@noims -- My grandfather had about 10 war stories that he rotated through telling, pretty much exclusively after one of my uncles "broke the dam" by asking him to recall things as they were at the Oshkosh air show standing next to a P-47 airplane like he had worked on.

By the time that happened, my grandfather was in his 80's and in very good physical and mental shape (cattle rancher that did daily work manhandling heavy feed bags around, etc.) but had a quirky personality because he was 90%+ deaf. I don't think that was a result of the war, hearing problems seem to run in the family.

Anyway, he frequently used those hearing problems as an excuse for not having to interact with people. He had hearing aids, but he'd turn them off most of the time and just ignore people. I think some of that was being an introvert, and some was probably lingering "shell shock" / PTSD effects. But overall he really adjusted back to civilian life just fine. Got a degree in education on the GI Bill and taught and coached basketball to High School students, then worked as a small-town Postmaster, and eventually retired to work the ranch. I don't think any of us in his family, including his wife and children, thought of him as being "impaired" by the mental effects of the war. But it was clear that some of what he experienced had a very deep, lifelong effect on his outlook.


I wrote out the 3 stories of his above because they seemed to be the ones that had the most emotional impact on him. To me, it was interesting that a lot of stuff outside of combat hit him the hardest. He also had more traditional "war stories" stuff about victories and bravery, like when his unit captured / accepted the surrender of a young German pilot in a Bf-109 who deserted to avoid near certain death from flying too many missions after the handwriting was on the wall that the allies were going to win. But by far, he got more choked up about the other stuff like having to knock that French girl off her bike and seeing starving civilians and being unable to help them much.

Like you said, more banal stuff side-by-side with or against a backdrop of horror. I think it's pretty much impossible to imagine what those sorts of experiences in war are really like and what being in those situations would do to us mentally. And then WW2 in particular just had a massive impact on the entire generation. Basically everybody back home knew multiple people that went away and never came back. Then when some did come back, they were clearly different and yet reluctant to talk about what happened. Pretty messed up time to live through, I guess.

Not saying it is the overall cause of student debt, but many students in the 1st world have 1st world causes. That starbucks coffee on the run that costs 4.50, that beer run, that everything...yeah, everyone thinks college is a place to screw until your dick or vagina fall off, but it is not. It is a place to learn. And if you were not taught how to be frugal, pay please. But then I got the GI bill for abysmal working conditions and pay so who am I to say it...

>> ^lantern53:

Who forced this young man into student loan debt?
I went to school on the GI bill and with a job incurred zero debt.
At least these two are likeable in contrast to the guy seen taking a shit on the police car.
But it's a shame that two veterans are being used to promote the progressive agenda. I can sympathize with their gripes but I would not associate myself with the majority of that unfocused, anarchist rabble.


Fuck Off.

Who forced this young man into student loan debt?

I went to school on the GI bill and with a job incurred zero debt.

At least these two are likeable in contrast to the guy seen taking a shit on the police car.

But it's a shame that two veterans are being used to promote the progressive agenda. I can sympathize with their gripes but I would not associate myself with the majority of that unfocused, anarchist rabble.

LOL! So explain how the US became an economic Super Power the world had never seen to that point IMMEDIATELY after WWII? This was after the Great Depression. WWII generated US deficits of 24% of GDP in 1945, which has NEVER been surpassed since, not even today, with the current deficits of 13% of GDP. It is absolutely the case that without those deficits, the US wouldn't have been able to pay for the war effort, and it is absolutely the case WWII ended the Great Depression. Those "talking heads" you refer to are called "historians". They use things called "facts" to help form their conclusions.

Just how did it end the Depression? By reducing unemployment to basically 0%, raising demand for labor which increased wages, all the while retooling existing closed factories and building new ones to crank out all of what we needed to win the war. As a result, consumers had significantly increased income, which was pumped into the economy when spent. When the war ended, the government did a tremendous job transitioning back into a peacetime economy compared to total war mobilization, while building a massive military industrial complex to compete in the Cold War. Also, the average male American citizen was granted wide access to the first time to a college education through the GI Bill, resulting in a never seen before highly educated general population. It was the dawn of the US as one of the two global economic and military superpowers.

So what did we do after WWII? We ran surpluses in the 1950s by raising marginal tax rates on the rich to over 90%, and that was during those super economically disastrous times known as the 1950s, when the US GNP rose by 66% in that decade. Both running a deficit to end the recession and raising taxes on the rich are both things you vehemently oppose, yet it was without a doubt proven to be effective in our history. It's historical fact you can try to ignore, but it's staring you point blank in the face.

Try to dodge this all you want. I'd rather accept reality and try to figure out honestly how to fix our current economy instead of clinging to a rigid ideology which has been clearly proven to be wrong in our national history.

These are laughable. Universal education is a failure?! Uhh, on what planet? Despite the enormous problems universal education faces today in the US, it's a hell of a lot better than the last time we left education up to the private sector only. It also put the US on the road towards becoming an economic and military superpower. Social Security has been a failure? How exactly?! The US was not an economic superpower until AFTER SSI began, and amazing, we've been a superpower ever since. Not that SSI caused our ascendance, but it clearly didn't hurt at all. The Post Office is a failure?! A few money issues doesn't change the fact that the post office still delivers mail to anywhere in the US for a nominal charge.

Now, and here's the most laughable thing I've seen WP say yet. That everywhere there's socialism, there's cronyism, corruption, poor standards of living, and routinely oppress people. Uhh, dude, we're more capitalist than virtually every European country, and you're saying there's no cronyism, corruption, standards of living are good for everyone in the US, and we oppress people less than France, Britain, or Germany?! Completely laughable.

And do you know how many failed, corrupt mainly market economies there have been?! Do you understand that the US has suffered two massive recessions (1929 & 2008) after structuring itself missing very basic regulation required along with proper enforcement, right? Oh, of course you don't. Somehow, socialist agendas somehow caused each.

For every Switzerland there's a bad socialist economy. Ok, how about this? Name a single thriving economy that isn't a mixed economy.

Socialist agendas are not aimed at creating bureaucracies for the sake of bureaucracies, and advocates are not selfish. I'm a pragmatist who favors what works. I know for example a well run public education system and wide access to normal people for college educations (first introduced to average Americans en masse in the GI Bill) radically changed society for the better. It's absurd to even argue against that. The US's rise to global superpower came as generations began being generally educated. I know the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal program, laid the foundation to industrialize that region of the US, which helped to produce war material to win WWII, improve the quality of life for people in that region with wide availability of electricity, and lots of jobs. It was originally one of those evil gov't socialist programs you so despise.

We can fix public education without privatizing it, btw. Across the US, there are shining examples of top notch schools that are public schools that outperform private schools, even though private schools get their proverbial pick of the litter. Across the US, there are lots of examples of bad private schools. I went to a public school, and here I am, on my second successful career, intelligent, thoughtful, and in demand by employers. I attended a public university, and I don't regret it at all.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Socialized medicine…only failing because of a lack of funding
Oh of course. Socialism never fails. Instead, socialism just doesn’t have enough money. Just keep on pouring taxes into the meat grinder, and finally socialized (whatever) creates the perfect sausages… Except it never does. War on Poverty. Great Society. Socialized Medicine. Universal Education. Social Security. Post Office. Shoot – take it all the way down to Food Stamps. No socialist program ever has ‘enough money’.
Social medicine fails because socialism is not designed to help people. Socialized systems are designed 100% to create large bureaucracies, which in turn exist only to self-perpetuate in the form of increasing year-over-year budgets. Helping people actually decreases a program’s budget-line, so they work to deny services (or waste them) as aggressively as possible so they can use it as leverage to lobby the government for more money and power. That’s the reason why the UK system (or any socialist program) routinely denies more and more ‘care’, while at the same time costing more and more money.
Guys like BS Bill brag about how wonderful socialist systems are. They ignore the reality. Socialist nations are rife with cronyism, corruption, poor standards of living, and regularly oppress their people. Socialist governments are the perpetrators of the worst tragedies of all human history. Historically, for every Switzerland there are a hundred North Koreas. Even the modern Euro socialist lite nations only work because they have capitalist wealth-creation engines to support (barely) their corrupt and inefficient socialist programs. The US is not failing because it is too capitalist and giving too much to the rich. It is failing because heavily socialized programs are doing what they always do… Collapsing because of internal corruption.
At its heart – socialism is nothing more than laziness and selfishness. People see a problem in society. They feel bad. They think, “Gee – someone should do something…” At that point you have a couple choices. 1. Be a capitalist and solve the problem yourself. 2. Be a socialist and vote for someone who PROMISES to solve the problem for you. That’s the trick of socialism. It preys on people who are well-intentioned, but who are also selfish, lazy, and a bit stupid. Socialists want to ‘help’, but are too selfish and lazy to actually do something about the problems they see. Therefore they become stupid and fervidly believe any liar (like Obama) who says they will solve the problem for them using taxes. It is stupid because there is no evidence that taxes EVER solve social problems.
Examples of lies that socialists believe…
“Aw – you feel bad when there are poor people… Vote for me and I’ll create The Great Society and eliminate poverty!”
“Aw – you feel bad about people who have medical needs… Vote for me and I’ll tax the ‘rich’ so you don’t have to pay for your medical expenses!”
“Aw – you get sad when you see pictures of polar bears… Vote for me and I’ll tax all carbon emissions and change the global climate!”
“Aw – you want children to get an education… Vote for me and I’ll create free universal public education!”
And do these systems work? Of course not. The Great Society didn’t make a dent in poverty. Social medicine denies more care than it provides. Carbon taxes don’t change the climate. Kids that go to public schools come out stupider. But the SOCIAL PROGRAMS created to address these problems? Oh – of course – they just need ‘more money’ and THEN they will start working!
Socialism. The lazy jerk’s way of destroying society while telling themselves they are ‘helping’.

Apparently the dividing line between poor and not poor was whether you had a garden or not, a place to corral animals.

If you had a garden, then you had a source of food. If you had a pig, and a cow, and chickens, you were doing just fine.

My dad lived in a two room shack, with the porch screened in for additional sleeping quarters. In these three rooms lived his widowed mother, her newly married brother and young wife, and five kids, the oldest of whom was 8 when his father died. Uncle Buck would wake up in the winter and have to shake the snow off his blanket - it had drifted in through the porch screen, accumulating on him as he slept.

But they weren't poor. They had a garden and a rifle and a means to feed themselves.

Now my dad has a Master's degree in mechanical engineering from MIT, thanks to the GI Bill and WWII.

The world is an amazing place, isn't it?

In reply to this comment by mentality:
>> ^bareboards2:

Seeing this vid prompted this story from my dad -- He grew up on a dirt farm in Oklahoma during the depths of the Depression. One of their sources of food was my dad's ability to kill squirrels for the stew pot.
He was 15-16 years old, out hunting. Saw a squirrel in the crook of a tree, just its head popping up. He got it with one shot, picked up the body and stuffed it in the back pocket of his overalls and started walking home.
Halfway home.... his pocket started wriggling. He had just creased its head, grazing the hair right between its ears. Knocked it unconscious but otherwise it was fine.
He says he built a cage for it, where it lived for months before escaping. Took up residence in the roof, until it eventually disappeared.
I was surprised it didn't end up in the cooking pot, but as dad says, they weren't poor. The folks living in a cave in the riverbank were poor.


I'm guessing that if he could afford guns and ammo (even if it was just a .22), then you weren't that poor.

Nah, I'll upvote the shit out of Tymbrwulf's reply.

It's actually entirely consistent with neocon behavior throughout to want to see this go down. Sustaining the war itself always gets their vote, but they always oppose things like improving health benefits to veterans, the new GI bill, pay increases for soldiers, better body armor for soldiers, or mine-resistant vehicles for soldiers, etc.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
I know you want to upvote the shit out of this comment, dontcha? http://videosift.com/video/The-Daily-Show-I-Give-Up-9-11-Responders-Bill?loadcomm=1#comment-1048881

I wonder if this is autobiographical. If so, I wonder if it was his plan all along to borrow money without paying it back.

I'm strongly against welshing on debt (especially when the lender's an individual and not a bank) but then I recently completed my BA at one of Canada's top-shelf universities and the whole thing was under $15K. I don't know what I would've done if I lived in the States. GI Bill, maybe, or just not have gone for a degree at all.

^The GI Bill was great for me. I paid in $1200 and got back over $12,000.

I think Blankfist may be a little more leftist than he thinks, but then again, I think that's true about most of the country. He's just a fiscal conservative, which I don't consider a bad thing - on the contrary, fiscal conservatives keep liberal thought in check with a firm slap of the checkbook. There needs to be balance, don't get me wrong.

As far as cops supporting Prop 8, I'm not terribly surprised, as I find cops tend to vote as social conservatives. Most cops I know are registered Republicans. I'm a little saddened by their support of the prop.

I think Prop 1A is a good thing to vote yes on, because our public transportation infrastructure here in America is a goddamn joke. I've spent a little time in Europe, and I was amazed at the public transit options they have available. I got off the airplane in Schipol Airport, and went downstairs to catch the train to Haarlam - it was extremely easy to get to where we wanted. My girlfriend has spent some time in Japan and Australia, and learned how to navigate the bus and rail systems they offer quite easily. The bay area has one of the better public transit systems in the US, but even it is lacking compared to what I saw in towns a fraction SF's size in The Netherlands and Germany. The plan would be even better if Sacramento was included in list of major cities hit, but for Sharks fans living in SF and Fresno, this might help them catch a few Hockey games, which would be a neat, albeit somewhat indirect, economic stimulus.

Prop 2 I'm up in the air about. I'd like to think that here in California we have access to the best quality food in the world as it is.

Prop 3 would be nice, but the CA budget is strained pretty far as is. I'd love for the state to be able to afford it.

Prop 4 is something my girlfriend and I have disagreements about. She'd likely vote for it, but I'd of the mind that Doctor/Patient confidentiality needs to be implicitly extended to minors.

Prop 5 is a step in the right direction for drug law reform. Jail is no place for non-violent drug offenders.

Prop 6, the cops are lying outright about this being anything about "safe neighborhoods." A strong "No" from me.

Prop 7 I think I'm going to vote No on as well.

I think I've made my position on 8 pretty clear.

Prop 9 looks pretty bad and unnecessary. Prop 10 looks even worse. Both will be getting "No"s from me.

Prop 11, I'm not so sure about. I'm curious as to why the League of Women Voters are endorsing it (I know they're supposedly Non-partisan, but tend to be socially progressive), but nearly every other progressive organization opposes it. I'd have to review this one a little more, but I'm inclined to vote No.

Prop 12, I'd rather give veterans better educations than better loan rates. Our GI bill as it exists now is a joke, and is in dire need of updating. I think this is the whole "Teach a man to fish" issue, but the prop just wants to give out fish instead of fishing lessons. For every dollar we spent on the WWII-era GI bill, seven dollars came back in taxes from veterans who used their free-ride scholarships to become better educated, then used their educations to get better jobs (increased salaries meant increased incomes to tax, and the ones who started their own companies opened up more taxable revenue streams), which paid for bigger homes (more property tax). We desperately need something comparable for our veterans today. I can't say that giving better home loans to veterans isn't a good thing, I think it is, but I think providing them with a better education after they've served their country would be even better. I'll have to wait and weigh out what I'm gonna do with this one later.

Well, in Obama's position, first thing I'd start is giving our nation a real GI bill, not this embarrassment we call a GI bill. The GI bill we had during WWII payed for itself, 7-fold. Educated veterans went on to climb employment ladders, finding jobs with better salaries, which they used to buy bigger homes and start businesses of their own. Bigger salaries and bigger homes translated into bigger income and property taxes. When we took care of our soldiers, instead of merely paying them lip service while slashing their benefits, our soldiers took care of our country.

Doing that today would be a HUGE boon. The Army might even have an easier time meeting their recruitment goals without having to resort to slumming for gang members who go on to use their battlefield experience to kill cops.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgwfVJIoBNM

Unfortunately, an educated public participates in democracy much more actively, which is something those currently in power do not want at all. Sheep are easier to keep in line with fear-mongering. Its easier to keep the wool over the eyes of the dumb.

I disagree. I know exactly how he as a person will vote. He was raised a in a poor family by a very strong, very liberal mother, never even knowing his father. He was also raised by Christian grandparents, who instilled in him a love for country and a burning idealism for how Americans can get things accomplished. He is a liberal, and votes his liberal conscious.

However whats great about Obama is that he is brilliant at a few key things which make people who recognize them very excited about his presidency. Lets see, I'll throw out three of them real fast... 1)selecting, managing and inspiring other brilliant people, 2)understanding and engaging both sides of an argument to fairly guide towards compromises that work, and 3)valuing American history, the Constitution and the founding spirit of 'anything is possible'. Towards the last point, I mean, he honestly believe he can get a huge squad of people who disagree together to form a plan to pull us safely from Iraq in 18 months, and another squad of people who disagree to form the beginnings of universal health care over the next 4 years. And, personally I think if anyone is smart enough to direct us out of this ditch, its this guy.

I loved McCain in 2000. The last 3 years have seen him doing everything he can to win votes from the people who brought us GWBushJR, which makes for exceedingly awkward choices like not signing the new GI Bill and dumbing down his opposition to secret military prisons, both for no particularly convincing reason other than thats what he's supposed to do. Its honestly hard for me to watch McCain's speeches and interviews today, because half the time he's not comfortable on the side of the argument he's putting him self, and anyone with a memory stretching back to 2000 or even 2006 will notice he's a changed man; http://www.videosift.com/video/McCain-Debates-Self-on-Bush , http://www.videosift.com/video/Washington-Bureaucrat-Predicts-USA-Politics-For-2009



In reply to this comment by gorgonheap:
That's the problem, unless we get republicans back in congress, they are going to run Obama too. He voted with his party 93% of the time. I'll admit that McCain isn't much better since he mistakes stubbornness for principal. But Peloci pushed Obama around when he was a senator and I can see her doing the same if he's elected president.

I feel like I'm trying to choose the lesser of two evils this election season. But my biggest issue with Obama is his double talk, I have no idea what he's going to do because he talks out of both sides of his mouth. He needs to find his issues and stick to them.

In reply to this comment by bamdrew:
Confession; my car has one bumper sticker on it, and its Obama'08.

He's a smart man. There's a small possibility he could become a Nixon, but a much greater chance he'll work to get congress to bullshit around just a little less.

In reply to this comment by gorgonheap:
Thanks for the article, it was a good read. I really hope the American public can see how unstable he is before November.

In reply to this comment by bamdrew:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/opinion/20brooks.html?em&ex=1214107200&en=98dbf7f8bae1fe38&ei=5087%0A

In reply to this comment by gorgonheap:


He advocates energy independence but pretends this can occur without more domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

Of course maybe that's the defining mark of a true politician, being able to speak to one side while the other hears a different message.

^ Apparently the Pentagon also doesn't want to see the bill passed for its own reasons.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=4652517&page=1


The GI Bill is pretty much a drop in the bucket these days as kollijes have already raised their tuitions to absorb it. Make the GI Bill bennies bigger and they'll just raise the tuition again.

Again, why would liberals care about the GI Bill? They're trying to keep military recruiters off "their" campuses, both kollij and high school. They despise the military who mostly vote Republican.

^ What BS. Why didn't Bush-McCain vote for the GI bill and back up their words?