{"id":1780,"date":"2010-10-09T21:47:13","date_gmt":"2010-10-10T02:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=1780"},"modified":"2010-10-09T21:47:13","modified_gmt":"2010-10-10T02:47:13","slug":"random-observations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=1780","title":{"rendered":"RANDOM OBSERVATIONS"},"content":{"rendered":"

1.) Was the Vietnam war<\/strong> a mistake? It’s a question that still matters to us aging Baby Boomers. I had a thought on the subject the other day. It seems to me that there are wars that a nation has to fight. Those are the \u201choly wars\u201d; where the other side is not just trying to plunder your bounty, but is trying to change your way of life. I.e., where the other side is trying to impose some sort of vision, be it religious (e.g. Christian or Islamic theocracy), or philosophic (e.g., Communist or Nazi fascist utopia). Whenever a nation or a tribe convinces itself that it has a plan for the world and that instituting that plan requires the use of firepower, about the only cure is to fight fire with fire. War is hell, but utopian visions that require belligerence are an even worse hell.<\/p>\n

The USA fought the Vietnam war because it was trying to stop Soviet Russia from instituting its Marxist-Leninist vision, which indeed had been promulgated through the use of firepower and other belligerence. Was Vietnam really a Marxist holy war? It was being fought by Asian visionaries; but what was their vision? Did Ho Chi Minh want to see collective farming in California? It seems to me that the Viet Cong and the Vietnamese Communists were a bit more pragmatic and nationalistically inspired. From what little I know, the \u201ceastern mind\u201d is quite pragmatic. It doesn’t dwell on grand visions of how humankind should live their lives. This can be seen in the difference between Buddhism and the major western \/ middle-eastern faiths. (But admittedly, there are forms of dogmatic Buddhism, and Buddhist holy wars have been fought).<\/p>\n

It’s too bad that Kennedy and Johnson and MacNamara and Rostow and Kissinger just couldn’t seem to grasp this. One has to wonder if the US and its Allies could have avoided full tilt war with Japan had, early on, we not viewed its military aggression as part of the same fabric from which Hitler and the Nazi’s were cut. And this may be a reminder that we have to look at the dangerous situations in Iran and North Korea today in different lights. I could be very wrong here, but I don’t see the Koreans as inspired by anything beyond their own dysfunction, whereas the Iranians might well be infected by the holy war virus. A very pernicious infection, indeed.<\/p>\n

2.) I just read a review of a recent study<\/a> regarding people’s attitudes about race<\/strong>, one that used biometric indicators of how people think and feel versus the usual survey technique. One interesting finding is that African-Americans do not have the same self-regard for their racial heritage as Caucasian Euro-Americans do (even though they verbally claim to; the biometric indicators tell a different story). So, several decades of \u201cblack pride\u201d and black heritage may not have erased the effects of slavery and segregation.<\/p>\n

3.) I drive to work in Newark, and I am starting to see signs of human misery that high levels of sustained unemployment<\/strong> are causing. Fortunately, the crime rate has not yet jumped significantly, although the number of murders may be increasing relative to the low point reached in 2008. <\/p>\n

Thank the Lord that I haven’t seen any murders. However, I am seeing an uptick in street begging, which also slacked off in recent years (after being quite rampant in the 1980s). I have also noticed a new technique: guys in wheelchairs out in the road at traffic lights, begging for money from commuters. The desperation index is definitely reaching higher levels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1.) Was the Vietnam war a mistake? It’s a question that still matters to us aging Baby Boomers. I had a thought on the subject the other day. It seems to me that there are wars that a nation has to fight. Those are the \u201choly wars\u201d; where the other side is not just trying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,20,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1780"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1783,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions\/1783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}