Chiquita Banana last evening. Tactics are pretty standard. When the U.S. wanted to take over a Latin American country, it would at first try to destabilize its government, e.g. Chile under Allende. If that did not work it would assassinate or otherwise remove leaders. And as a last resort, it send in the troops. See our various raids on Cuba in these departments which produced the Castro reaction eventually.

Currently both the U.S. and Israel are denominated democracies. Yet they are both nations that are occupying the lands of others and killing fairly freely those who would resist their occupations. These occupations look to be self-interested in both instances. The U.S. wants to dominate Middle Eastern oil and Israel is expanding its turf while expelling as many Palestinians as possible. Real peace is unlikely in either case and it is majority governments in each instance that have been driving the injustices inflicted. It is always possible that majorities be eventually redirected to doing the right things. But that is scarcely a guaranteed outcome when vital interests are involved. The U.S. wants oil and Israel wants land.

Needless to say one cannot condemn all the people of a nation that is oppressing others. There are always opposing voices calling for justice. And sometimes they do prevail or at least curb the majority from the most extreme actions -- genocide or collective punishment of an oppressed people.

Let us hope for better!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Killer Landlords

The article below more or less spells out all the underhanded tactics that landlords may use to expel low rent tenants to be replaced with high paying ones:

.....................
*Questions of Rent Tactics by Private Equity *

*By: Gretchen Morgenson*
*NYTimes.com |* May 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/business/09rent.html?_r=3&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1210342530-ZktOWAjBJkVj+mCCEKoP8g&oref=slogin

......................

Few of us have not had friends engaged in such battles or have had to fight them out themselves.

I have been in a small way on both sides of the landlord/tenant divide. Upon the deaths of my parents we inherited a lovely small two family house in the North East Kingdom of Vermont. At the urging of a lady who had been caring for my mother in a nearby nursing home we rented out one side to her and let the elderly lady remain on the other. This all occurred about 30 years ago and the rents have remained the same -- below cost to us for keeping the house going. This past year two older ladies have had hard going and virtually no rent has been coming in.

I guess in our minds we wish we had sold the house way back when and had not had the expenses and some very difficult tenants since, but at the moment we are trying to keep things going for some deserving people.

When we were renters back when, we had pretty good breaks. On several transitionary occasions we were able to live in friends homes while we found a good rental. Public Housing became an option when we were grad students and we learned much from our neighbors and community (lower West Harlem) and could pay beck a bit. We lobbied the management to put locks on the entrances which kept out the druggies shooting up in our stairwells. And we got the emergency elevator repair number which kept us from walking up and down 21 flights weekends when they would inevitably both break down when no staff were around.

Our most amusing 'eviction' came when we were living in a basement apartment in Oxford. I was called up by the elderly couple renting to us and told to "get that American woman out of here!" I explained that the women was my new wife and even got our wedding certificate to prove it, but they looked at it and said they didn't see the Queen's seal, so that was that. Happily we got to move to 11 St. Michael's St. next to the famous Oxford Union where major political figures had fine tuned their debating skills as undergrads.

Our return to NYC came with the greatest good fortune. We moved into a classic Riverside Drive building which in a few years converted to a coop at a very low price, so we have ever since had safe and secure living with a view of Riverside Park and the Hudson River where we have raised our 3 children.

We have been most fortunate to experience such a range of homes and none of the horror battles that are once again besetting people simply trying to get by with their lives. Some of our institutions as well as landlords are doing their best to uproot people with promises of "affordable housing" -- a fraudulent promise I expect of the kind that greed promotes.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Dawn in Manhattan

As I write, dawn is breaking over Manhattan. My attention was drawn to it from the sound of crows signaling to each other in Riverside Park which our apartment overlooks.

Crows, if one is not familiar with them, are amongst the cleverest of birds. They work together in flocks and post 'guard' crows to warn them of any impending dangers -- a hawk on the horizon, a fox stalking or whatever. I used to hear the same calls when I was a kid living in rural Connecticut, a quarter mile away from our nearest neighbor. It is amazing how much of the same wild life we have here in the city -- I recall watching a terrified squirrel hiding on the opposite side of a tree trunk from a huge hawk that had settled there. Eventually the hawk flew off and the terrified squirrel fled to safer places. We probably don't host the larger mammals, but we do the smaller ones such as squirrels, rats, and mice. We had one of those once which would pop out the space from a pipe from a radiator into our floor and dance around for a minute in the middle of our floor before popping back into his retreat. We named him Herman and eventually sealed off his approach route as we had a new baby who would be sharing the floor with him.

We urbanites try to make do with our dogs and cats and pet birds and fish. But we miss the richness of nature which some of us try to recapture at places still available on summer vacations. As a kid I learned how to imitate a number of the animal calls and would occasionally carry on a conversation with some crows trying to feed peacefully in our vicinity. Being able to speak the animal languages gave one a sense of identification with creatures of all kinds. One tended, however, to rank them in order of intelligence which is manifest in farm animals as well as wild ones. Many of our proverbs follow therefrom -- the fox in the hen house, for instance. Foxes are quite clever both in their ability to live on the richness of nature and to avoid being harmed by it. I hope our pollution is not doing in our wild ones. The demise of the honey bee necessary to produce many of our crops may be a warning sign of bad things to come. The world out there is a far different place than it used to be. I saw, perhaps, the beginnings of change when as an eight year old I would train in observers at our front yard airplane observation post on guard against WW2 invading enemies. I could tell a plane's identify by sound with my keen child's hearing. It was an awesome thing to be protecting against enemies at that age. I mourn for all those children around the world who are now facing horrendous horrors that threaten them day and night. The stress must be killing something in them that we so richly enjoyed
as children growing up in a world not distorted by sound bites and deadly images on TV screens.

And so it goes.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Jobs that I learned from

Forgive a self-centered blog. When one retires as I did last fall, one expects to have some time to catch up. Actually I find myself about as busy as previously finishing up loose ends -- student recommendations, late papers, etc.

However, in odd moments I have been going back in memory to various times in my past to see what I can find there that makes sense of things. One particular is the wide variety of jobs that I held as I was getting my education and planning my future. And I realize that there are many lessons to be learned from a good number of them. So here I go.

My first paid employment (apart from a few days of farm work with my friend whose father managed a nearby farm) was camp counseling following upon my attendance as a camper in a Vermont Y camp (which my mother had attended as a young girl). Manpower was scarce just after WW2, so I got quickly promoted from junior counselor to the full job in charge of a tent full of kids around 8 or 9. I had been an oldest brother of two younger siblings so things came naturally for me getting along and guiding my little gang. I discovered that even young kids come with some serious hang ups that need to be worked out. This one was a bully. That one was a bed wetter. A big brother type could do much to help straighten out these things. Persuading the bully to take on a helping role with smaller kids in the first instance and getting the bed wetter out of bed when I went to bed to trip to the latrine. Both worked well and I got thanking letters from parents in both cases.

Probably this teaching role was what headed me ultimately into teaching despite the attractions of other possible careers. I later spent an easy summer tutoring two little girls of a famous wealthy family. The main value of that one was that it persuaded me that the pursuit of wealth was not for me. Too many of the surrounding wealthy ones were both unhappy and unpleasant. Wealth kills -- particularly one's children.

During my scholarship years which ran from 7th grade to graduate school I encountered a wide variety of part-time things ranging from delivering news papers and house cleaning, cafeteria work, book printing, writing for school and college papers which culminated in a summer writing for Time Inc. with 3 other college editors. I could have moved in there easily as Luce was a relative. But I discovered that most of the guys with which I was working were bored with their work with half finished novels in bottom drawers and so I left that one until retirement blogging which I do with enjoyment now.

Another domain of jobs that was most useful was in the blue collar world. Back then these jobs paid quite well and a man could support his family well, build or buy a home and car and have hobbies on the side such as flying a plane or fishing with a boat towed here or there. There were dangers in most of my jobs and people died around me. These included building houses (me clearing the trees with a power saw and helping a blaster) for factory workers. They were well built and affordable. I also worked in an aircraft factory and a major scrap metal operation simultaneously so as to be able to save enough money for marriage and a year of study at Oxford. Each of these jobs was interesting. The aircraft plant employed about 35,000 but only one African American (East Hartford, Conn.) but the scrap metal operation employed mainly African Americans and was unique in making jobs available and also offering college scholarships to some of their workers -- Suisman & Blumenthal. They gave me a loan towards my theological studies, too. In both of these jobs which were wearing combined, I made friends with buddies after a week or so of minor hazing. The guys at the aircraft plant were from all over the country and had some tales to tell such as the foreman who turned up dead in a ditch who had been giving guys a rough time in Texas. One day a big guy came at me and accused me of flirting with his wife. I thought I had had it when he backed off and left. I turned around and my buddies were putting their knives back in their jeans.

One of the weirder jobs was serving as summer helper to a retired Yale prof and his wife. He was supposed to tutor me in Shakespear which seemed a good deal after my sophomore year. It turned out that they were both living back in the 1920s and they treated both Peggy, their Irish cook/maid and me as dirt. She would spit in the soup nightly before she delivered it from the kitchen and I persuaded her to ask for a raise over her $25.00 per week for six day a week slave labor. Such I discovered was the world prior to the New Deal -- and, perhaps, the one to which Bush has been trying his best to return us?

My various jobs in Britain were also great learning experiences. I worked with teens as a teen myself my first year there as an exchange student in a British public (really private) school. I was discovering the rigidities of the British class system from which I realized some of my ancestors had escaped some centuries earlier. However, the Labour Party was hard at work both rebuilding war torn Britain and putting in place such essential services as universal medical care. My work in the Bethnel Green community center with kids was an extension of my camp counseling. Later when I worked with teens in the Manhattanville Community Center in West Harlem I was shocked by the contrast. The teens in Britain in 1952 were well fed, housed, and cared for medically. Those in Harlem in 1956 were hungry, living in horrible housing, and without medical care. We baked cakes as our primary activity -- mixes that I brought nights when we were to work together. It was heart breaking and later I learned from one of the few to survive that nearly all of my little guys had died violently before they reached 40. Such was the vast difference between the U.S. and Britain and their care for children. Bush is still opposing medical insurance coverage for kids and millions are still going hungry in Amerika.

Some of the other things were instructive -- preaching in Britain and in the U.S. I discovered that theology was not for me -- too many fatal flaws in the institutions that Christianity had evolved -- murderous tendencies towards wars and horrendous abuses of subordinate groups -- all those centuries of pogroms culminating the Holocaust!

I recall my last sermon at the Welsh Presbyterian Church in Manhattan with some embarrassment. I had a year earlier given one chastising them for not doing more for their neighbors. I repeated nearly the same theme and afterwards a parishioner told me that they had invited a nearby Latino congregation to share their church. I could see the ego stuff that all too often comes out in sermons. Jeremiah Wright is an all too typical example. There are more egomaniacs in the pulpit than saints.

There had been any number of other things that I won't detail here. The lessons are hopefully obvious. I did not mention that I worked as a heavy freight porter at the Oxford station to make ends meet during our year there. My mates were a fascinating group, ranging from a former German war prisoner to an Irishman with a love of opera. We got on fine, too. Had an amusing moment when my fine college principal got off the train one evening and I greeted him with "Carry your bag, sir?" He was stunned. Oxford students would rather starve then take blue collar jobs -- that damned class system. Two were killed when the midnight express caught them lugging a wagon across the tracks the week after I quit.

The years overseas were incredibly instructive as to the differences -- demonstrating the flaws there and here in the U.S. graphically through direct experience.

And so I learned much outside of classrooms.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Candidates' Health Plans?

Maybe I am getting too far along in age to catch subtleties that I may be missing, but as I watch the reports on the 3 presidential candidates' health plans it looks to me that intelligent commentators in the press as well as the sound bite media are missing the intent of the plans, their weak points, and the nonsense sometimes entailed therein.

As background here I was saddened by the Harry Truman defeat in his efforts to introduce universal health coverage here back when. The enemy was the A.M.A. which at that time held only greedy members determined to maintain the high incomes of doctors. I was told that by Dave Rogers, one of our leading medical figures in his day -- dean of two medical schools as a very young man, head of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and finally University Professor at Cornell Medical.

We missed a vital opportunity then as I saw as a teen exchange student to a British school and a later year at Oxford which exposed me to universal medical care independent of capacity to pay. Vividly I saw the contrast between the medical situations of kids in the East End of London (the poorest section) versus the lack of care for a comparable group of kids in Harlem some years later.

So what are the candidates offering? Both of the Dems are working towards universal medical coverage with different pragmatic strategies. Hillary wants to impose obligatory health insurance on all. Obama wants to follow the past route by including another group in need -- children -- to those now covered -- the poor (Medicaid) and retired (Medicare).
One cannot tell in advance which is the best strategy to the common end. There will be massive resistance to whatever by powerful vested interests -- profit and non profit health insurance bureaucracies and those opposed to mandatory health insurance generally. We will have one hell of a job to do in correcting our horrendously flawed system which costs twice our nearest competitor's and delivers far less. Folks are making out big with what we have and they won't give up easily. Even caring doctors may worry about the decline in their incomes, if we move to universal medical care.

McCain's medical offerings seem to have been provided by a speech write -- another attempt to privatize along the lines of Bush's effort to sabotage Social Security. I gather that even his figures do not hold up. A $5000.00 tax credit gets reduced to $2000.00 when taxes are taken out and that amount covers a pittance of the roughly $12,000 a year now is the cost of private insurance. McCain more and more looks to be out of touch with reality in area after area. Maybe being married to a hundred million plus dollars distorts one's views on things like taxes and basic services to the rest of us?

Hopefully we will elect enough Democrats -- at least 60 Senators -- so that we can make some major reforms in medical care in America. There are still those at work trying to kill us off prematurely, e.g. the cut out of coverage for very expensive life saving medicines tossed out this month to desperately sick people who need them.

What we have seeing in Republican medical insurance manipulations since Truman is a war on any of us who become ill and need medical care. And that is all of us at some point along the line -- I can vouch for this from my own experience as a retiree.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Lberal Democracy ----> Corporate Oligarchy?

Through the period running from the end to WW2 until the Reagan election, Americans shared in the nation's prosperity, the civil rights movement was launched, and we saw the beginnings of protections of others -- women, the disabled, gays, and others faced with discrimination both personal and economic. The change which was not noticed by the public nor particularly reported by those who understand the workings of our legal system was in the distribution of legal powers between three agencies -- corporations, labor unions, and governmental agencies designated to play protective roles through regulation of the powers and actions of the first two.

Reagan, however, began the tipping of controls towards the corporations and weakening of unions and protective agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust standards and protecting the public from corporate abuses either by exploiting economic powers or negating protective laws, regulations, and agencies.

The upshot of this tip in the scales of power has been that our corporations may now more or less do whatever they wish short of committing manifest murders. Drug companies make out like bandits in the U.S. while promoting what turn out to be dangerous redundant medications. The energy corporations are reporting massive profits while home owners and drivers are struggling to pay bills for essentials in these domains. The military industrial complex has been making out like a bandit by staging an illegal war and profiting vastly not only by the stepping up in production of military equipment, but also the vast profits made by all sorts of corporate parasites working the Iraq deserts -- ranging from Blackwater to Bechtel, Halliburton and others directly benefiting the friends of Bush and the Vice President who has a finger in virtually all of these pies.

Worst of all the failure to enforce the antitrust laws has allowed corporate interests to take over our major media sources of information. Bloggers may rail at such, but the principal sources of information for everyman are the manipulated TV circuits run by such as Murdock who has migrated his crookery from Australia and Britain to more or less control our one time democracy in the interest of his own balance sheets.

We have become a oligarchy dominated by our corporations -- which are killing us either directly or indirectly (an instance of latter crime consists of denying medical care to those who need it -- even children -- which is provided to every other developed democracy in the world. Our life expectation is now down to something like 48th world wide and our infant mortality rate is 28th. This atrocity committed by a nation that spends its energies boasting of our wealth -- which is now held mainly by the narrow spectrum of those who control the dispensation of our resources mainly into their own pockets. Check out those CEO perks and compare them with the below the poverty level survival struggles of single mothers with children to support -- or working people who cannot earn enough to support one person, let alone a small family.

So it went in Amerika. Such is all too reminiscent of the racist regimes of the 1930s which also plotted criminal wars to fatten their bellies.
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
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Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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