From the Pendleton Book Blather Facebook group...

Aphorism time!

IGNORISTA: a fanatic of the right, center or left who, with ignorance of and/or contempt of history and science, advocates an activist path that is doomed to repeat the stupidities of the past.

[We (the Space Brothers, who share my brain) are in *cautious* agreement on this point. We smell some smoke here, tho, so we promise to pull the plug if the 'Chao' starts any of the more energetic styles of ranting of which he is so fond. Dipshit indeed.]

A paradox of specialization:

Sometimes the best way to obtain a broad understanding of, well, everything, is to study a VERY specific part of it....but do that very thoroughly. You discover that almost all subjects worth the time are interdisciplinary; in other words, it is almost impossible to get down to the the guts of a thing without wandering off into a related field.

[And I will add; a major bonus of dredging into all this muck? You are no longer a dilettante! You are a buff, a geek, an educated layperson in the field....and you have so many, many fertile questions to follow up on!]

The Vietnam War is a case in point.

1. You can learn the strictly military details; if you consider (like the Vietnamese do) that the war REALLY started in 1946 and that the SECOND part was the one the US was involved in (essentially the day we installed Diem)...military technology? Guerrilla tactics and strategies? The effectiveness of strategic and tactical bombing? The role of civilians?

2. History of communism: how does the Vietnamese version of communism compare to Maoism, or Stalinism, or Titoism for that matter? How do ANY of them relate to Marx or Socialism in general? Did the Vietnamese believe themselves to be part of the Communist International at all, considering that they hated the Chinese and the Russians?

3. Contemporary domestic US politics! Did the war contribute, kick off, distort the political disruption of the late Sixties? How did this affect Presidential politics? Are the lessons and mistakes of the war and the Sixties of any use to us now?

4. Historical domestic politics! Isolationism! The League of Nations! The UN! Anti-communism! European politics between the wars!

5. How does Vietnamese history fit in with the history of the rest of Asia? With the US role there in the Philippines, Japan, China, and Korea? Why was colonial Asia important to the US, when we were (supposedly? Really? Philippines?) not a colonial power?

And on, and on, and on. Several dozen books later (or a few dozen hours on Wikipedia at least), you have a pretty good outline of twen-cent history.

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11/4/2014 (Jon Preston) Of Scientists and Salamanders

Surprise, I found the time to read a book. So a feller came into my visitor center striking up a conversation about amphibians. We got to talkin' and I mentioned a little about my stop and go driving on the way to work to get the migrating newts off the road surface and on their merry way to wherever newts go, so's they don't git runned over. I also mentioned to the visitor, that I had once heard a blurb, one time in the past, that became stitched into my memory. It was about a book that an embryologist wrote, you probably guessed it by now, about where the newts are going.

He said oh you mean "Of Scientists and Salamanders." It is the story of Professor Victor Chandler Twitty. Published in 1966. Stanford's Prof. Twitty unlocked a whole bunch of Biologic mysteries including where the newts go. But more, he was a students teacher who's instruction birthed a generation of notable biologists. It is a very intimate, whimsical, funny book about a very smart man who never took himself too seriously and how 61% of 564 newts relocated (forcibly) from their few yards of stream to another stream 7 miles away made it back to their home waters over a six year period. I found a copy on Amazon thanks to this guy. And just to be clear, it came from a little bookshop in New Hampshire.