Jewish Revival in Poland

So they're having a Jewish revival in Poland. Only they're kind of short on Jews.

Color me "unimpressed." No, that's not right.

Fuck them.

One thing not mentioned in the article was that immediately after the war, thousands of Polish Jews tried to go home. The Poles would have none of that, they celebrated the end of World War II by having a pogrom and killing roughly 1,500 Jews who had survived the concentration camps. Most of the other Jews got the message and those who didn't mostly left following crackdowns by the Polish Communist government.

Poland is getting what it has coming to it. Their loss.

Formative Literature

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a story about how Ayn Rand's works were formative for a lot of people. It wasn't for me. But the story got me thinking of which book did I read early in my teenage years that I would consider formative.

That book was "Mila 18," Leon Uris's novel about the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. I haven't read the book in probably 30 years or more, but I remember it to be a work about endurance, suffering, how people can tolerate the unthinkable, and, finally, people rising up against overwhelming odds.

(You can read about the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in a lot of different places, from short entries in Wickipedia to lengthy discourses of a scholarly nature. I won't get into it here.)

What struck me, most of all, was that the Jews in the Ghetto took on the German Army and the SS with very few weapons at the beginning. Some handguns, a few rifles and mainly Molotov cocktails. With that and what they could capture, they held off the Germans for about six weeks, with little if any support from anyone. At one point, they raised their flag and the flag of pre-war Poland high over the Ghetto and those flags flew for days, despite the efforts of the Germans to take them down and much to the displeasure of Himmler.

Six weeks. How long did France last against the Germans? How long did Poland, Denmark, Belgium, or Norway last against the Germans? It wasn’t six weeks. Days, a few weeks at best. Not a month and a half.

The lesson I took away: Having an education is a good thing. Having an education and weapons is better.

And never go quietly.

I Was Trying

And I really have been trying to get something written tonight. I went for a walk after work, then ate dinner and returned some calls. But as I try to write this, I have a cat pawing at me, for she feels I haven't paid her enough attention.

An old classmate got married out in Scully-Land. I wasn't invited, which was probably a good thing. From the reports I heard, not only were the wedding vows very big on the bride being submissive to her new husband and obeying him in all things (there are advantages to being single), the Wingnut of a preacher made comments exhorting them to be like Jesus Christ in all things and held out George Bush as an example a man who emulates Jesus.

I would have projective-vomited my appendix all over the church.

My religious edjumacation is lacking, but the last time I looked into this, I didn't find where it said that Jesus thought that waging wars of aggression were good ideas. And correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I kind of doubt that Jesus would be in favor of torture. Maybe there is something in Scripture where Jesus says: "Hooray for the rich and fuck the poor," but I've never heard anybody cite it.

So I'm Certifiable. Deal With it.

I don't quite know why this is so, but there is something about this video that grabs me. I'm not a fan of anime, but I suppose I'm going to have to track down a copy of "Jin-Roh" and see the original.

"Return on Success"

Yes, the Surge is so successful that the Army is taking its soldiers who worked in the supply chain and giving them rifles. So they need to hire contractors to do those jobs.

What's next: "All walking wounded, fall out and draw rifles."

Look at the bottom of the article: 129,000 private contractors in Iraq, so many that the Army is considering getting a private medical provider in the country to service them.

(Ayup: "Did you get pre-approval to have that sucking chest wound treated?")

160,000 of our troops, about 13,000 in the Coalition of the Willing (Bribed) and 129,000 in the Coalition of the Billing. Of course, you rarely hear about the latter number.

Of course, the latter number may go down since Blackwater is being kicked out of Iraq for being trigger-happy. Or so the Iraqi government claims. Guess we are going to see how "sovereign" Iraq is.

My bet: Not so much.

Greenspan, Part 2

Paul Krugman, in today's New York Times (hidden by those fuckers at TimesSelect), blasts Alan Greenspan for being a moral coward (my term, not his).

I don't always agree with Krugman, though I did admire his "send Bill-O to Darfur" campaign (though the fundraising for that was probably slowed by the fact that donors could not just pay for a one-way trip). This time, I think he is skewering someone who badly needs it. It's easy to criticize when the folly of a particular policy has become apparent over time, which is what Greenspan is doing. It is a lot harder to criticize a popular policy before it is obvious or before it becomes politically easy to do so.

It is especially easy to criticize when one has left office and has no responsibility for cleaning the bloodstains from the carpet. Waiting until after the evil deed is done and the corpse is cooled before saying "this was not a good thing to do" is belated honesty at best.

Especially after Bush started his overseas adventures, it was clear that his penchant for tax cuts was a really bad idea. War is expensive and that the Republicans refused to recognize that fact is inexcusable. That the party of "fiscal responsibility" opted for massive deficit spending was hypocritical to a legendary degree. None of this is exactly rocket science.

Republicans stood aside and cheered as Bush carried out the two policies that he is good at: Cutting taxes and killing people. Greenspan kept his mouth shut.

Those on the Right (and I include Greenspan) who are now saying that the tax cuts (and the war) were bad ideas and that they were always against them are nothing more than moral cowards. They could at least take some responsibility for enabling the Chimperor in his policies of pillage and burn.

Let's be clear about this: Republicans have forfeited any claim they once had for being the party of fiscal discipline. Reagan and both Bushes ran huge deficits so they could give tax cuts to their supporters while passing the bill to the unborn generations. Bush the Last has been particularly aggressive in this regards, his "economic success" is only benefiting the wealthy, the economic boom of his Administration is confined to those who do not need it. It has not trickled down, the people who do the work that makes society function are not feeling the good times, they are getting squeezed.

Krugman has it right, but he could have concluded his column by stating the obvious conclusion:

Greenspan is a moral coward.

The Brave One

I saw Jodie Foster's new movie "the Brave One" this weekend.

If I wanted to be snarky, I'd call it "Jodie Does Death Wish," but I think the movie aspires to be more than that. I think it tries to be two movies in one; one of them being a blood-soaked vigilante flick and the other being a discourse on revenge and how violence changes the victims. The performances by Foster and Terence Howard were very good. Nicky Katt is almost funny as a detective who indulges in dark humor. One line (from memory): "It's a toss-up which killed him; the seven-story fall or the crowbar in his skull. No, make that 70-30 on the crowbar."

I thought the audience was interesting. Besides the usual collection of guys that one would expect to see for a blood-soaked thriller, there were almost as many women, including women who had either come alone or with other women. From the comments I overheard in the ladies' room following the mandatory post-flick pit stop, the reaction towards the movie was positive.

More News from the Toljaso Dept.

According to Alan Greenspan, the motive for the Iraq War was oil.

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Gee. It's not just lefties making this charge anymore.

Here's another nugget from Greenspan:

"The Republicans in Congress lost their way. They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose."

I can't argue with that. Not that I'd want to.

Light and Shadow

I like the way that the shadows cast by clouds play across the landscape.

IFR

"I Follow Roads."
Divided highways are excellent visual navigation aids, if one happens to be going in your direction. Railroads, by comparison are pretty poor. When Cal Rodgers flew the first airplane across the US in 1911, railroads were about all he had to navigate by. He had state maps, nothing like a modern sectional chart.


Following a course line on a sectional chart is the most basic method of aerial navigation. In the 1930s through the 1950s, four-course radio ranges were used. You can see the "beams" of one just to the west of Detroit in this sectional:

All you needed to fly those was an AM receiver, a set of headphones and a magnetic compass. If you were "on the beam", you heard a steady tone. If you were off to one side, you heard Morse code for A (.-) or N (-.). And you needed a ton of smarts, because if you were lost, finding out which side of the station you were on took a lot of know-how. Some of the "beams" could be bent by weather conditions and in thunderstorms, all bets were off.

Four-course ranges were replaced by VHF Omni-directional Ranges, or VORs. You dial in the frequency, dial in the bearing and fly to or from the station. If you scroll back up to the first chart, the large circle northeast of Topeka indicates a VOR station. Draw a line on the chart to the station, note the number on the bearing circle and that is the radial bearing from the station. You fly that away from the station and you fly the reciprocal bearing to the station.


Easy as pie, especially compared to trying to find your way by a sectional over rural Illinois, where all of the small towns look the same from 4,500'.

OMEGA was used in high-end airplanes for many years, but the OMEGA stations were shut down ten years ago as GPS came online. LORAN was also used in airplanes, although it was developed for maritime use. VORs are still in wide use, though it's pretty clear that the Feds want to shut them down soon.