VH_50

This is NOT a troll . . . it's an honest question, and part of my ongoing attempt to understand Lee's public image. Being in the history business, and living in Georgia (a Yankee in exile), I've heard these arguments many times . . . and I still don't understand the fascination with Robert E. Lee. Can somebody who *likes* the guy explain to me why they find him admirable? I'll grant you that he was a brilliant commander . . . but so was Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. I'll grant you that he was (by all accounts) a nice guy . . . but so (by all ac

Here's another vote for the works of Robert Heinlein (virtually anything he published in the 1950s), which were Scouting-age favorites for both me and my (now college-age) stepson. The astronomy's now obsolete, but the adventure holds up well. If there are still boys out there who like the Horatio Hornblower sea stories, the first ten volumes or so of Alexander Kent's (similar) Richard Bolitho series are a good follow-up. Alistair MacLean ("The Guns of Navarone," etc.) is marvellous for contemporar--mid-20th century--adventure with no sex and (at most) PG-13 violence. Somebody

There's something to be said for minutely studying the wording of this or that requirement for evidence of intent, but we should also keep in mind that inertia is a powerful thing . . . references to "catalogs" and "mail" may simply be leftovers that nobody has an elegant alternative for. I haven't seen letter-size carbon paper in use for 25 years, but we still put "cc:" at the bottom of business letters. :-)

Just a reminder that the "call people what they prefer to be called" principle also extends to *which* honorific you use . . . This can be an issue with PhD's (who often prefer to avoid being "Dr." except in professional settings), but it's especially true for women who keep their birth names (for personal or professional reasons) after marriage. The wife of Bob Smith and mother of Bobby Smith may well be Mary Jones, and thus properly "Ms Jones" NOT "Mrs. Smith." It may seem like a small thing but like a lot of small things, it's worth making the small bit of extra effort and gettin

Fat Old Guy writes: "Last time I checked, the federal government was supposed to mint money, provide for the common defense and regulate interstate commerce. State and local governments really aren't supposed to do much more than provide an infrastructure." ----- "Supposed to" if you use the strictest and most literal interpretation of the Constitution. A valid position, to be sure, but not the only position--and not one that I find intellectually compelling or politically attractive. (And I'm in good company: Jefferson himself overstepped his presidential authority--if strict

I'm a liberal because I think that the highest purpose of government is to put the talent and treasure of an entire society to work on behalf of what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" . . . to ensure that the hungry are fed, the naked clothed, the homeless housed, and the sick healed. I'm a liberal because I cherish our free market economy, but believe that government can and should play a role in curbing its worst excesses . . . treating workers as a disposable commodity, pursuing profit at all costs, and doing long-term damage to the environment for short-term gain.

Laurie makes a good point . . . being able to write with a pen or pencil and do basic arithmetic "by hand" is still valuable, and will likely remain so. You can still depend on there being times when you need to write and add/subtract without a machine handy. On the other hand . . . the calculator has basically made it pointless to learn how to take square roots "manually" or use a table of logarithms. The odds of you needing to do one of those things in a situation where you can't pick up a calculator are *really* long. The question is, which category does (say) Morse code (ot

"Back in the day" (late 1970s, when I earned it) splices were also required for the Small Boat Sailing MB, though I doubt (given the shift to braided, synthetic lines) that they still are . . . or should be. It's an interesting question, though: How long the program should continue to require skills made obsolete by changes in technology or culture (morse code, splicing, axemanship) . . . and how quickly it should adopt new skills requirements based on new technologies? Idle thought: How ubiquitous will GPS need to get before proficiency with it is required for first class? VH

Just an addendum: Regardless of whether or not a council has the *right* (by policy or selective approval) to limit a given councilor to 5 or 6 badges, that number seems artificially low to me. Two reasons: 1) It's my experience as a long-time advancement chair that about 24 of the badges account for 90% of the traffic. I'm a counselor for *many* badges that nobody's ever even asked me about doing (much less completed). The workload issue is, I think, a straw man. 2) A relatively small set of qualifications can qualify an individual (not even stretching) to teach a *lot* of

Discussion of leaders modelling character and integrity for the scouts got me thinkng: Why assume that character and integrity are gendered? That being a "man of character and integrity" is one thing and a "woman of character and integrity" is another? Surely it's not that we (as a society) take character and integrity for granted in women and find it so rare in men that we have to hunt for examples! :-)

I am (as a working writer) not one to take copyright lightly, and would never urge anyone to support video piracy. . . BUT: Disney is far from being the wronged innocent here. They have ruthlessly pushed (on more than one occasion, if memory serves) to have copyright law rewritten so that valuable Disney properties (e.g. Mickey Mouse) that *would* have passed into the public domain in the 1990s or early 2000s remain under copyright. I don't object if they want to manipulate the market by (say) creating an artificial scarcity of _Bambi_ tapes by releasing it for three years and

I am (as a working writer) not one to take copyright lightly, and would never urge anyone to support video piracy. . . BUT: Disney is far from being the wronged innocent here. They have ruthlessly pushed (on more than one occasion, if memory serves) to have copyright law rewritten so that valuable Disney properties (e.g. Mickey Mouse) that *would* have passed into the public domain in the 1990s or early 2000s remain under copyright. I don't object if they want to manipulate the market by (say) creating an artificial scarcity of _Bambi_ tapes by releasing it for three years and

On a related note . . . I've been amused for some years now that the song "YMCA" has been shorn of its original connections to the gay subculture of the 1970s and become an apolitical, upbeat audience participation song. But trying to present Credence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" as a rah-rah patriotic anthem just boggles the mind. At least Mercedes had a sense of irony when it started using "Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz?" in its commercials!

OGE . . . I'd always figured that in the context of the refrain: There won't be any trumpets blowing, Come the judgement day On the bloody morning after One tin soldier rides away. A bloody battlefield on which only a single tin soldier is left standing is a metaphor for total and utter devastation--which the song sees as the *inevitable* result of violence, no matter how "righteous" the motivation for it. [Like many here, I suspect that the movie missed the point of the song . . .]

Re. the alleged decline in belief in evolution as level of education increases (I, too, am skeptical and await a citation): Even if it *is* true, why is it relevant? Scientific theories stand or fall on their ability to explain the relevant evidence in a more coherent way than competing theories. The raw number of people who believe (or don't believe) in a given theory counts for zip in this calculation. Raw numbers of "educated" people who believe (or don't believe) in a given theory count for not much more. "Educated" is too broad and complex a category for that. If I have a PhD