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August 29

Who painted the iconic "The Sad Clown" painting?

I assumed this painting was pretty famous but there is no Wikipedia article on it to my knowledge, and its painter remains a mystery to me. It seems to be called The Sad Clown, going off the fact that it dominates the Google image search results for that term: http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=%22the%20sad%20clown%22&biw=1280&bih=641 . I do know that the painting is of Emmett Kelly and that his official painter was one Barry Leighton-Jones, but a scan of Leighton-Jones' website does not show this specific image and a Google search doesn't show it either meaning I doubt he actually painted the legendary "Sad Clown" painting I'm referring to. Any ideas? NIRVANA2764 (talk) 03:50, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Barry Leighton-Jones? Everard Proudfoot (talk) 05:09, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Did you click my google link? That is clearly a different image from this one. --NIRVANA2764 (talk) 23:05, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Some kid named Aiden claims that it is his painting, a copy of the style of Leighton-Jones. Responses to his claim are filled with people claiming that he is certainly not the painter. I agree. Leighton-Jones made many paintings that look exactly like this. -- kainaw ™ 14:24, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1907 pogrom in Poland

The front page of the July 18, 1907, Pittsburg Press describes a horrible pogrom that had just taken place in "Skonitz," which the paper described as a Polish town on the border with Austria. I can find no other information on the Internet about this event, nor can I find anything about a town of "Skonitz" -- there is no place of that name in the JewishGen Communities Database. Chojnice, Poland, known in German as Konitz, is not in the right location. Does anyone know what town "Skonitz" might be or have any more information about this massacre? -- Mwalcoff (talk) 07:09, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Chojnice was right on the German-Polish border, but that would mean the NYT made two separate and considerable errors. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 09:04, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

When I Google "Skonitz" I find this from the NYT: "le maSsacre of Jews has occurred at Skonitz. Russian Poland, r. car the Ausirian frontier. In reply to query, the correspondent at Jtarsaw of tile Russian ...", which is filled with Optical character recognition-errors. Could "Skonitz" be an OCR-error too? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.171.56.13 (talk) 09:15, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, I saw it in a graphical reproduction of the Press page. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 17:15, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've checked the original article, and it says "Skonitz". N.b. I think I'm wrong about Konitz. Our article says it was in Germany at the time. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 09:26, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just to muddy the waters with a little ignorant Googling, there was an attack on Jews in Konitz (Prussia) in 1900, according to this tabulation : http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/HistoryJewishPersecution/ citing "P.E. Grosser & E.G. Halperin, Anti-Semitism: Causes and Effects, New York: Philosophical Library, 1978". The American Jewish Year Book for 1908-9 ^{[PDF, 1.35 MB]} (page 131) does have a simple timeline listing of a massacre in Skonitz on July 18, 1907, which I suspect was based on the same press reports as The New York Times and The Pittsburgh Press. The two-sentence dispatch in the former from St. Petersburg, July 19, quoting the Warsaw correspondent of the Russian Telegraphic Agency as knowing nothing of such a massacre, is here (PDF from microfilm or photocopy rather than an OCR transcription). —— Shakescene (talk) 04:42, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This map: File:Galicia 1897 1.jpg shows the region in question. The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was part of Austria, while the white area to the north is Russian, or Congress Poland. I am pretty sure this is roughly the area known as Volhynia. My best guess, looking at that map and checking the cities listed, is the city of Kremenets, which is noted for having a large Jewish population pre-WWII, though no progrom is noted there. According to the article on Volhynia, the area had a large concetration of Jewish Shtetl, or villages. See also Pale of Settlement for a more general history of Jewish areas of Russian Poland. The article Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire notes that the years 1903-1906 were particularly bad for Jews in Russia at the time, but states that by 1907 they had mostly subsided due to large exodus of Jews to the U.S. Apparently "mostly subsided", since there were still some. I can't find the exact city you were looking for, but these articles should give you some ideas on where to look. --Jayron32 05:08, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if The Pittsburgh Press is a reliable source about Jewish pogroms in Central Europe, but the name "Skonitz" seems made up to me. It sounds like a Germanized version of a Polish toponym, which would be "Skonice" in Polish, but there doesn't seem to be a village or town of this name of Poland. Besides, if the alleged pogrom took place in the the Russian Empire, then why would the reporter use a Germanized name? I can't vouch for an American journalist's knowledge of European geography, but I would interpret "Russian Poland" in 1907 to mean the "Congress" Kingdom of Poland and not the entire Russian partition of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (mostly coextensive with the Pale of Settlement). — Kpalion^(talk) 11:27, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The article is almost certainly from a newswire, or a collection of newswires. Even in 1907, a mid-size American daily wouldn't have reporters in rural Poland. I also can't imagine they would just "make up" a story like that, although it's possible a correspondent in Warsaw or St. Petersburg may have had his information wrong. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 22:34, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

mma fighter

WHATS THE UPDATE ON MIKE WHITEHEAD mma fighter sry caps legal case. what did he plead he was arrested almost a year ago. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tomjohnson357 (talk • contribs) 09:26, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

According to article Mike Whitehead he was arrested in April, hardly a year ago. This indicates he's still fighting. And this shows his case is up sometime this month Rojomoke (talk) 09:40, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Should we add "WP is not a news service", to wp:NOT? I thought it was already there, but...NOT!

220.101 talk^\Contribs 13:02, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Highly classified US government information — only for the president?

File:CIA Memo.JPG is a now-declassified briefing that was prepared for George W. Bush in August 2001; with a few words redacted, it was made public in 2004. The bottom of the page bears a marking of For the President Only. Why would the Vice President be restricted from seeing such a document? Nyttend (talk) 12:03, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The President's Daily Brief is generally considered to be maybe the most highly-classified document out there, and it is at the President's discretion to show it to the Vice President or anyone else. Now as you can tell from that particular document, it is not necessarily the case that it contains information that is very exciting or even unknown (Bin Laden wants to attack the US? You could have learned that from Newsweek at that point). I suspect the classification level is due to a few things: 1. high-level programmatic information (you can tell what all of the parts of the CIA are generally worried abou), 2. high-level foreign policy info (you can tell who they are spying on, what decisions are being made, etc.), 3. liability issues (as with that particular memo, for example — it shows that the President had something brought to his attention, and if he doesn't act on it and it does become a problem, then he's wide open for attacks of mismanagement), and 4. it is probably usually an example of over-classification, where in reality the information warrants either just "secret" or maybe even "confidential" at times, but it gets a blanket "top secret" just based on the fact that it is a PDB.

As for why in general would the President not want to tell the Vice President things, there are lots of reasons. Some Presidents have only trusted their VPs with certain amounts of information. Roosevelt famously never told Truman about the atomic bomb in his lifetime. Presidents often do not regard the VP as being a political equal in any way, and quite a number of VPs have openly clashed with Presidents. The key to keeping a secret is not having many people know it; if the VP knows it, maybe he mentions it to his staff, who mention it to someone else, and onward. Maybe the VP has lunch with a Senator and accidentally leaks out the information, and the Senator doesn't realize it is secret, and so on. In this particular case, I would be surprised if Cheney was not in on the PDB's, but again, that's at the President's discretion in this case. The whole point of that classification level is to give the President the option to share or not share it. It is worth noting, of course, that "For the President Only" is not a legal classification level, just an administrative directive. The document itself was probably graded "Top Secret", which is. An easy indication of this is that when declassifying it, they didn't need to cross that line out, whereas they did cross out the classification category (the line just to the right of the "For the President Only" line). --Mr.98 (talk) 13:54, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I recall having been in discussion with a software vendor in about 2004 who provided a package that allowed the brief to be protectively marked at quite a high degree of granularity. As part of the management of that the various copies of the PDB were personally labelled for the reader, as the protective markings may vary according to who the reader is. One can be sure that the whole brief is open to the President, but other readers may only have access to a subset.

ALR (talk) 14:06, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In general there is often a high degree of granularity in classified summaries. It used to be that some of the Executive Orders from the 1970s required each paragraph to be marked separately, or something along those lines, so it could be segregated if possible. (E.g. "Someone has set us up the bomb. (C) Make your time. (U)" — the first statement is "Confidential", the second is "Unclassified". Usually this would not be a sentence-by-sentence thing.) It doesn't surprise me that the software would make this easier, assuming that all of this stuff is going to be not just typed up by people in Word anymore. The late Clinton and Bush E.O.s changed classification procedure quite a bit so I don't know if that applies today (or applied in 2004) in the same way as before. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:56, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The approach at the time was using Word with an XML plug-in allowing paragraph by paragraph classification. The vendor in question were permitted to use the brief as a sales credential so we discussed it in quite a lot of detail. It was then passed through a processor that disseminated as a PDF with a page by page decrypt. Quite impressive although in real terms of limited value for most clients.

ALR (talk) 18:31, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This document "The U.S. Intelligence Community and Foreign Policy: Getting Analysis Right" by Kenneth Lieberthal of The Brookings Institute mentions this declassified document directly (see p.9) as part of the President's Daily Brief(as mention by Mr.98). It was at one time "produced and presented by the Director of Central Intelligence", so it presumably would be an amalgam of data that, in total, was not possessed by any other single person in the US Intelligence Community. I imagine the President could pass that information on to anyone with the requisite need to know and security clearance, (such as the VP, but I am naturally unfamiliar with the exact details, which are probably classified too!). It may be that as the Commander in Chief the president can pass it to anyone they believe needs it, with clearance or not. One possible reason for the high classificiation is that even what the President knows is potentially a useful piece of data.
• ALRs' comment is interesting as I have heard of software that makes each copy of textually identical documents individually identifiable. I believe it was by uniqely altering the spacing between words, or perhaps even individual letters, for each copy. 220.101 talk^\Contribs 15:28, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The President has the authority to declassify (or downgrade) at will, basically. Note that it is not clear that the Vice President actually has that same level of declassification authority. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:43, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, okay, thanks. I had no idea that the President could downgrade classifications or show information to someone whose clearance wouldn't permit it. I had expected that if Bush had shown Cheney this document, either or both would be in violation of some law or another. Nyttend (talk) 20:44, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The reason the President gets to do this is, I believe, 1. almost all regulations on classification in the U.S. is done by means of Executive Orders, not laws (there are a couple exceptions — Espionage Act, Atomic Energy Act, and Patriot Act, I believe); 2. the idea is also that the President could not be forced by, say, the Air Force, or the Army, into not revealing information. Other agencies are more interconnected in this respect — the DOE can't release military information without getting the DOD's approval, or foreign policy information without getting State's approval. If the President couldn't release things without getting approval, it would mean for a sticky authority issue. Congress on the other hand cannot release anything without agency approval. The Courts run into all sorts of odd problems with regards to classified information disclosure. (Everything from the state secrets privilege to graymail.) --Mr.98 (talk) 22:27, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As to why the PDB is top secret, I'll add one point to the numbered list above: 5. If its classification level is known to vary, then people know which days the President is seeing things that are more highly classified. So it makes sense for it to always be the same level. (Of course, if I actually knew anything about this, I'd now have to kill you.) --Anonymous, 04:15 UTC, August 30, 2010.

The long blanks look like a foreign intelligence service and the short one looks like an allied service.
Sleigh (talk) 08:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, "an _____ service" is most likely "an Egyptian service"; see the "Redactions" section of Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US, our article on this memo. Nyttend (talk) 12:45, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Why not Israeli? Googlemeister (talk) 15:00, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know; the article said that this determination was made by a group of top cryptographers. Nyttend (talk) 19:32, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, there really are some articles on trivial garbage in wikipedia...

ALR (talk) 09:31, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Trivial, it isn't. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:51, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That article is, the majority of the content is quotation. If there was some so what wrapped around it there might be some value to the article, but there's not.

ALR (talk) 07:14, 2 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see the argument at all that the PDB would have to be uniformly classified. Knowing that the President is seeing something Top Secret today and Secret tomorrow doesn't actually let you infer anything concrete whatsoever about the contents, even if you did know what was and was not graded as such. There's no way to even infer importance from the classification rating by itself — stuff which is really quite trivial gets graded "Top Secret" if it comes from a secret source, for example. (There is a lot of stuff in the VENONA transcripts which is really quite worthless, but obviously had to be graded Top Secret because the knowledge of its origins was itself a secret.) --Mr.98 (talk) 13:51, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Rawsons

Was Arturo Rawson a descendant of Amán Rawson? LANTZY ^TALK 12:17, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wills' letter to Lincoln

Looking at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Gettsyburginvitationpage2.jpg , I cannot understand the last sentence of the second paragraph (the one beginning "I am authorized..."). Where I lose it is after "... invite you to be present and participate in these ceremonies, which will...". Could someone with a better grasp of cursive please to transcribe it for me? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.120.0.81 (talk) 16:26, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"I am authorized by the Governors of the different states to invite you to be present and participate in these ceremonies, which will doubtless be very imposing and solemnly impressive. // It is the desire that after the Ovation, You, as Chief Executive of the Nation, formally set apart these grounds." TomorrowTime (talk) 16:33, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you!69.120.0.81 (talk) 16:59, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Part of the problem here is that Wills used the long s multiple times, writing "ſs" when today we'd write "ss". Nyttend (talk) 20:46, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just in the interest of complete accuracy, I missed three capital letters - I was writing my response in a dash, and haven't been at a computer since that, that is why I'm a little late with this. The capital letters I missed are the s in "states", the y in the first "you" and the c in "ceremonies": "...Governors of the different States to invite You to be present in these Ceremonies, which will..." TomorrowTime (talk) 15:41, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Strange colon

Hia. I came across the name of Benjamin Perley Poore in a book by Michael Kammen, where he is consistently spelled "Ben: Perley Poore". I found some other contemporary sources like this New York Times obit, but I still can't make sense of that colon; is this some unusual (or even usual) way of abbreviation or did this guy simply have a quirky name? --Janneman (talk) 16:57, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's frequently used to indicate that the "Ben" is an abbreviation, and not his name. I've seen it used when a man's name was John and he was referred to as "Jno:". Everard Proudfoot (talk) 20:30, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to based on the system used in American libraries in Charles Ammi Cutter influential work Rules for a dictionary catalog where the colon means the name is abbreviated and not merely being used like a middle initial would be with a period (C: A. Cutter). B: is used for Benjamin in that work though and I would have guessed Jno: would be Jonathon perhaps. meltBanana 00:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The colon was commonly used in the 18th century to abbreviate a personal name, as you can see by looking at the signatures on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States; George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among many others at that time, regularly used a colon to abbreviate their first names, though others used just a period. Somewhere along the line in the 19th century, the colon dropped out of style and the period became the norm, as it is today.

Also, I know that my grandfather, whose first name was John, not Jonathan, on a few rare occasions did abbreviate his name as "Jno." - an old-fashioned style that is all but forgotten today. Textorus (talk) 01:05, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks all, that was helpful; I'd just never seen it written before (it seems Jefferson forgot the colon when signing the Dec Declaration of Independence...) --Janneman (talk) 11:40, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Joseph Ratzinger "subsequent illness" during Wehrmacht service

The Wiki article concerning Pope Benedict XVI includes the following quote:

"Ratzinger then trained in the German infantry, but a subsequent illness precluded him from the usual rigours of military duty. As the Allied front drew closer to his post in 1945, he deserted back to his family's home in Traunstein after his unit had ceased to exist, just as American troops established their headquarters in the Ratzinger household. As a German soldier, he was put in a POW camp but was released a few months later at the end of the war in the summer of 1945."

These three sentences are completely unsourced. In particular, I am interested in the phrase "but a subsequent illness precluded him from the usual rigours of military duty." I googled this phrase and came up with over 6700 hits using this precise language, including the English spelling of the word "rigour."

What is the source for this? Is Wiki the source being quoted by everyone else (I don't think so), or is Wiki quoting another source without attribution? And from what "subsequent illness" did he suffer?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Nrglaw (talk) 18:52, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see why it's so unlikely that a few thousand people have quoted Wikipedia's article on a figure as notable and controversial as Benedict XVI. The phrase doesn't appear at all in Google Books, and Google gives no hits with site:.va, so I doubt it's a copyvio. The fact that it's unsourced is a pretty major problem, though. I suggest digging through the history until you find the user who added the text, and then asking them. Also, add an unsourced tag. (Pet hate: please don't call Wikipedia "Wiki". It's not the only wiki in the world.) Marnanel (talk) 19:02, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Relevant link: WP:NOTWIKI. Vimescarrot (talk) 00:30, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

English language with most speakers

This is kind of language and society, so I'm putting it here. I'm an English upper-school student from Suffolk spending a semester in here the US as part of an exchange programme for children from well-off families to be exposed to the culture of other Anglophone countries. In History class one day we were discussing the English language and its international use, and the teacher asked why English was so widespread in use. A student said that this mainly was because of US influence around the world and somehow tied in the US 'winning' the World Wars!!! These weren't very young students either, they were 16 and 17 (albeit in a state school). I was dumbfounded, and more so when the teacher said that was correct!!! BEfore I could respond the announcements came on and the students started pledging their [blind] allegiance to the flag which is a totally different question in and of itself, and it was for some reason regarded as mandatory. What could have caused this total ignorance of a particular empire upon which the 'sun never set'?! 76.235.109.75 (talk) 21:22, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it's no mystery. It's common for people to overestimate the historical importance of their own country. In the words of Enoch Powell, "I sometimes wonder if, when we shed our power, we omitted to shed our arrogance." LANTZY ^TALK 21:36, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The British Empire may be responsible for the prevalence of English in India, Canada, Australia, etc., but you can't deny the impact of "American hegemony" in establishing English as the world's second language in non-Commonwealth places like France, Germany, Japan, China, Latin America, etc. Incidentally, if your school is portraying the Pledge of Allegiance to be in any way mandatory, it's breaking the law. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 22:00, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

^{[citation needed]} on your last statement. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:12, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

[1]. Everard Proudfoot (talk) 23:33, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Times change! Thank you for the link. I will point out as a quibble that this would not be "breaking the law" because there is no law stating that students can't be compelled to stand and say it; rather, any law compelling same is (now considered) an unconstitutional law. Comet Tuttle (talk) 13:32, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

At the risk of going horribly off topic, the law that is broken is the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution as shown in the cited reference. —D. Monack ^talk 20:10, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to be pedantic like me, you'll assert that the Constitution is the Constitution and not a mere "law". Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:22, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Teachers, being employees of the state, can be compelled to lead the Pledge, in a public school, but the students are under no legal obligation to participate, although peer pressure usually fixes that problem. Private schools are probably a different matter. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:53, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

While I think it laughable that they "won both wars" I do agree that it is US influence that has caused English to become such a prominent language (Irish so I consider myself unbaised).--178.167.189.165 (talk) 22:49, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Our article section English language#Significance sums it up well, I think:

Its spread beyond the British Isles began with the growth of the British Empire, and by the late 19th century its reach was truly global. Following the British colonisation of North America, it became the dominant language in the United States and in Canada. The growing economic and cultural influence of the US and its status as a global superpower since World War II have significantly accelerated the language's spread across the planet.

Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:12, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As far as a year in a US public school is concerned, you've been "traded down"; you'll find you have some catching up to do when you return to Britain.--Wetman (talk) 23:52, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

One can certainly make the case that although the British sacrificed far more to achieve the Allied victory in WWII, it was really the U.S. that, along with the Soviet Union, came out as the "winning country." Before the war, Britain was the world's leading imperial power. After the war, the UK was dependent on U.S. aid and credit and quickly lost its empire, while the U.S. became a "superpower" with involvement on all of the continents. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 00:13, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It is a complicated issue, and I am not sure entirely related to this topic. But one can say in the first place if the UK had not held its ground in the first year of the war it is unlikely the US would have bothered entering the war with the force it eventually did. The outcome of the war, at least, would have been very different, and would probably have played out more like a cold war scenario, considering the difficulty of each party to launch a full scale invasion then. Next, as you mentioned, the Soviet Union, was as much part of "winning the war" as the US, in fact one could say with their relatively greater losses much more so. So a statement that the US won the wars is not incorrect (after all they were among the winners), but if it was implied that the US singlehandedly won the wars is plain wrong. --Saddhiyama (talk) 11:08, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Britain went to war to fulfill its obligation to protect Poland from foreign invasion. At the end of the war, Poland was still under foreign occupation, which means that Britain failed to meet its original goal and thus lost the war. — Kpalion^(talk) 11:50, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not quite true - we went to war to stop Germany invading Poland. Also in 1945, it wasn't clear that the Soviets weren't going to restore democracy in Poland - at least to optimists. But we're drifting badly off-topic here. Alansplodge (talk) 12:54, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

76.235.109.75 -- It was rather striking that in the 1880's, 1890's, and early 20th century, when Britain's share of world industrial output started to significantly decline (from 22.9% in 1880 to 13.6% in 1913, according to Paul Kennedy), and there came to be strong rivals to Britain's naval predominance, the English language did not correspondingly lose momentum, but instead went on ever greater strengths. The main countervailing force inhibiting the peaking and eventual decline of international English usage was the influence of the United States... AnonMoos (talk) 05:43, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Whereas I agree that the nationalism shown by the students was quite ridiculous, I 'essentially' agree with them. Prior to World War II, English, French and German where more or less equal in importance - probably French was somewhat ahead the other two as a lingua franca in international affairs. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, English quickly became the undisputed lingua franca - almost exclusively due to the rise of the US as the foremost world power. --Belchman (talk) 12:10, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The second part of the question, regarding the allegiance to the flag, is an important one. C. G. Jung warned against this. This question does seem to colour thinking, here. MacOfJesus (talk) 23:12, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There's something deeply funny, maybe even reassuring, that every British-U.S. conflict on Wikipedia has familiar contours. Person from country A says that they don't understand something from country B, quite understandably, then country B responds with a rational response, although maybe with a bit of their own version of history, then country A responds similarly, repeat, repeat. Shadowjams (talk) 06:17, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

At last, Logic prevails. I keep thinking of a song: "I'm an Englishman in New York, I'm an Alien....". C. G. Jung also spoke of the collective unconsciousness, perhaps we are now "proving" it. MacOfJesus (talk) 10:37, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]