Ain't Nothing Wrong With That

Robert Randolph & The Family Band.  Robert on pedal steel and his cousins on bass and drums.  Great message.  A live act not to miss - I've seen 'em three times.

The Lone Ranger

I was 5 1/2 when we moved from our apartment in Stamford to a house in Norwalk CT in the fall of 1956. One of the things I remember from my time in that apartment was watching two Westerns on TV (along with the Disney Davy Crockett series); Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger, the latter with its stirring opening and closing theme from the William Tell Overture.  Although I remembered The Lone Ranger, there was only one show I specifically recalled in detail - the origin story of the character.  I recently came across that show and it turns out it was the first episode of the first season.  I must have seen it as a rerun because the show began in 1949 and ran through 1957.

Watching that first episode for the first time in more than 65 years I realized why it made such a big impression on me.  We learn in that first episode that John Reid, about to become The Lone Ranger, vows never shoot to kill, only to wound, believing that justice belongs to the legal system.  Yet that first show is very violent though, in keeping with the times, not graphically so.

Reid, along with five other Texas Rangers, including his brother, are in pursuit of a gang of outlaws.  They ride into a box canyon and are ambushed.  Reid is badly wounded and the other Rangers killed. This is the scene I remembered all these years and I think it was the unusual level of violence that made it stay in my mind.  Reid's life is saved when the Indian Tonto rides into the canyon while hunting, finds the wounded Ranger and helps nurse him to recovery.  We also find out that years earlier, Reid had saved Tonto after his family was killed by raiders from another tribe.  The outlaws believe Reid dead, and Reid decides it is better for them to continue to believe it, and adopts his new identity as The Lone Ranger.

Clayton Moore plays The Lone Ranger and Jay Silverheels is Tonto.   Silverheels was a Mohawk and an outstanding athlete before making his film debut in 1938.  Silverheels appeared in all 217 episodes of The Lone Ranger, while Moore missed one season because of a contract dispute.

Facing Into Reality

The bulk of the post below was written several months ago and has been in draft form since.  I had hesitated to publish it because the topic had been thoroughly explored in my lengthy 2023 post The Danger Within.  However, I came across recent remarks by Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which prompted me to update and publish this post.

Greenblatt appeared on CNBC to talk about a recent study funded by the ADL.  The study involved submitting resumes for white collar jobs from candidates with European names, Jewish names, and Israeli names, finding that those with Jewish and Israeli names needed to submit substantially more resumes before getting interviews.  I've not read the studies so can't comment on the methodology which is critical to determining the legitmacy of the results, but I was interested in Greenblatt's comments on DEI.  One of the interviewers makes several remarks about the problems with DEI.  Greenblatt responds:

"DEI industrial complex which excludes, rather than includes, Jews, it magnifies the problem."

"It's hard for me to make sense of a program trying to create more diverse environments when we see it is diminishing that".

Is the ADL's embrace of DEI, described below, weakening?  It's hard to tell, but I think Greenbaltt is still hoping to have DEI embrace, rather than reject Jews.  Looking at the ADL website I can't find anything about DEI, but the organization is full on in support of social justice and of all the other causes now falling under the rubric of DEI.  It looks like it can't face directly into the nature of the problem.

However, maybe there is something going on below the surface with the ADL and other American Jewish organizations.  There certainly needs to be. As pointed out in my previous post on this, DEI is simply incompatible with Jews being included.  To do so would undermine the very logic and rationale for DEI which is based on the oppressor versus oppressed framework.  You cannot include the most disproportionately successful group in America within DEI.  It would make a mockery of the ideology.  

In the news right now is a story about the University of Michigan firing its Director of the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives for allegedly saying that the university is "controlled by wealthy Jews" and that Jewish students are "wealthy and privileged" and so do not need diversity services.  She's actually correct, according to DEI doctrine.  That's the reality that needs to be faced in to and why DEI is such a corrupt, divisive, and racist way of thinking.  It is a repudiation of the tenets of the Civil Rights Movement, a denial of our common humanity, while embracing a reactionary view of tolerance.

In a piece earlier this year, The Real Rupture in American Jewish Life, Ben Koan best summarized the situation for American Jews,

As Franklin Foer writes in The Atlantic, the real rupture is between traditional Jewish-American liberalism and an antisemitism-ridden, illiberal left. According to Foer, “The intersectional left self-consciously rebelled against the liberalism that had animated so much of institutional Judaism, which fought to install civil liberties and civil rights enforced by a disinterested state.” Instead, the new left “considered the idea of neutrality—whether objectivity in journalism or color blindness in the courts—as a guise for white supremacy,” with Jews “treated in sectors of the left as the epitome of whiteness.”

While the old Jewish-American liberalism espoused cultural pluralism, for the left influenced by Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, there are only racists and antiracists, colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed. In this Manichean, literally black-and-white worldview, Israel is wholly in the wrong and the October 7 attacks are to be justified or even celebrated. Liberal Zionists are, at best, the equivalent of whites who refuse to see their privilege and thus contribute to structural racism. At worst, they are de facto oppressors and legitimate targets of ostracism or violence themselves. 

Accordingly, the choice for most American Jews is not whether to adhere to liberal principles or to support the existence of Israel; it’s whether to fight for traditional liberal principles on the left or to abandon the left entirely.  

Here's what I wrote a few months ago:

Those Jewish organizations who had been collaborating with the DEI crowd seem to have decided to maintain that course of action.  In an interview with the Jewish Insider, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt once again tells us he sees nothing wrong with DEI, other than that Jews are not included:

We’re going to judge these institutions based on not what they say but what they do. And so whether it’s how they update and expand their DEI programming, whether it’s how they apply consequences to student organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice in Palestine, that seriously violate their codes of conduct and target and intimidate and threaten Jewish students, whether it’s ensuring that those Jewish kids or Israeli kids don’t experience discrimination. 

And so, DEI is here, and, you know, at ADL we believe that diversity education is really important. We live in the most heterodox, multicultural society in the world. Understanding your peers, your colleagues, your employees — understanding them, knowing their histories, ensuring that you can approach the issues from a more informed perspective, I think that makes you a better peer or a better manager or a better leader. You are able to demonstrate empathy. But if DEI perpetuates not diversity, equity, inclusion, but the exclusion of Jews and Israelis, we have a problem. So my hope would be that we will see the change that will ensure that Jewish people are going to be treated it with decency that are treated fairly and that are treated in the same manner as all others.

The problem with Greenblatt's position can be best seen in this tweet:

It's critical for any push for diversity in any industry to be inclusive of Jews. If your project of inclusion perpetuates the exclusion of Jews, you are failing. So, we applaud the many celebrities for their courage in standing up, speaking out and writing to @TheAcademy to… pic.twitter.com/lbOPuP9TrQ

— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 10, 2024

The tweet links to this article, in which well-off Jews demand inclusion in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Representation & Inclusion Standards promulgated in 2020 in the midst of the George Floyd hysteria.

Here's another example that occurred in September 2023, predating the October 7 attack.  The American Jewish Committee (AJC) joined a lawsuit against the Santa Ana Unified School District because it inserted antisemitic material into its mandated Ethnic Studies course.  So far, so good.  But the article goes on to quote the AJC Chief Legal Officer saying:

"Done right, ethnic studies prepare students to live in an increasingly diverse society.  Done wrong, they can be divisive and discriminatory."

The futility of this is evidenced by how Harvard defanged its antisemitism advisory task force by naming Professor Derek Penslar as co-chair, ensuring it would be a puppet of the administration.  While much attention has focused on Penslar's issues with Israel, the real problem is that he is a hard-core DEI advocate.  His role is to provide some window-dressing designed to do the minimum possible to address antisemitism and keep Jewish donors happy while failing to address the core issue of DEI, from which all of the campus hostility to Jews springs from.  Also little noticed is that at the same time Harvard announced formation of a task force on Islamophobia.  The idea is to create an equivalence between a virulent outbreak of antisemitism with a non-outbreak of Islamophobia.  These things are not alike but Harvard will do its best to play Jews for fools.

This is the reality of DEI and settler-colonialism link Israel and America.  Settler-colonialism is not limited to Israel.  As the professor below states, "the goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States" because "the U.S. is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed".  A few years ago, I would have dismissed such talk as just crazy campus stuff, but since 2020 we've discovered the incredible power this set of beliefs holds, not just in academia but across most of our elite institutions and the Biden administration. (1)

The speaker quoted above is not some random person.  It is Professor Melanie Yazzie of the University of Minnesota, whose biography states:

She writes and teaches about a range of topics, including Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism; Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies; biopolitics; water; media; Marxism; and theories of policing and the state. [NOTE - most of these are even real things]

Yazzie has been helped along the way by the academic and foundation networks backing the effort to instill race essentialism into our society.  She was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship; Andrew W Mellon Dissertation Fellowship; and University of California Postdoctoral Fellowship.  This is not happening by accident, these institutions are deliberately fomenting divisiveness.  These people mean what they say and must be taken seriously.  Don't believe it?  In April 2022, a communist "anti-colonial" black activist attempted to assassinate a Jewish mayoral candidate in Louisville, Kentucky.  Though he fired four shots, he fortunately did not succeed.  Didn't hear about it?  No surprise, as it was a one-day story in those media outlets that reported it at all.  No need to start a national conversation about that!

“Land back is going to happen," University of Minnesota professor Melanie Yazzie said during a "teach-in" about the Israel-Palestine conflict. “The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States.” pic.twitter.com/glgwZpLmmD

— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) December 21, 2023

You can get a further flavor of Yazzie's thinking in her TED Talk.

Yazzie is not alone in academia.  On October 7, 2023 Yale Professor Zareena Grewal tweeted, "Settlers are not civilians.  This is not hard."  She went on to tweet, "My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israeli is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity." 

Grewal is still an Associate Professor of American Studies, Ethnicity, Race, & Migration, and Religious Studies(!).  Yale seems fine, as do many other academic institutions, with having an advocate for murder and genocide on its faculty.  Grewal also, like Yazzie, gets foundation support, in her case from Fullbright and Luce.  Anytime you look at the most radical faculty at American universities you will find a network of progressive foundation support. There is a lot of philanthropic money to help those who want to destroy America.

For a different perspective read, "America Works, DEI Doesn't" by Corey Brook, a pastor on the South Side of Chicago.

The reality is that DEI is an ideology for the privileged. It helps people like Claudine Gay who exploit race for power and prestige and it hurts communities like mine by exploiting them for poverty-porn.

DEI ideology didn’t offer Jonathan a better life; it has no ability to help him. It doesn’t offer faith, and it doesn’t offer meaningful work. It doesn’t live with us on the South Side of Chicago. It’s manipulative rhetoric, a way of exploiting Jonathan’s tragedy, and the tragedy of thousands of young men like him, on behalf of professional-class ideologues who seek to use our pain to fuel their rise through American institutions. Their stock-in-trade is a soul-destroying poison whose moral and real-world effects are as negative for our communities as those of any other drug that is sold here.

An anonymous former academic, The Ivy Exile, wrote something similar from his perspective.

But by the mid-2010s their once-searing insights had become frozen in time like it was forever the 1980s—that even with the federal bureaucracy and Fortune 500 on board they remained scrappy underdogs against all odds. Even as America grew vastly more diverse, old black and white categories blurring and dissolving, the systematized version insisted that little had changed.

At least the campus wars of the ’80s and early ’90s around political correctness had offered critical race theorists spirited pushback in the public square, encouraging them to hone and diversify their ideas. With critique verboten in the age of Black Lives Matter, they’ve become increasingly insulated, cranking out the same faded dogma even as ill-conceived schemes like cashless bail and defunding police take disproportionate toll on minority communities.

Whatever the latest disaster, it’s always somebody else’s fault, and further proof that ever more DEI officials and administrators are needed to fix things. If not for white and adjacent privilege, plus the rest of the intersecting spectra of oppression, statistical parity of all indices across all groups would be the default state of global society.

You should read his entire piece with an example of the sloppy scholarship of the DEI academics.

-----------------------------------------------------

(1)  The Democratic controlled Minnesota Legislature passed legislation enacting a mandatory ethnic studies curriculum based upon DEI principles, legislation signed by Governor Tim Walz, who then appointed a committee to develop the cirriculum, a committee chaired by an academic who advocates the destruction of the United States because it is a settler-colonial project.

The Beauty Of Reading

Umberto Eco: "When we read a really great book, the book doesn't end on the last page. The book is only one stage in a lifelong dialogue between the reader and the author. The beauty of reading is that we never finish a book when we read it; we can always come back to it..." pic.twitter.com/D3dkCC5oPU

— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) December 4, 2024

How true.  How many books have I read and re-read over the years. How many more will I in the future.  And, as I get older, I take different things from your favorite books upon each reading.

You can read more about Umberto Eco here.

The View

 I like Edward Hopper paintings.  This one, from 1930, is called Cobbs Barn and Distant Houses.

  This, from a decade later, is simply called Gas.

Black River

A thousand years is but a day they say

And maybe in a thousand more I'll find my way

Sierra Hull on vocals and mandolin.

It's Taco Tuesday

 Let Lalo Salamanca give you some tips on making the perfect taco.

Two lines of dialogue from Breaking Bad mention Lalo and Nacho, who are never mentioned again and never appear in the series, but later become major characters in Better Call Saul; the charming and extremely lethal Lalo Salamanca, and soulful and tragic Nacho Varga.

Amazing how only a few seconds of context in Breaking Bad gave us 2 of the best characters in Better Call Saul pic.twitter.com/Gi4aIeGx5i

— Saul Goodman ⚖ (@itsSaulGoodman) November 26, 2024

Job Posting

Great progress has been made on reading the carbonized scrolls found at the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.  It's required some amazing applications of new technologies to do so and you can read more about the details here and here.  

And now you have a chance to participate as the team has just posted an opening for a full time annotation specialist paying up to $40 an hour!

Skunk

 Rick Beato has been on a roll lately, recently interviewing the elusive David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and then, a few days ago, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, lead guitarist for Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers, and session player for many other famous artists.  Rick is the best music interviewer going.  He focuses on the music, not on anything else, asks good questions and gives interviewees the space to talk.  Even when I don't understand all the musical details I still enjoy it.  Skunk comes across as a true gentleman and it was wonderful to listen to his stories about the Dan, the Doobies, as well as Segovia, Hendrix, Slash, and others.  Hendrix and Jeff Beck are on his Mt Rushmore of guitarists.

Skunk features on the first three Steely Dan albums, before Fagen and Becker decided to stop performing as a live act, and he then moved seamlessly into the Doobies and was the guy responsible for later bringing Michael McDonald, who'd been a backup singer on Dan albums, into the Doobies.

Rick gets Skunk to talk about two of his most famous solos for the Dan, My Old School and Rikki Don't Lose That Number.  Another favorite solo (not mentioned in the video) is in The Boston Rag, starting about 3 minutes in. We also learn that his favorite instrument is the pedal steel guitar.  There wasn't much call for that in Steely Dan, but it does show up in a couple of their tunes, most notably Fire In The Hole, where Skunk adds a tasty solo at the end (the song also features outstanding piano parts).

  Beginning in the 1980s, Skunk developed a parallel second career as an expert on defense technologies.  Here's how Wikipedia explains it:

Baxter fell into his second profession almost by accident. In the mid-1980s, his interest in music recording technology led him to wonder about hardware and software originally developed for military use, specifically data compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices.

His next-door neighbor was a retired engineer who had worked on the Sidewinder missile program. This neighbor bought Baxter a subscription to Aviation Week magazine, provoking his interest in additional military-oriented publications and missile defense systems in particular. He became self-taught in this area, and at one point wrote a five-page paper that proposed converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system.

He gave the paper to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and his career as a defense consultant began. Baxter received a series of security clearances so he could work with classified information. In 1995, Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Curt Weldon, then the chairman of the House Military Research and Development Subcommittee, nominated Baxter to chair the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense.

Baxter's work with that panel led to consulting contracts with the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He consults for the US Department of Defense and the US intelligence community, as well as defense-oriented manufacturers such as Science Applications International Corporation, Northrop Grumman Corp., General Dynamics, and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. He has said his unconventional approach to thinking about terrorism, tied to his interest in technology, is a major reason the government sought his assistance.

"We thought turntables were for playing records until rappers began to use them as instruments, and we thought airplanes were for carrying passengers until terrorists realized they could be used as missiles," Baxter has said. "My big thing is to look at existing technologies and try to see other ways they can be used, which happens in music all the time and happens to be what terrorists are incredibly good at."

Baxter has also appeared in public debates and as a guest on CNN and Fox News advocating missile defense. He served as a national spokesman for Americans for Missile Defense, a coalition of organizations devoted to the issue.

In April 2005, he joined the NASA Exploration Systems Advisory Committee.

Baxter was a member of an independent study group that produced the Civil Applications Committee Blue Ribbon Study recommending an increased domestic role for US spy satellites in September 2005.  This study was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on August 15, 2007. He is listed as "Senior Thinker and Raconteur" at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and is a Senior Fellow and Member of the Board of Regents at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

While Beato does not cover the military side of Skunk's career, American security remains important to him. In the interview, when discussing his friendship with Jimi Hendrix, Baxter mentions Jimi's service in the 101st Airborne and refers to him as a "patriot". 

This is an interview where Skunk shares his thoughts about Ringo Starr (very complimentary) as well as a bit on his military career.

Bird Day

For all my past Larry Bird posts, I've never done one on his birthday.  It's time to start.  Happy 68th, Larry.  Let's watch some passing by #33.

The War Begins

Today is the 83rd anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.  A tragic day for America, with more than 2,400 servicemen dying and, longer-term, a disaster for Japan.

On December 8, 1941 President Franklin D Roosevelt asked Congress to declare that since the prior day a state of war had existed between the Empire of Japan and the United States.  In his "day of infamy" speech you can hear the anger and outrage in his voice, reflecting that Japanese peace negotiators were in the US Capital, even as Japanese carriers launched their air strike on Pearl Harbor.  You can also hear his recital of the other attacks simultaneously carried out by Japan across the Pacific which conveys the massive scale of the assault. For an edited, but very high quality audio and picture, version click here.

Something often missed is that the US did not declare war on Germany on December 8.  This created a dilemma for American policy and military planners who believed American involvement in WWII was inevitable and who viewed Germany as the greater threat.  In fact, it had already been agreed that in the event of war with both Germany and Japan that 85% of America's resources would be devoted to defeating the Nazis.  Hitler solved the American dilemma by declaring war on the US (for reasons that are still debated today) on December 11.

Over the decades there have been suggestions that FDR knew of the planned attack on Pearl Harbor and let it proceed in order to draw the US into WWII.  I've read quite a lot about these accusations and believe them to be utterly without merit as do most historians who've reviewed the documents.

In 1941 was FDR seeking a way to get the US to intervene in the war?  Yes, but it was on the side of Britain against Germany.  War with Japan would interfere with that goal.

There have also been exhaustive studies of the intelligence (particularly via code-breaking) that the US had available to it in the weeks leading up to Pearl Harbor.  During those last days, FDR and our military were tracking Japanese naval forces and believed an attack was imminent with the likely targets being the British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia and/or the Kingdom of Siam along with a lesser probability that American forces in the Philippines would be attacked.  There were only very scattered references to Pearl Harbor amongst a blizzard of intelligence from the broken codes.

As is often the case I'll let Winston Churchill have the last word with his reaction to Pearl Harbor:

"No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy . . . So we had won after all! . . . We should not be wiped out.  Our history would not come to an end . . .  I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before - that the United states is like 'a giant boiler.  Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate'.  Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful."

Japan's decision to wage war against America was a monumental miscalculation.  There were many within the Japanese military who had misgivings; one was the Emperor Hirohito's brother, Rear Admiral Takamatsu Nobuhito who told his brother a week before Pearl Harbor;

"The navy cannot afford to fight.  There is a feeling that, if possible, the navy would want to avoid a Japanese-American war.  If we pass up this opportunity [for peace], war will be impossible to avoid".

Relinked here are my posts Japan Decides On War, along with Dereliction of Duty, on America's military escalation in Vietnam.  Both are examples of how bad decisions can be made, despite the misgivings of many of those involved.  Useful lessons to keep in mind, particularly with war, the weightiest of human endeavors.

The Clouds Of Mars

From Astronomy Picture of the Day.

"Explanation: If you could stand on Mars -- what might you see? You might look out over a vast orange landscape covered with rocks under a dusty orange sky, with a blue-tinted Sun over the horizon, and odd-shaped water clouds hovering high overhead. This was just the view captured last March by NASA's rolling explorer, Perseverance. The orange coloring is caused by rusted iron in the Martian dirt, some of which is small enough to be swept up by winds into the atmosphere. The blue tint near the rising Sun is caused by blue light being preferentially scattered out from the Sun by the floating dust. The light-colored clouds on the right are likely composed of water-ice and appear high in the Martian atmosphere. The shapes of some of these clouds are unusual for Earth and remain a topic of research."