The Bosque Boys

Some thoughts on what I know about playing poker...

1. One of my favorite axioms: “if you can’t figure out who the sucker is in the game—get out; it is probably you” (famously quoted in Rounders).

2. In essence, the law of averages says that everyone at the table with a modest amount of ability will win the same amount of hands over the course of the night; therefore, the key to winning at poker is to maximize the hands you win and minimize your losses on the ones you lose. Sounds simple—but there is great art to this.

3. A corollary to this is the Kenny Rogers advice: “know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.” Don’t chase good money after bad. Get out early on bad hands. Drive up the pot on good hands.

4. A poker face is essential—but the whole art of “bluffing” is much overrated; it is very Hollywood—but unlikely to make you a consistent winner.

Now you know everything I know about playing poker.

Some quick not-necessarily-connected thoughts on the State of the Union:

1. Great drama: a President at war in the midst of historic low public approval numbers facing a newly crowned majority in Congress opposed to almost everything for which he stands.

2. The President's domestic agenda is nearly irrelevant. He has lost the initiative. He may get some of the things he wants, but they will be mostly on Democratic terms.

3. American institutions are so very powerful. I loved the civility and the respect for the offices and the history. The President's tribute to Nancy Pelosi was first class. He seemed sincere, and she appeared genuinely moved.

4. The expectation was that the speech would have no impact. I think that is basically correct, although the President gave his partisans a moment to be proud of and something to stick in their gas tank. The speech was the best and most articluate I had seen from this President in a long time, but does it matter at this point?

5. Kudos to the new speech-writing team. I like Michael Gerson--but, perhaps, it was time for a change. Although the punditry proclaimed it subdued, that stale analysis gives the wrong impression. The call to arms was a low roar that played powerfully eloquent on TV.

Instantly classic lines:

"The rite of custom brings us together at a defining hour -- when decisions are hard and courage is needed. We must have the will to face difficult challenges and determined enemies -- and the wisdom to face them together."

"This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we're in. Every one of us wishes this war were over and won. Yet it would not be like us to leave our promises unkept, our friends abandoned, and our own security at risk. Ladies and gentlemen: On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. Let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory."

"We went into this largely united, in our assumptions and in our convictions. And whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure. Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq, and I ask you to give it a chance to work. And I ask you to support our troops in the field, and those on their way."

As I said yesterday, "This week I am attending workshops in Tempe, Arizona, on topics related to leadership and ministry in Native Christian Churches. (Saying "Native American Churches" means another thing.) Here are a few random thoughts from today." To read yesterday's thoughts see here.

1. Tonight we are having ( I left early) a "cultural night" in the auditorium. A sort of mini-pow-wow. The evening began, as do all pow-wows I'm familiar with, with the posting of the colors done by veterans. We all stood as the honor guard presented the flag, then pledged allegiance to the United States of America. I feel humbled whenever I stand among Native peoples who demonstrate their patriotism, peoples who could rightfully hate this country, but instead serve as proud citizens. I've written of Indian patriotism before here and here and elsewhere. The color guard was from American Legion Ira Hayes Post No. 84, a racially mixed post including Native Americans.

2. Following the flag ceremony a WW2 veteran and member of the Legion Post gave a talk on his life. He was of Japanese descent. His father immigrated to the US in 1900, his mother in 1916. They were prohibited by law from becoming naturalized citizens, though their son and his siblings born here were citizens. When the draft was activated he was processed, but not inducted because he farmed. Following Pearl Harbor his father was arrested by the FBI, though never publically charged, and held in North Dakota. He continued farming until FDR signed the relocation order. Then, given only a few days to sell the farm, livestock, etc., he was processed as a detainee, being sent to the camp on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona. (His draft classification, like that of other citizens sent to the camps, was reclassified as "Undesirable.") He was quite clear that he regarded this action as unjust and a violation of his rights as a citizen. However, the military soon realized its need for Japanese readers and speakers in the Pacific theater, and asked for volunteers from each camp to join the military as translators. He did. For the rest of the war he served in India and Burma assigned to the British, then with American forces in China. Finally, he finished his service in occupied Japan. Returning home after the war he found he had to start over. A kind neighbor to the family farm had allowed the family to store some machinery in his barn which he sold on behalf of the family during the war shortages. This money provided the nest egg to begin again. Eventually the family owned a farm in Arizona. He now is retired, and a proud Legion member. And, a patriot, who expressed his loyalty and love for America tonight.

3. He provided us a key to understanding the mystery of his patriotism by telling the story of the return of the highly decorated 442d to the United States after WW2. He told that President Truman, honoring this unit, told them that they had shown the country courage and loyalty. He then challenged them to continue the fight to hold America to its own highest ideals. For this citizen of Japanese ancestry, and I think for the Native American veterans, America is ultimately not a region of territory, nor a particular government administration, nor simply the sum of past injustice; America is an ideal to be defended and fought for against all enemies both foreign and domestic.

This week I am attending workshops in Tempe, Arizona, on topics related to leadership and ministry in Native Christian Churches. (Saying "Native American Churches" means another thing.) Here are a few random thoughts from today.

1. You can learn a lot about a town by riding city busses. To save money I and the person I traveled with took a city bus from the Phoenix Airport to the Cook Conference Center/School (founded years ago to serve Indian Churches). Phoenix folk were very friendly and helpful, driver and passengers. My opinion of this town now is higher.

2. Have I ever mentioned I am frugal? I refer to myself as a true conservative--I read all restaurant menus from right to left.

3. Our dominant culture is crazy. Along University Avenue I see grass planted, with sprinkler systems installed. You have moved to the desert, people! It is dry here. Go with it, don't fight it. Adapt, change. Instead we usually seek to dominate our local environments. As the Phoenix area grows, where will the water come from to water this turf?

4. I am one of the few Anglos here. Most of the attendees are tribal. In conversation I find that tribal governments are universally despised as crooked, incompotent, etc. I ask why so? One of the more intriguing explanations I heard today: democracy is an alien imposition on tribal cultures which have other ways of raising up leaders; democratic processes tend to reward politicians (in the bad sense of the word) rather than raise up leaders. Ironically enough, the Founders of the US would have understood. By "tribal governments" we do not mean the Bureau of Indian Affairs, etc., but rather the self-government structures of each tribe.

5. Another explanation of the above: since friendship and kinship ties matter so much for tribal people (as they do in all traditional societies), then people in power necessarily reward their friends and relatives. In another context, (a discussion of gang activity on reservations), one man said--our tribe has found we have had to federalize gang-related law-breaking. They are not afraid of the tribal police or jails, they say, "go ahead, put me in jail, my aunt ----- will bring me food I like and my uncle ----- will let me out nights."

6. National gangs are a growing problem even on reservations. Perhaps more on this later.

I have long argued that the decade of the 1970s was a golden age for filmmaking. Think about some of the Best Picture winners during the decade: Patton, both Godfathers, The Sting, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Annie Hall. Even more astounding, think about some of the films that did not win Best Picture: (a mere sampling) The Way We Were, The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, The Last Detail, Jaws, M*A*S*H, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, Love Story, and the list goes on. In 1976 alone, the non-winners included: All the President's Men, Bound for Glory, Network, Taxi Driver, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and The Omen (the latter two were not even nominated for Best Picture).

Why were the 1970s so golden? It was a fortuitous end of an era. For years, great talents learned and labored under the efficient but stifling studio system. In addition, these artists operated within the restrictive Hays production code, which policed motion picture content to insure "wholesome entertainment" (read the code here). When old Hollywood collapsed, the restrictions evaporated and a new generation emerged. These screenwriters and filmmakers, generally trained under the discipline of the ancien regime, felt free to experiment outside the old envelope, and their genius flowered. The results are the plethora of masterpieces cited above.

An aside: What happens when a generation emerges without training and no deeply embedded sense of propriety to which they must conform and against which they must inevitably rebel? Now appearing at your local video store. Sadly, there is a big difference in the ability to bend and/or break through the old standards and having no standards at all. Our current generation of filmmakers suffers from too much freedom and a palpable lack of cultivation.

I mentioned the non-winners from 1976. Do you remember the winner? Rocky.

Rocky was not an especially rebellious film. Of course, there is coarse language and implicit sexual intimacy outside of marriage; there are sympathetic criminals, and there are times when right and wrong is not clearly defined. But, in its essence, Rocky is the classic underdog narrative; it is a plot that goes back to the beginning of story telling and the halcyon days of Hollywood. In fact, in an almost quaint fashion, Rocky tells the utterly contrived tale of a club fighter who gets a title shot and, more importantly, an opportunity to reclaim his life.

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Historiography is the history of history. We are becoming accustomed to the notion that the recording of history is an intellectual battle with winners and losers. Here is an extremely brief note on how the history of the "Cause" developed over time:

With a few notable exceptions, the historiography considering the causes of the war consistently identified slavery as the main artery of conflict. That is, the issues of Constitutionalism, sectionalism, state rights, et al revolved around slavery and drew their emotional power from slavery. To some extent the debate over causation mirrored the sectional conflict and even the course of the actual war—with the Southern revisionism eventually succumbing to the numerical superiority of northern scholarship.

Northern explanations of the hostilities, from the near-contemporaneous account written by Henry Wilson to the initial scholarly discussion offered by turn-of-the-century historian James Ford Rhodes to the mid-century work of Allan Nevins and Arthur Schlesinger, revolve around the immorality of slavery. Transplanted Westerners David M. Potter, Don Fehrenbacher and Kenneth Stampp provided later affirmations of the centrality of slavery.

The three great twentieth-century divergent explanations occurred during the first fifty years. The Dunning School, named after a pioneer historian from Columbia University, unleashed a swell of Southern and Midwestern scholars, U.B. Phillips and William E. Dodd foremost among them, who defined the system of slavery as benign and justified the South’s actions leading to the war.

After the Dunning heyday of the 1920s, the second wave of revisionists declared that a “blundering generation” of politicians mishandled the sectional crisis of the 1850s. The post-World War I generation of historians accused the ante bellum generation of politicians of stumbling into a devastating war that could have been avoided through skillful statesmanship. The underlying premise, of course, was that slavery was not something over which a nation should have fought a civil war.

The other great threat to the “primacy of slavery” explanation came from the Charles and Mary Beard thesis, also offered during the 1920s, in which the Progressive historians pronounced the war to be the “Second American Revolution,” the product of economic transformation, and the ultimate triumph of capitalism over agrarianism. While economic determinism captured the imagination of radical historians and enjoyed a brief revival among some prominent Marxist historians during the 1960s and 1970s, in the end, even Beard himself repudiated this notion.

From my files on the CW, here is a bit more nuanced approach to why the war came and what it accomplished.

For a brief discussion on the who and the when of causal analysis, you may also be interested in "Civil War Historiography 101" (here).

Participation, Equality and the Constitution:
The Issues of the Civil War Era

During the restive middle decades of the nineteenth century, a series of disparate political fevers swept across the national landscape. Two separate but oftentimes complementary impulses, the Age of Democracy and the Age of Reform, produced a national crisis of identity in the form of a sectional division. The Civil War, the point at which the fever of sectional strife reached a near-lethal level, proved to be a defining moment for the American experiment in popular government. Hastened by the question of slavery in the western territories, the war preserved a unified nation and resolved several fundamental questions concerning the nature of the Union. The violence also marked a crossroads in the way in which citizens perceived their political leaders and interacted with their government.

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Tocqueville attached this essay to the prior post, and, in response to off-line requests, Iam featuring it as a stand-alone post:

It's the Demography, Stupid
By Mark Steyn

"Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West."

Full essay here.

Gaypatriot has a link to this site on Terror-Free Oil. That is, a list of gasoline companies broken down into those whose product contains oil from countries of the Persian Gulf and those who do not. Here is the list.

Who are we funding when we fill up?

Worth Looking at: Martian Mariner takes exception to the Okie Gardener's post (read here in its entirety), which featured S. K. Malik's The Quranic Way of War. In conclusion, The Gardener commented: "We are not in a War on Terror. We are in a war with radical Islamists. This is not a new war. We are in another hot period of the nearly 1400 year-long war of Islam against everyone else. We need to understand the enemy in order to defeat him."

Guest Blog Rebuttal: Martian Mariner

"Understand the enemy."

Pakistan and its army is an important ally of our current War on Terror, misnamed as it may be. The reason that every Arab government, and most Islamic governments, are cooperating with us is because radical Salafism is as threatening to their regimes as it is to us. I'm certain that these secular but assuredly Muslim leaders do not consider themselves in the midst of a 1400 year-long war against the West.

My point here is that you're giving the Salafists more credit than they are due, by granting them the point that their brand of Islam is the true Islam. This point is not decided within Islam, and we shouldn't help legitimitize the side which would be most harmful to us.

I for one am not looking for a fight, and to claim that we're in the midst of an epoch-long war can have no benefit in a search for peace.