My dad just spent a week at the Medical Center in Macon, GA. He is doing fine.
The Medical Center’s Main Entrance is located on Hemlock Street. The pharmacy in the building bears the last name of the owner; David Graves. (Graves Pharmacy).
I am told that they changed the street name because past 3rd street it is Oak Street and 50 years ago that was a center for prostituion and they did not want the hospital associated with that area. That is interesting but was Hemlock the only alternative?
Just seems odd. I am glad Terminal Avenue is several blocks away.
I find history interesting because in an uncertain complicated world the results of our actions are often unclear in the present. Present biases are replaced with results that are slightly but not totally clearer, and less subject to the spin of current office seekers.
The victory of WW II erased the memory of early disasters, the discovery of the concentration camps dissolved the doubters of our moral purpose like Henry Ford (he had a fatal stroke when he viewed footage of the camps.)
In ten years our Iraqi incursion may be seen as a positive turning point in the middle east and the intense controversies over the war may become distant whispers.
Likewise the pretense of humanitarianism used to justify Clinton’ s military action in Kosovo may become even more fraudulent than the WMD’s in Iraq.
History becomes interesting when politics become distant.
from The New Republic, Victor David Hason
In a wider sense, the war is as most wars: an evolution from blunders to wisdom, the side that makes the fewest and learns from them the most eventually winning. Al Qaeda and the insurgents in 2004-6 developed the means, both tactical and strategic, to thwart the reconstruction, but we, not they, have since learned the more and evolved.
As in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII, the present American military — which has committed far less mistakes than past American forces — has shifted tactics, redefined strategy, and found the right field commanders. We forget that the U.S. Army and Marines, far from being broken, now have the most experienced and wizened officers in the world. Like Summer 1864, Summer 1918, and in the Pacific 1944-5, the key is the support of a weary public for an ever improving military that must nevertheless endure a final storm before breaking the enemy.
The irony is that should President Bush endure the hysteria and furor and prove able to give the gifted Gen. Petraeus the necessary time — and I think he will — his presidency could still turn out to be Trumanesque, once we digest the changes in Europe, the progress on North Korea, the end of both the Taliban and Saddam, and the prevention of another 9/11 attack.
For the rest- http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWQ5NDkwMDNiMzZhODNlNjdhN2JiM2EyMjQ1N2ZmMWQ=
Unspun – Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson does a good job of demonstrating how information is spun to achieve objectives beyond the facts.
But a few of the subjects repeated require more than mere interpretation of facts. The Iraqi war is more complicated than the mere possible errors of the existence of WMDs (yes I said possible, I belive this information is still incomplete). These errors and the readiness of many of us to believe them is a legitimate source of inquiry and concern. But there were other factors involved in that decision.
The clarification of the facts about the estate tax or as the spinners love to call it, The Death Tax, misses the point. Yes, only a very small percentage of the public actually loose their business or property to estate tax but the amount of resources such as expensive life insurance and estate planning used to avoid crippling estate taxes belies a cost far in excess of the actual property lost to estate taxes.
It is not enough to study the facts, you must expand the question and examine the facts beneath the facts. The answers you get are only as good as the questions you ask.
35 years ago in college statistics we had to read a wonderful, still in print volume called How to Lie with Statistics. unSpun is a good companion piece, but it lacks some essential depth on some of the more complicated issues.
While the great missing story in our media is the success of the reinforcements (we call it a surge), the real success is probabaly coming form the excess of Al Queda. Extremists like Al Queda always go too far. Iraq was a largely secular society and they are not responding well to the primitive theocratic rule of Al Queda.
Theocratic rule and forced marriage is just not sitting well with the Iraqis. But Al Queda really crossed the lined when they banned smoking. Now hostile forces are joining the coalition to defeat Al Queda.
Sometimes you can beat the enemy with resolve and sometimes you just need to hang in there long enough for them to do themselves in. Amd sometimes the right thing happens for the wrong or unexpected reasons.
