Maggie's Farm

The Jewish holiday of Passover begins this year next Monday night with the first Seder. (Translation = Order or sequence and content of the prayers, symbolic foods, and retelling of the Exodus, with emphasis on educating the children.)  Many Christians also celebrate the Passover Seder, which was their Last Supper.

Less known is that the Exodus was central to the minds of the new United States' Founding Fathers.  The first committee of the Continental Congress assigned to design our Great Seal, the symbol of our sovereignty, was comprised of three of the five men who drafted the Declaration of Independence: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. Franklin chose a design of "Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity." The motto: "Rebellion To Tyrants Is Obedience To God," which was later adopted by Jefferson as his personal motto.

The above is drawn from this website about the US' Great Seal. Click around the site.  It is fascinating.

Here's a relevant quote:

"All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up amongst us. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher." – Abraham Lincoln

The subject is Real Estate in the New York Times, and the treatment of it in this article is architecture.  This short filmette from the article is well done, but (more below)

that was my high school, the largest in the country. The NYT misses the more important backstory.

Winners of the most Westinghouse and National Merit Scholarships were from Erasmus Hall High School. (My favorite alumnus was Moe Howard.) With changing demographics and theories of education, the city has shut it down as unmanageable. The building on the corner was a Yeshiva in my time.  The grade school (P.S.6 for public school #6, in NYC parlance) sits on what was a parking lot in my time, for people who flocked to the then excellent shopping, now mostly gone and replaced with Carribbean shops, and three palace like movie theaters on Flatbush Avenue, now shuttered. What's now called the Flatbush Town Hall, built in 1875, was a police station, and we knew all the beat cops who looked out for us. Down the block on Church Avenue was Holy Cross, church and school, now closed. If you look in the upper right corner of the shot above you'll see the steeple of the Dutch Reform Church, built in 1654.

In my time, one out of every seven families in the US traced its family to Brooklyn, a major settling spot from the 1600s to 1900s for immigrants who went on to build America. The bones that made Flatbush, at the heart of Brooklyn, famous are still there.  The spirit and lifeblood isn't.

FWIW, the man I respected most of any I've met in my life and to whom I was closest to came out as gay. He was a Navy veteran, who'd served at Pelelieu and elsewhere in the Pacific during WWII.  I sat with him through his last year before he succumbed to AIDS. He was an accountant when I knew him and learned from him, who insisted on honest and informative numbers.

The VetVoice Foundation’s poll of Iraq and Afghanistan vets’ attitudes toward Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell says that:

[B]y six points Iraq and Afghanistan veterans under age 35 lean toward favoring allowing gay and lesbian people to serve openly (41% favor to 35% oppose) while veterans over age 35 lean toward opposing by five points (31% favor, 36% oppose).  This recent bipartisan survey, conducted among service members in the United States, in many ways runs counter to the idea being asserted by many, that service members and the military cannot handle this change and are unwilling to do so.

That may or may not be so.  The poll itself, however, has some problems.

1. Its service composition is off. The poll has the following service who say they served in Iraq or Afghanistan, 50% Army, 12% Marines, 18% Navy, 22% Air Force.  According to Stars and Stripes in March 2008, for example, when most who’d served had been in Iraq, 73% were in the Army, 18% in the Marines, 3% in the Navy, and 6% in the Air Force.

2. The poll does not distinguish those in combat units (although many in non-combat units often were subject to hostile fire).  One of the key considerations regarding Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell is how it may affect combat effectiveness.

3. The methodology of the poll is clouded. Proper polling standards require full disclosure of the methodology.  This poll doesn’t. This is all it says:

* Methods:  Lake Research Partners and American Viewpoint designed and administered this survey, which was conducted by phone using professional interviewers.  The survey reached a total of 510 veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq) and/or Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan).   The survey was conducted February 8-23, 2010.  Telephone numbers for the sample were generated randomly from a military sample and a radius sample drawn from military bases in the United States.  The margin of error for the total sample is +/- 4.4 percentage points.

The respondents’ answer to whether they served and to where is self-reporting and unverified.  How the sample was chosen is not detailed nor its representative validity presented. And, as seen in point 1 above, the service composition is off, and from point 2 above a critical question not asked.

4. The sponsoring organization is partisan.  Although claiming the pollsters themselves “designed and administered” it, it is frequent that sponsoring organizations influence the design.  VetsVoice Chairman is John Soltz, and only one vet Board Member is listed, J. Ashwin Madia.

On John Soltz (who supported disgraced Democrat congressman Eric Massa):

Mass was endorsed by the tough guy Veterans Political Action Committee (PAC) VoteVets. VoteVets is led by tough guys like Jon Soltz, a veteran of four months of duty in a division extended for fifteen months in Iraq. So far since 2006, VoteVets (click here for the This Ain’t Hell breakdown) has lied about Body Armor issues in a multi-million dollar campaign commercial used against Senator George Allen, had another veteran lie about his service in a Missouri Senate campaign commercial for Claire McCaskill.  Still following? VoteVets used a veteran who lied about being a veteran in Denver. A veteran who is not a veteran. There are lies and then there are VoteVets’ Richard Strandlof who is now facing jail time for claiming to be a wounded warrior.

For the past week,  Massa has further disgraced VoteVets in a gay scandal.

This is the legacy of VoteVets. You can’t blame them. When you are so desperate to prove your argument, even though you are absent factual truth or first hand testimony, you tend to get that guy on camera quick. So when you meet a fellow defeatist, pro-victimizing veteran, you grab them with both arms. Sometimes vetting these liberal “war heroes” would a good idea. But if Jon Soltz and VoteVets vetted everyone in their group claiming to have served in a combat zone, hell even Jon Soltz wouldn’t be a member of VoteVets.

On J. Ashwin Madia (who served as a Marine JAG in Iraq, defeated as a Democrat for Congress in 2008: “The district was ranked as one of the top ten most likely to switch parties in 2008. However, after a challenging campaign, the district remained in the Republican column.”):

I have experience advocating on behalf of unemployed people, immigrants, disabled children, battered women, and the LGBT community. In fact, I was one of the first marines to successfully defend a gay marine from “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Although influenced by Obama, I prefer to wait for the Department of Defense to complete and issue its study of Don't Ask/Don't Tell, in progress.

P.S.: I just received an Excel worksheet from the Defense Department's Press Operations Center breaking down by service and various demographics all those deployed from September 2001-January 2010.  I'd be happy to email a copy to the pollsters or journalists.

A map-equipped exercise machine can reenact any hike on Earth.

My son and I are already watching pre-season baseball games on TV.  We hosted a viewing of the great film "The Jackie Robinson Story" for his Little League team.  Here's a book that examines the interracial baseball that barnstormed the country before then.

Interracial games had been a part of baseball for almost as long as the game has been played. Beginning as early as 1869 in Philadelphia, and becoming a component of professionalized baseball culture by the 1880s, teams of black players and teams of white players stepped out onto the diamonds and went at it for nine innings. Remarkably enough, it was possible for a team like the All Nations (with a roster of blacks, Native Americans, Cubans, Polynesians, Asians, and Italians) to “barnstorm” the country between 1912 and 1920, before they were transformed into the legendary Kansas City Monarchs of the original Negro National League. Otherwise, interracialism meant that all-white teams played against all-black teams. But even so, once the regular season ended, some of the stars of the Negro and Major Leagues (including Babe Ruth) would join the barnstorming tours for the competition, the fun, and the cash (though not necessarily in that order)....

And yet, even as Paige, Dean, and Feller demonstrated that baseball fans might well be ready for integration, the contradictions of Jim Crow America hung over them. Paige had mixed feelings about the prospects of integrating the game, successful as he was in the world of the Negro League and interracial barnstorming. What might integration hold in store for him? “You might as well be honest about it,” he reflected in the early 1940s, “There would be plenty of problems, not only in the South, where the colored boys wouldn’t be able to stay and travel with the teams in spring training, but in the North, where they couldn’t stay or eat with them in many places. All nice statements in the world from both sides aren’t going to knock out Jim Crow.”