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Monday, July 28, 2014

At least he didn't mention Munich....

A few days ago, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Martin E. Dempsey said the following at the Aspen Security Forum (full text here):
“You’ve got a Russian government that has made the conscious decision to use its military force inside of another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives -- first time, I think, probably, since 1939 or so that that’s been the case,”
To some readers, the remark fails the laugh test even though no one in the room apparently laughed.

In that last link, former Reagan Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts is hot and bothered that the United States is demonizing Russia and Vlad Putin in apparent preparation for war -- and he means World War III, all caps and Roman numerals. The title of his post (which I received somehow in my email) is "The World Is Doomed By Western Insouciance; don’t expect to live much longer."

That title didn't fail the laugh test as I chuckled when reading it. That's why I put it in bold.

Anyway, Roberts notes that the U.S. has been using its military force inside of other countries a great deal just in the post-cold war era. Think Bush in Iraq or Obama's drone war in "Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen." Thus, how could anyone say this is the first time a country has used its military inside another since 1939?

Is that what Dempsey meant? Was he saying that no state since 1939 had militarily intervened in another state like Putin's Russia has in Ukraine? If so, that would be profoundly stupid.

However, it's pretty clear that Dempsey was saying Russia hadn't intervened in this way since 1939.

In context, his statement was in a Q&A conducted by Lesley Stahl of CBS News. She had asked Dempsey about ISIS in the question before and then said:
MS. STAHL:  OK, let’s switch to Ukraine and Russia.  There were reports today that the Russians were firing from Russian territory into Ukraine.  How does that change the situation, if it does? 
GEN. DEMPSEY:  Well, I think it -- I think it does change the situation.  I mean, you’ve got -- you know, you’ve got a Russian government that has made the conscious decision to use its military force inside of another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives -- first time, I think, probably, since 1939 or so that that’s been the case.  So you’ve got -- you’ve got -- in my view, you’ve got a very different security environment inside of Eastern Europe. 
The problem for Dempsey is that even by more generous reading, the claim is still pretty stupid.

Just Russia now: Hungary 1956. Czechoslovakia 1968. Afghanistan 1979.

AFGHANISTAN 1979 until 1989.

Georgia 2008.

So maybe Roberts has a point about the laugh test.


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Sunday, July 27, 2014

Racial injustice

If you haven't read it yet, then I recommend you give some time to "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which was the cover story in The Atlantic in June.

On the same theme, here's the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members, the Staple Singers performing "When Will We Be Paid (For the Work We've Done)?" live in 1971.




In 3 minutes, the song effectively communicates a similar message. Lyrics.

And since it's baseball Hall of  Fame induction day, you might also check out "42" on DVD. It's the story of Jackie Robinson -- and to some extent, Branch Rickey. It focuses on real events from 1946 and 1947 when Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball.

I had put off watching the film for at least a year because I was afraid that the story would be Disney-fied and therefore gloss over the injustices faced by Robinson. It was almost certainly softened a bit for contemporary mass audiences, but the film does reveal a sample of the disgusting overt racism prevalent at the time. Movie critic Richard Roeper wrote a thoughtful review explaining the film's value even with these limitations. Roeper gave it 3 of 4 stars and that sounds about right to me. Here's the Metacritic summary.




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Wednesday, July 23, 2014

15 years ago...

July 23, 1999, an old friend and I attended a game in Yankee Stadium. New York beat Cleveland 9-8 that night in just over 4 and a half hours. Long game.

Photo credit: Paul Parker

This might be a good time to mention Hardball Passport.  If you save old baseball tickets stubs from games you attended (they also have a basketball site, with football coming soon), you can easily retrieve details of the games you attended. Here is my list. I attended some games in the early 1970s that are not yet covered by the website and many, many minor league games that are not in their database -- many from the late 1990s and early- to mid-2000s. Oh, I've also apparently lost some tickets stubs from college. They don't seem to have exhibition games either, at least not from 1987 when I saw 8 games in 7 days in Spring Training in Florida.

The website likewise doesn't show that I attended the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies two days after that Yankee game in Cooperstown, New York. I went because of George Brett, though Nolan Ryan and Robin Yount were also inducted that weekend (along with four others nominated by the Veterans Committee: Orlando Cepeda, Nestor Chylak, Frank Selee, and Joe Williams).


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Friday, July 04, 2014

Dave Alvin - "4th of July"







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American History Through Family Ties

I believe that this is the headstone of my great, great, great grandfather, buried in Clear Run Cemetery Bridgeton, Indiana.  That's about 150 miles from where I live. If correct, his descendants made their way to Kansas just before the Civil War began.



As you may notice, James Payne died on July 4, 1884.

That was exactly 130 years ago today.

If the information at a grave site website is accurate (James Payne (1799 - 1884) - Find A Grave Memorial), then I'm descended from a Payne family from colonial-era Virginia. James's father Augustine fought in the Revolutionary War and also moved to Indiana (in 1835).

I'm definitely descended from George Daily Payne, who is supposed to be James's son, but George (my great grandfather) was born when James was 58 years old. That's 5 years older than I am now and is difficult to imagine. Moreover, the gravestone says that James's wife's name was Sarah Webster (married 1829), but the alleged son's webpage says that his mother was Maria Daily Payne. Given that George was born 28 years after the marriage between James and Sarah....then Maria could have been a second wife. Why is Sarah on the gravestone, but not Maria?

I think someone has made an error.

The accurate information seems to be that James Young Payne, married to Sarah Webster, is actually George's grandfather and his father was James Webster Payne, who married Maria Daly. George was in Kansas by the 1860 census, but the record indicates that he was born in Indiana, apparently in 1857. That would have been a violent time to be in Kansas, actually.

Kansas became a state in January 1861.

So there's some history.