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In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

~ John McCrae, May 1915

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Nov 12, 2022·edited Nov 12, 2022

As I read HCR's Letter of war and peace of guns and veterans, I thought of the thousands of New York City residents dying of COVID, the urgent pleas to find protective gowns for the nurses and the nighttime applause and singing for the nurses, doctors, therapists and healthcare workers that were keeping us alive. I thought about the number of guns in the USA and the death toll from them. How can we forget the noise and ugliness of Donald J. Trump; the red states' campaigns to restrict access to voting by minorities; book banning in the schools and overturning Roe v. Wade...the list of abuses on the American people is so damning. Have we not been at war? Our society is being torn apart. We need a people's campaign against the forces and politicians that are destroying the earth and everything upon it. When is the time to look around, to count the ways? We all feel what has been happening. Hate is a diversion that enables people like Cruz, DeSantis, Abbott, McConnell, the Billionaires, gigantic corporations, the whole lot of them to walk all over us. We have to organize to stop the fires from burning, gun violence multiplying, the lack of affordable housing, the homelessness and the politicians who care for nothing but themselves. Look at the face of Ukraine President, Volodymyr Zelensky, at the end of today's Notes. Volodymyr Zelensky has not left the battle for a moment. He and the Ukrainian people are our models.

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Thank you, President Volodymyr Zelensky❣️❣️

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Nov 12, 2022·edited Nov 12, 2022

Watching newly liberated residents of Kherson greet Ukrainian troops with joy and tears was fitting on this Veteran's Day. I'm proud of the U.S. under President Biden's leadership for contributing so much to help the Ukrainians in a heroic effort, an effort that has security implications for so many other countries—and implications for democracies too.

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Nov 12, 2022·edited Nov 12, 2022

My family's story (at least as it was touched by World War II):

My Nana was, I am sure, considered a shockingly independent woman. Born in 1913, devoutly Irish Catholic and New England Democrat (Connecticut specifically), she eschewed getting married to move to NYC to become a nurse. This was the Depression, and she later told my Dad of once losing the nickel she needed for fare home; five strangers managed to scrounge up a penny a piece. THAT was America. When the war broke out, she offered her nursing services. She was needed, simple as that. En route to North Africa, her ship (the Strath Allen) was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. She helped evacuate all the injured soldiers to safety and hung onto a rope ladder in the dead of night as the ship's side sunk into the sea. They were barely rescued and arrived in Africa sans all her possessions. A fellow nurse insisted she borrow her dress, after confirming they were the same size, for there was a social going on and Nana deserved a nice few hours after this ordeal.

Grandpa, a colonel, was at that party. It was apparently a movie whirlwind from there. Problem: he was Jewish and a Midwestern Republican (Iowa specifically). Obviously, they didn't care, but boy did others! Upon writing to his mother of his intentions to marry the most wonderful person in the world, she wrote back (and this was behind lines in Africa, so I'm guessing it wasn't a quick turnaround) that she would never be able to speak to him again. He spent a horrible day wandering about, trying to figure out how to tell Nana he couldn't marry her after all.

They eloped the next day. Uncle Jerry began to show signs of existence a few months later. Nana hid it as long as she could, so as to not be sent away. She was soon, but fortunately VE Day come quickly. Their families got over themselves in quick time, 4 more kids and an idyllic 50s postcard childhood (by all accounts) followed. Grandpa had declined a role in the Nuremberg Trials (who could blame him), and went back to being a respected lawyer both back in Iowa and when they moved to Cali, leading the Rotary Club. There were a few occasions where they would visit an Army friend in DC who had worked his way up. Somewhere, there is a photo of my Aunt Susie (Miss Van Nuys!) sitting at the Resolute Desk. Unfortunately, he died early from a series of heart attacks. Decades passed, but Nana never remarried. I guess there just wasn't anyone else.

These stories were recounted a lot to me. On the other hand, GrandDAD's (Mom's Dad) stories weren't told by him, or at least not passed down with the slightest hint of glamour. He was a Marine who fought in the Pacific, specifically at Guadalcanal. We knew that he had at one point, while already gravely wounded, carried multiple fellow soldiers to safety up burning terrain. Mom figured that is what he had the Purple Heart for; it was used as a plaything after being found stuffed in a dresser drawer. Years later, we did some research and discovered that Purple Heart was actually one of many, with a Silver Star to boot. There was some documentation indicating he served in what was the precursor to the SEALs, as well as did important service translating in Japan after the surrender. To everyone in San Juan Capistrano, he was simply everyone's friendly neighborhood Spanish teacher. I'm sure he wanted it that way. My Uncle Bob made copies of his dog tags a few years back and I carry one on a keychain gladly.

My Granny was born in 1930, so a bit too young to participate more directly in the war effort. But she tried to explain to me recently the frame of mind from the home front, how different physiologically it was to anything we have experienced. The knowledge so much of your family was in harm's way on another continent. The knowledge this was *everyone's* family. The uncertainty that we could be invaded. The sense that America really could end in a few years, that freedom could be snuffed out. And the attitude that made everyone gladly contribute and pull together to make sure that never, ever happened.

Dirt poor, they moved from Arkansas to California when she was young. At 92, she has told me more recently about going back to visit after the war as a teenager. How everything seemed dilapidated and backwards, how terribly the Black people were treated, of hearing casually of someone hung from a tree for being on the wrong side of town. She couldn't believe this could exist in this same country that had defended itself so proudly; she asked her mother "Is this really the United States? Are we really still in it?" She has never been back.

The last few years, she confided, are the first time she has worried deeply about our country's survival in the same gnawing existential way.

It's up to us now. So many of us have these family stories. The things they saw and felt and had to do make what we see on the news and in our lives pale in terms of difficulty. Those who wish to break our democracy don't scare me. How could they? With stories like these in the back of your mind, allowing fear to be your response is just plain disrespectful.

We can do this. They did. Happy Vetean's Day.

P.S. Slava Ukrani!

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This should become a law...

“The politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass

murder”, said the last surviving British soldier of WWI, Harry Patch

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President Zelenski, You inspire us 💙💛

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WW II ended with two A-bombs, two U235 bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to kill civilians and force Japan to surrender. The nuclear bombs were created by the secret Manhattan Project run by ‘25 Nobel in Physics, James Franck and Enrico Ferme, two geniuses educated in Europe. Franck was my wife’s Opa. He rose in Germany in 1933 to declare Hitler a fascist menace and he fled Germany. The Franck Report he organized and published secretly was designed to influence President Truman - and it was ignored, initiating nuclear war.

There are many nuclear weapons poised to destroy civilization. The USA, England, France, Russia, China, North Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, and possibly s few others have nuclear weapons.

Mutually assured destruction or MAD threatens. Nuclear powered submarines armed with H bombs many times as powerful as the U bombs are programmed to react with devastating consequences should we be attacked. The president is authorized to act without a congressional declaration of war if we are attacked or threatened. Recent presidents have had no military experience. Our constitution allows the congress alone to declare war. With intercontinental ballistic missiles, there is no time to call the Congress. So, we have the war powers act. Presidents, stable or not, have the power.

Will Putin test us in Ukraine? Would we respond?

Do Americans remember Lend Lease and the isolationists in congress that watched Hitler and refused to use our military to protect England.

Do the American people understand why we must stop Russia? Protect Formosa or Taiwan?

What started and what ended Vietnam? Korea? What must we do if Japan is attacked my North Korea?

Is Pearl Harbor the last time we declared war in the congress.

Why did we drop the Draft? Which pseudo Nobel urged us to drop the Draft? Why did he do that?

What color is our well paid army? When were the armed services desegregated?

Do Americans recognize fascism? Are Trump, DeSantis, Hawley, Cruz, Miller, and many others here and abroad fascists?

Do you have or read a local newspaper worth reading?

Are ee losing our democracy? What event proves this?

Are Republicans intelligent?

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Invictus

BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

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A fitting tribute on Veteran's Day to the sacrifice of so many both in the past and presently struggling to secure justice, peace, and democracy.

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Nov 12, 2022·edited Nov 12, 2022

"While the U.S. has sometimes failed to honor them, their central theory remains important: no country should be able to attack its neighbor, slaughter its people, and steal its lands at will. It is a concept that has preserved decades of relative peace compared to the horrors of the early twentieth century".

In 2001 the World Trade Center in NY was felled by two planes crashing into them. No perpetrator was from Afghanistan, had been to Afghanistan recently, had trained in Afghanistan or planned in Afghanistan.

However, because a party boy from Harvard, admitted to Harvard based on white affirmative action called "legacy admission", George W. Bush, had flagging popularity, he "decided" that it would be a good idea to do a full invasion of Afghanistan, then, Iraq, to bolster his popularity and "find Osama Bin Laden", a man Bush had been ignoring up to that point and who Bush claimed was in Afghanistan.

We invaded without regard to the MANY objections of other countries or the "rules based order". We dropped thousands of bombs on civilian targets including schools and hospitals. We leveled historic cities that contained schools, markets, hospitals, homes.

We machine gunned 12 year old boys in small villages gathering wood. One survived to tell how the US helicopter first descended to look at them, then rose back up and mowed them down with a .50 caliber machine gun.

Dr. Richardson, saying: "While the U.S. has sometimes failed to honor them (the rules based order)" is a sentence that truly re-writes history and simply ignores what is true.

The US has routinely failed to honor those rules and often aggressively ignored them. However, the US has managed to get by with this carnage because they pick countries to invade that are not white European.

Apparently, invading countries with brown people, or Vietnamese people, or Cambodian people is totally OK.

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What many Americans seem to have forgotten is that World War II was all about fighting fascism. Fascism being a move, in particular, to a political dictator ship. During World War II more than 40,000 of America’s finest young men died fighting fascism and assuring that democracy would thrive all over the world.

Today in America, MAGA Republicans in office have turned to that same fascism and the accordant dictatorship as a method of maintaining their power and staying in office, while blaming Socialism for the ills of the nation.

These blatant lies have been a slow process, taking place over decades, so that it has gone almost unnoticed, like putting a frog in a cauldron of water and gradually bring it to a boil. By the time the frog realizes what is happening it is too late and the it perishes in the boiling water.

Before it is too late, Americans must realize what is happening and put a stop to the process.

In the recently completed midterm elections in this country, many Americans saw what MAGA Republicans are trying to do, and turned many of these Fascists in office away.

Unfortunately, many of them are still remain and Americans must continue their vigilance and their fight to remove them before it is too late.

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Oddly, this is also my birthday.

We don’t celebrate so much as we honor folks today. For that reason and thanks to “deer” season here, the anniversary of my birth tends to get lost in the mix.

It’s also the birthday of the Marines, 247 years ago.

My father was a Marine. I have many friends

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The 1914-18 war was appalling, but the armistice "laying down of arms" held. There were no victors. The UK, French and US rejoiced in rubbing German noses in the dirt, and should have known better. Versailles drove Germany to democratically elect Hitler as Chancellor, leading to another awful war. Ultimately the US - unlike the triumphalism of 1919 Versailles - launched the Marshall Plan, to their credit.

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"Rather than trying to push their own boundaries and interests whenever they could gain advantage, countries agreed to abide by a series of rules that promoted peace, economic cooperation, and security."

Sounds like a wise idea for local or global.

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Nov 12, 2022·edited Nov 12, 2022

My sister, who is a flight attendant, returned to Minnesota from London today.

She wrote,

“When we got to the airport today right at 11:00 on the 11th day of the 11th month the entire airport stopped. Every person stood in 2 minutes of silence and then they played their National Anthem. Absolutely beautiful to see all these people from many nations,  at least 1000, all in silence, remembering.

I had tears in my eyes as I looked around the hall, seriously 1000 people as it’s very large. They wait there until their gates for their flights are announced. Lots of shops and restaurants.

I had just cleared crew security and walked into this space of silence. No registers ringing, no shopping being done. Just stillness and quiet. Just took my breath away to see the respect and remembrance on all those faces.“

We must remember.

Thank you for helping us remember, Professor Richardson.

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