Veterans Day, Armistice Day

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

Yes, indeed, I am that old—old enough to just barely remember when Veterans Day was called Armistice Day. The change in names occurred in 1954, when I was very small, in order to accommodate World War II and its veterans.

Since then, the original name has largely fallen out of use—although it remains, like a vestigial organ, in the timing of the holiday, November 11th, which commemorates the day the WWI armistice was signed (eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month).

I’m also old enough – and had a teacher ancient enough – to have been forced to memorize that old chestnut “In Flanders Fields” in fifth grade – although without being given much historical context for it, I think at the time I assumed it was about World War II, since as far as I knew that was the only real war.

You can find the story of the poem here [well, you could when the post was first written, but the link is dead now]. It was written by a Canadian doctor who served in the European theater. It’s not necessarily great poetry, but it was great propaganda to encourage America’s entry into what was known at the time as the Great War.

The poem’s first line “In Flanders fields the poppies blow” introduces that famous flower that later became the symbol of Armistice – and later, Veterans—Day. Why the poppy?

Wild poppies flower when other plants in their direct neighbourhood are dead. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, but only when there are no more competing flowers or shrubs in the vicinity (for instance when someone firmly roots up the ground), these seeds will sprout.

There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him bloodred poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.

But in this poem the poppy plays one more role. The poppy is known as a symbol of sleep. The last line We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields might point to this fact. Some kinds of poppies are used to derive opium from, from which morphine is made. Morphine is one of the strongest painkillers and was often used to put a wounded soldier to sleep. Sometimes medical doctors used it in a higher dose to put the incurable wounded out of their misery.

Now a day to honor those who have served in our wars, Veterans Day has an interesting history in its original Armistice Day incarnation. It was actually established as a day dedicated to world peace, back in the early post-WWI year of 1926, when it was still possible to believe that WWI had been the war fought to end all wars.

The original proclamation establishing Armistice Day as a holiday read as follows:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

After the carnage of World War II, of course, the earlier hope that peaceful relations among nations would not be severed had long been extinguished. By the time I was a young child, a weary nation sought to honor those who had fought in all of its wars in order to secure the peace that followed – even if each peace was only a temporary one.

And isn’t an armistice a strange (although understandable) sort of hybrid, after all; a decision to lay down arms without anything really having been resolved? Think about the recent wars that have ended through armistice: WWI, which segued almost inexorably into WWII; the 1948 war following the partition of Palestine; the Korean War; and the Gulf War. All of these conflicts exploded again into violence – or have continually threatened to – ever since.

So this Veterans/Armistice Day, let’s join in saluting and honoring those who have fought for our country. The hope that some day war will not be necessary is a laudable one – and those who fight wars hold it, too. But that day has clearly not yet arrived – and, realistically but sadly, most likely it never will.

[NOTE: I’ve scheduled this post to be published at 11:11 AM on 11/11.]

Yes and no from SCOTUS

The New Neo Posted on by

SCOTUS says it will be hearing a case about mail-in ballots. This is potentially extremely important:

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Watson v. the Republican National Committee (RNC), which asks the Court to decide if ballots cast before Election Day by mail should be counted if they arrive after that date.

It’s not everything – I would love for mail-in ballots to be limited to actual absentee votes, and certainly not mailed out automatically to all voters. But this case deals with one of the more flagrant outrages involved with mail-in ballots – the idea that the counting can go on and on and on even with ballots received after the fact. This is a situation that increases the possibility of fraud.

In other SCOTUS news, the Court has declared it will not be hearing a case on gay marriage. It won’t be reviewing Obergefell, at least not any time soon:

The Supreme Court on Monday morning turned down a request from Kim Davis, a former county clerk in Kentucky, to reconsider its 2015 decision recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In a brief, unsigned order, the justices rejected Davis’ petition for review of a ruling by a federal appeals court upholding an award of $100,000 to a gay couple to whom she had refused to issue a marriage license. That petition had also asked the justices to overrule the 2015 decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, arguing that a right to same-sex marriage “had no basis in the Constitution.”

As is generally the case when it denies petitions for review, the court did not provide any explanation for its decision not to hear Davis’ case.

I believe Obergefell was poorly reasoned in the legal sense, and yet I’m glad the Court won’t be reviewing it. Reversing it could possibly wreak havoc in terms of the millions of people who have relied on it to marry, and it would almost certainly have extremely negative political repercussions as well.

Trump pardons Giuliani, Eastman, and the so-called “fake electors” otherwise known as alternate electors

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m glad Trump did this:

President Donald Trump granted sweeping pardons to 77 allies accused of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The group included Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Boris Epshteyn, and Jenna Ellis. …

The pardon document states:

“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation.

“Acting pursuant to the grant of authority in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution of the United States, I. DONALD J. TRUMP, do hereby grant a full, complete, and unconditional pardon to all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities, participation in, or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of Presidential electors, whether or not recognized by any State or State official, in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election, as well for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Trump explicitly excluded himself from the pardon. What’s more, none of these people are currently being charged with federal crimes, so the pardons merely serve to ward off such future prosecution.

The Democrats’ contention that the alternate electors were “fake” – instead of merely “alternate” in case the election challenges were successful – was always weak; I wrote about the issues here.

The shutdown is nearly over

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess the Democrats were waiting for last Tuesday’s election. They thought the shutdown would help them win – especially in Virginia, home of the federal worker, and that they could successfully blame it on the GOP. Now they can end it. The vote was for cloture, which means the shutdown will almost certainly be ended by a simple majority, and fairly soon.

All those predicting that the Republicans would cave were wrong; at least so far. It was eight Democrats who “caved,” none of them up for re-election in the 2026 midterms. So now it goes to the House, where I predict it will pass (hopefully), with a few more Democrats from purple districts “caving”:

… [M]ost Senate Democrats [had] refused for weeks to reopen the government unless a deal included the extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are set to end Dec. 31. The compromise includes a commitment for a Senate vote on the subsidies in the second week of December, but the concession doesn’t guarantee an extension.

John Hinderaker thinks it was the problems with air travel that caused the Democrats to give in:

Based on the speeches by Chuck Schumer (bordering on the insane) and John Thune, it sounds like what tipped the balance was disruption to air travel. Important Democrats are not on food stamps, but they fly. A lot. So when a shutdown of air travel threatened, pressure on Democratic senators became irresistible. That is my reading of the situation, anyway.

I have zero inside info on this, but I don’t think that’s correct – although I do think the air travel shutdowns made the “cave” even more likely. As I wrote above, I think it was always the Democrats’ plan to give in after the elections. I think the whole thing was pre-orchestrated, and the eight senators who “gave in” did so with the blessing of Schumer. If the Democrats had wanted to continue with the shutdown, they could have tried to continue to spin out propaganda that the big bad Republicans were the ones holding out, which never made sense but with the MSM’s help they were successful in convincing at least the Democrats I know that this was the case.

Several New Englanders were among the “cavers”, including the two bland senators from New Hampshire who like to pose as moderates but rarely are if it would mean actually defying the Party:

A critical group of at least eight Senate Democratic centrists has reached a deal with Senate GOP leaders and the White House to reopen the government in exchange for a future vote on extending enhanced Affordable Care subsidies, according to two people familiar with the discussions — even as the rest of their party has openly pilloried the deal.
***
At least eight Senate Democrats have agreed to vote for the deal, which was brokered Sunday night between three former governors — Sens. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Angus King of Maine and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire — along with Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the White House.

One of those Democrats is Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who represents thousands of federal workers in the state and who said he supports the GOP’s promise for a future vote on the subsidies.

The more radical Democrat politicians seem outraged, and the Bluesky contingent likewise. Many of the former may be angry only because the GOP didn’t make more concessions; most of the latter probably thought the Democrats could and should hold out forever, or until the revolution.

Only the lonely

The New Neo Posted on by

The guy who made this video, Chris, has a channel in which he goes around spotting people who look interesting to him, and he talks to them and offers to take their photos. Here’s one:

And now for some music on the theme:

The Bee Gees wrote so many songs about loneliness that it’s hard to pick just one. But here’s my choice from their early years:

And I’ll close with this:

James Watson of double helix fame dies at 97

The New Neo Posted on by

I must admit that my first reaction on reading the news of the death of one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, James Watson, was to think in wonder: he was still alive? It was so very long ago that I first heard of him, and back then I was a child and he was quite the celebrity and brash young man. I later read his book The Double Helix when it came out in 1968, and the impression its somewhat gossipy pages gave was of a brilliant young man in a great hurry, who considered the pursuit of scientific discovery a competitive race. The book certainly wasn’t your typical dry work of science, and it ruffled a lot of feathers, including that of his older partner in the discovery, Francis Crick:

Crick himself immediately understood the significance of his and Watson’s discovery. As Watson recalled, after their conceptual breakthrough on February 28, 1953, Crick declared to the assembled lunch patrons at The Eagle that they had “found the secret of life.” Crick himself had no memory of such an announcement, but did recall telling his wife that evening “that we seemed to have made a big discovery.” He revealed that “years later she told me that she hadn’t believed a word of it.” As he recounted her words, “You were always coming home and saying things like that, so naturally I thought nothing of it.”

… Crick was incensed at Watson’s depiction of their collaboration in The Double Helix (1968), castigating the book as a betrayal of their friendship, an intrusion into his privacy, and a distortion of his motives. He waged an unsuccessful campaign to prevent its publication. He eventually became reconciled to Watson’s bestseller, concluding that if it presented an unfavorable portrait of a scientist, it was of Watson, not of himself.

Watson was a man of his times, too, as this article describes, making statements that were later criticized as racist and sexist. There was also the controversy about whether he and his colleague Crick gave enough credit to the work of Rosalind Franklin on which they built their theory. Long ago I read quite a bit about that, too, and I think this quote from the article is a pretty fair description:

The breakthrough did not come until 1953, when Watson visited Wilkins at King’s College in London, and Wilkins showed him a new x-ray crystallography image of DNA. The image was made by PhD student Raymond Gosling, who was working for Rosalind Franklin, a gifted chemist and crystallographer who also worked at the college. Watson was dazzled.

“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” Watson wrote in his 1968 book, The Double Helix. “The pattern was unbelievably simpler than those obtained previously. Moreover, the black cross of reflections which dominated the picture could only arise from a helical structure.”

Critics have argued that Watson, Crick and Wilkins effectively stole Franklin’s work, especially since they later also came into possession of some of the data she had derived by analyzing the image. They did not — but nor did they cover themselves in glory.

Gosling, who had been working for Franklin when he created the picture, was now working for Wilkins, who thus had legitimate access to his work. What’s more, Franklin’s data was not confidential, but rather was readily available and had been passed to Watson and Crick by other researchers who knew that they were exploring the structure of DNA. Informal protocol did call for Watson, Crick and Wilkins to tell Franklin that they were working with her material and to seek her approval, which they did not do; that was a breach of professional courtesy, however, not scientific ethics. Most important, Franklin’s data was raw; it required far more work and far more independent analysis before it could reveal the double helix. Watson, Crick and Wilkins did that work — and they did it well.

Unfortunately, Franklin died of cancer before the others won the 1962 Nobel prize for their 1953 discovery, and at the time of the award she was therefore ineligible to share it. Also, the personal portrait Watson painted of her in his book was unflattering, and people who knew her said it was deeply untrue.

Watson and Crick (I think of them together always, because that’s the way I first learned about them) made a discovery with extremely far-reaching consequences. Later research based on their work told us so much about the human genome, as well as that of other living things, and the knowledge has been used not only in medicine but in forensics, in anthropology, in botany, in evolution, in paleontology, in genealogy, and in history. And I’ve probably left a few things out.

RIP.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) A jury decided that throwing a sandwich at a public official doesn’t put him “in fear of bodily harm”:

The jury deliberated for several hours over Wednesday and this afternoon before finding Dunn, a former Justice Department paralegal, not guilty of misdemeanor assault on a federal law enforcement [ICE] officer. The verdict is another high-profile embarrassment for federal prosecutors in the District of Columbia, who have repeatedly failed to win convictions or even indictments against residents accused of obstructing or assaulting federal officers deployed as part of the Trump administration’s occupation of D.C. …

In a statement to Reason, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said, “As always, we accept a jury’s verdict; that is the system within which we function. However, law enforcement should never be subjected to assault, no matter how ‘minor’. Even children know when they are angry, they are not allowed to throw objects at one another.”

True. The principle is that initially the person on the receiving end has no idea what the object is, and it could be dangerous. There also is no question in my mind that had the political party of the sandwich-hurler been the GOP, and the officer a member of the Capitol Police, the defendant would have been convicted. Here the charge was misdemeanor assault, and I think it’s clear that’s exactly what this was.

(2) SCOTUS rules on SNAP payments and issues a stay on a lower court’s order to fully fund SNAP despite Congress’s inaction:

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued an administrative stay on Friday night, in response to the Trump administration’s emergency appeal on the SNAP funding case. …

“The core power of Congress is that of the purse, while the Executive is tasked with allocating limited resources across competing priorities,” the brief reads. “But here, the court below took the current shutdown as effective license to declare a federal bankruptcy and appoint itself the trustee, charged with picking winners and losers among those seeking some part of the limited pool of remaining federal funds.”

(3) CNN pundits pretend the GOP is making stuff up about Mamdani:

(4) The shutdown is resulting in flight cancellations. I have little doubt that regular Democrat voters will blame Republicans, although it’s the Democrats holding out.

(5) Here’s an article claiming links between the current strain of paleoconservative thought represented by Tucker Carlson, and the Ron Paul libertarians of the past.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Greetings from Idaho! I’m bored to tears at work so I decided to browse your website on my iphone during lunch break.

Who knew a spambot could get bored, much less to tears.

Then again, if you really think about the life of a bot, it must be very tedious – traveling the web, dropping the same message over and over and over, never or almost never getting a response. It’s the least I can do to spotlight one every now and then on this blog.

Is the shutdown coming to an end?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d heard for a while that the Democrats were planning to keep the shutdown going till Tuesday’s election, because they thought it would help them, and then after that some sort of compromise would be reached since the shutdown had served its purpose.

Word is that that may be happening. I don’t get the sense that the GOP is “caving,” although I’m sure some will disagree. I think there are concessions and both sides want to move on. The dispute wasn’t over much in the first place:

Senate Majority Leader John Thune told fellow Republicans in a private lunch that he plans to hold a vote Friday that could pave the way to end the government shutdown, according to two people in the room who were granted anonymity to describe his comments.

The plan, the people said, is to bring up the House-passed continuing resolution that Democrats have repeatedly rejected and then seek to amend it with a new expiration date very likely in January as well as a negotiated package of three full-year spending bills.

While Thune believed the plan would win the support of enough Democrats to advance, Democratic senators emerged from their own private lunch determined to seek out a better deal, and they are expected to block the House CR again absent additional progress in negotiations, according to two other people granted anonymity to describe the deliberations.

In any case, Senate GOP leaders are preparing to keep lawmakers in Washington to try and force a resolution to the record-breaking shutdown. Asked if the chamber will be in through the weekend, Majority Whip John Barrasso said “yes.”

Your guess is as good as mine. Hey, maybe even better.

NOTE: More verbiage here, but not much more news.