Ruminating Dude

2007-01-17T19:53:00.000-05:00

Getting Older, Stealin' Daddy's Heart

2006-11-04T21:59:00.000-05:00

No Time, No Complaints

My daughter, all 8 months of her, and I'm SO in love with her. This was taken today on a trip to New Hampshire that my wife and I took, for no particularly good reason than to get out of the area and see something different on a sunny day - seems like a good enough reason.

I've been incredibly busy these past few months, so much so that communicating here has been impossible in the midst of all the other priorities. I figure I'll get back into the swing of this at some point, but when I have no clue. Between school and the 90 plus lab reports sitting on my kitchen table as I write this, and helping my wife take care of our daughter, life just seems far
more full than I ever expected it to be, and that, on the whole, isn't so bad.

2006-08-29T15:03:00.000-04:00

Air Power Delusions

An excellent article in this week's The Economist: Air Power - An Enduring Illusion. The article is worth reading when one considers recent events in Lebanon with Israel's ill-conceived use of air power, addressed in an earlier blog post by myself (The Iranian Threat - Puhleeeeeeeze) and American expectations in just about every war it has participated in since WW II.

Right now the only military service in the Pentagon that embraces military action against Iran's nuclear program is ... you guessed it, the U.S. Air Force! I addressed this in U.S. Military: One Up, One Down which covers The New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh which talks about the administrations maneuvers to obtain backing to do "something" about Iran's nuclear program. What's the likelihood that any Air Force, U.S. or not, could wipe out an Iranian nuclear program? Just about zero. What's the likelihood, after doing such a thing, that the Iranian people would opt to overthrow their government and decide that America is the light it needs to follow, especially after we bombed the hell out of their nuclear program? You guessed it, just about zero. After the rubble was cleared, the and the dead buried, what's the likelihood that Iran would indeed go after a nuclear weapon, and in fact be successful in getting one? I'll hazard to say significantly greater than 0, in fact I'd say the odds are pretty darn good. So what would be the point of bombing Iran's nuclear progam? You got me ...

There are few instances anyone can point to where air power has carried the day in a war, and none of any significance where this has happened when faced with a guerrilla war. But the technologically advanced countries of the world repeatedly convince themselves that they can solve their problems with precision guided munitions dropped by stealth bombers or whatever else you can attach a bomb to. The hubris attached to that kind of thinking, in the face of historical evidence to the contrary, is hard to understand, but it also brings to mind a paraphrase of a comment I remember from a book by Michael Ignatieff, which is that the west seems to have an inclination to fight a war with all of its clever machines, but not have its own people die for one - we'll leave that to those we bomb, in the end for little to gain beyond really pissing off a lot of people we could well enough do without pissing off.

2006-08-24T15:58:00.000-04:00

The Iranian Threat - Puhleeeeeeeze ...

This bothers me no end, and this particular "bother" has been triggered by this morning's article in the NY Times, Some in G.O.P. Say Iran Threat Is Played Down. The leading paragraph to the article states:

Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States.

Shades of deja vu. Here we have the administration and its lackeys warning the intelligence community, which, by the way, it has stacked with ITS own people, that they're not providing enough evidence to highlight the threat of Iran. I can only conjecture from this that they're looking for support to do something in Iran, such as bomb its nuclear facilities (wherever the heck they may be located as at this point no one really knows, something those tricky/threatening Iranians have been very clever about) - does this sound like something we've seen before? Maybe like what this very same administration was doing to justify the mess we now find ourselves entangled in in Iraq?

I'm not a big conspiracy freak, but this has all the markings of the administration pandering to Israel and its followers here in the U.S. Israel has been embarrassed by its venture into Lebanon, and made to feel vulnerable. The image conveyed of late from the talk pundits and the media in general is that some odd few thousand Hezbollah guerrillas have beaten Israel, the regional superpower. This is ridiculous - Hezbollah suffered far more than Israel did, and the Lebanese themselves have suffered far worse than anyone. This wasn't a classic war, which not a single country in the region could hope to win with Israel, but a guerrilla action that has lines for victory and defeat that are far more ambiguous than when powers of equal standing, or assumed equal standing when one considers the Arab and Iranian militaries in the region, go to war. In an army to army battle no one in the region can expect to defeat Israel, but when it comes to a guerrilla action, such as Israel in Lebanon and the U.S. in Iraq (or Vietnam for that matter), a classic military such as Israel's or that of the United States is at a disadvantage, especially when the guerrillas in question embrace the opportunity to die (the Vietnamese never were so willing to get themselves killed.) Israel's problem was making claims regarding victory it should have known were nearly impossible to achieve, going into this with an army ill-prepared for the mission (this is very disturbing if the reports coming out of late regarding this are true, with troops ill-trained, ill-equipped, and otherwise simply not up to the task), and an over reliance on air power to get the job done, something that technologically advanced countries like Israel and the U.S. should know better than to do, but it seems we have to re-learn this lesson time and time again.

So, Israel's embarrassed, possibly feeling threatened, and the administration feels this is an opportunity to rally around "getting" Iran, which ostensibly is behind Hezbollah's activities in Lebanon, to show support for Israel. Of course there's no evidence to support that Iran is pulling Hezbollah's strings (see cited Times article above) - yes, Iran supplies Hezbollah and that's enough of a concern, but that's not the same as being able to tell Hezbollah what to do which is a different matter altogether. But if we can make the case that Iran's a threat to the U.S. (mind you, it's the U.S. that's threatened per the administration, not Israel) we can then take care of that threat, just like we did in Iraq, right? Interestingly enough, and something I wrote about back in July regarding an article by Seymour Hersh (see U.S. Military: One Up, One Down), the only U.S. military service that seems to be biting at the bit to go into Iran is the U.S. Air Force - what a surprise. All of the ground services see the problem with Iran and know that there's no way to go in there while in Iraq, and even minus complications from Iraq it'd be an extraordinarily difficult mission, and the Navy's not interested in bottling up its aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf to make fat targets of them for the high speed, bomb laden Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats. But if we did go in we'll surely be supporting the Israelis, right, just like we were supporting democracy when we invaded Iraq?

Iran is not a threat to the U.S., never has been, likely never will be. It surely will often be a pain to U.S. policy makers who often won't agree with the leaders of that country, but it'll never be a direct threat. For as much bellicosity rained on Israel by Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, there's little direct threat to Israel from Iran either. Indirectly Iran is a troublemaker for Israel as Iran does support Hezbollah and Hamas, two organizations whose prime reason for existence is to be a thorn in the side of Israel. But even with a nuclear weapon Iran isn't a threat - Israel has many nuclear weapons, and the means by which to deliver them now, Iran doesn't. Israel won't hesitate to wipe Iran off the face of the Middle East were it to believe that it was responsible for a nuclear attack on Israel and it's unlikely that anyone in a position of influence in Tehran isn't very well aware of this.

The administration shouldn't be goading the intelligence community to produce intelligence data that supports its ideological contentions/beliefs - you'd think they'd have learned that after the Iraq debacle, but apparently not. Moreover, there's no possible excuse anyone can comeup with that justifies military action in Iran as the fact remains that if the Iranians want nuclear weapons they'll eventually get them and trying to stop them, especially with military force, will simply give them reasons for getting them that much more quickly and threatening the world with using them. We must be sure to prevent a repeat of what we've already managed to thoroughly foul up in Iraq, though with Iran the costs would be vastly higher and the end results would be even less desirable than what we're now getting in Iraq. This administration has managed to befoul one part of the Middle East already, we must not stand by and watch as it rationalizes going about trying to do it again.

2006-08-15T20:41:00.000-04:00

Incredible ...

Taken from The New York Times

While I'll admit that this is an odd assortment of countries, it's likely this way so that the U.S. isn't solely compared to its fellow "first world" countries like Japan and those of the European Union. Having the fewest percentage of people who believe that they evolved from earlier species in that crowd doesn't quite frame where we in the U.S. stand, but throw in Malta, Slovenia, Latvia, Croatia, to name but a few, it's another matter all together. I suppose there's some comfort to be taken from the fact that we beat out the anchor country, Turkey, by a healthy margin, though it's hardly something to crow about.

How is it that in the country that's considered the most technologically advanced and dependent for its riches on science, we have so few people who fundamentally understand how biology works? Maybe it's not a matter of simply not understanding but more a matter of choosing not to understand, which is even scarier when you think about it. Whatever it might be, it is embarrassing and causes me no end to wonder as to where this country is going to go when so many are so ignorant, so unwilling to accept what their religion tells them differently, or just think of themselves as so plain special that the rules of biology just don't apply to them ... I'm afraid that there are likely more in the latter category than one would like to think.

2006-08-11T23:13:00.000-04:00

Letter Regarding Mistreatment of Iranian Visitors

Ok, I got a bit hot under the collar on this one, but the whole thing is chock full of the sort of stuff that should make any right thinking person hot and pissed off. This is regarding the abuse of Iranian visitors who were issued visas by our consulates overseas and then detained/arrested at their airport of entry here in the states. This mess was laid our pretty clearly in an article at Iranian.com, specifically Iranians detained at San Francisco airport, 2006. After reading this I was compelled to write a letter that today I sent to both senate representatives for my state, my congressman, and to the President for good measure. Not that I expect anything to come of this, but I felt it was important to have at least expressed my outrage very directly to the "powers-that-be". To go full circle with this I'm sharing the letter, here, too:

August 11, 2006

Enclosed you’ll find a copy of a 9 August 2006 article which ran in Iranian.com, a web site established to provide information to the Iranian community throughout the world. Please bear in mind that the person who has written the email highlighted in this article was one of the victims of the incident described and is writing with English as her second language, a fact that in no way should reduce the impact of what she was subjected to, nor put in question how in this case we treated invited foreigners to this country.

I wanted to bring this incident to your attention inasmuch as it received little publicity here that I’m aware of, it doesn’t seem that anyone feels that there’s a need to explain why these people were treated this way, and frankly I am still incredulous that an incident such as this could occur in my country. I’m a retired naval officer with 22 years of service to this nation, and this is not how I expect the U.S. to represent itself to people who are invited into its borders. Moreover, I’m married to an Iranian scientist currently involved in research here in Providence at Brown University, and I have many personal friends who are graduates of Sharif University of Technology who are also in the U.S. doing graduate and post-doctoral work in some of the more prestigious educational institutions in this country.

I am flabbergasted that our country would have issued visas to Iranian graduates of Sharif University, an institution internationally referred to and respected as the MIT of Iran, only to arrest them upon their arrival here in the United States. What sort of policy allows for this? What sort of disconnect in how we treat foreign visitors to this country would allow for such inhospitable, disrespectful, and flat out rude behavior on the part of this country? The Bush administration professes to want to influence change in Iran and I’d very much like to know how the manhandling and mistreating of citizens of Iran, much less those representing the upper tier of the country, manages to foster any measure of good will between those most likely to be the actual agents of change in Iran and the U.S. government?

I respectfully request that you look into this matter. We cannot hope to expect to positively influence anyone from any country if our policies are going to lead to the sort of incident described in the enclosure to this letter. If we don’t want specific Iranians in this country for whatever reason, and Lord knows our consulates deny them visas all the time for reasons that are rarely ever made clear to them, we shouldn’t be providing them visas and then arresting them and treating them like criminals when they arrive here – I am besides myself with trying to make sense of the lunacy that would justify what was done in this situation to people who now are soured on this country, and who have many friends, relatives, and acquaintances who’ll also take a decidedly negative view regarding the U.S..

Bottom line, I don’t want my family, my friends, or the many Iranians who have traditionally maintained a positive perspective regarding this country subjected to this sort of treatment. I expect that you would feel the same way and ask that you help in preventing this sort of thing from happening in the future.

2006-08-10T18:13:00.000-04:00

Death & Destruction Good, Oral Sex Bad - Remember That

Well, gee, why not? It makes about as much sense as anything else he's done there ...

I've just finished reading Thomas Ricks' new book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Now this book, on top of Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, and Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War by Anthony Shadid, leaves me stunned on the one hand, and angry on the other.

These books have left me wondering how in the world Congress took a sitting U.S. President through an impeachment for lying about an act of fellatio in the oval office, yet doesn't seem to have so much as its feathers ruffled about the ineptitude, arrogance, hubris, and fundamental lack of honesty that emanates out of this administration and it's principal players. Let me be more specific regarding who the principal players are when we're talking about this specific issue, i.e. the current Iraq war: Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz (who is now the president of the World Bank, a McNamarian attempt to expunge himself of his sins from his last job as the man main under Rumsfeld, and he couldn't be World Bank president nearly long enough to make that happen), Gen. Tommy Franks, Paul Bremer, and maybe George Tenet, who I feel sorry for on some level but then again his pain comes no where near what the military in the field is going through, what the Iraqi people have had to bear now and into the future, or what the American people are having lifted out of their wallets daily, so my "feel sorry" quotient for the guy who played no small part in our getting into Iraq isn't high at all.

As of today there are over 2,500 American dead, and over 19,000 wounded (for the most recent numbers I recommend Iraq Coalition Casualties). I'm guessing that this site, Iraq Body Count, is essentially bonafide, as it looks well referenced and the major complaint seems to be that they under-report Iraqi casualties, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that the 40,000 + Iraqi deaths is a reasonable estimate. So we have a large number of American dead, and the number is increasing pretty much weekly, and a huge number of wounded Americans, and if we take the extraordinary number of Iraqi dead and multiply that by say 4 (Americans, due to on-site emergency critical care and rapid medevac to state-of-the-art medical facilities, are MUCH more likely to survive injury than Iraqis), we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 160,000 Iraqi wounded, and why?

First it was because Sadaam had weapons of mass destruction and was supporting terrorists - no, actually, he wasn't and the intelligence was there to support that neither was true but that didn't support what the administration wanted to do so it wasn't paid attention to. Then our focus became helping democracy take root in the region - it's doubtful that the American people would have bought into this were that the prime motive to begin with. Of course our excursion into Iraq was executed with little to no appreciation for the fact that some regions of the world are resistant to democracy when ethnic, tribal, and religious affiliations take precedence to any consideration of the rules for or implementation of democracy, an institution which of course would limit ethnic, tribal, or religious prerogatives. Whatever the reason and how fallacious they were, the fact was that we went into the country with NO plan to take the necessary steps to secure it and afford it the chance to get on an even keel - there was no plan to occupy the country, in spite of the fact that we just conquered it. Neocon fools like Wolfowitz proclaimed that the Iraqis would take over after we did the fighting and won the war (he appeared to have in mind his buddy Chalabi), and the restoration of the country would pay for itself, so who needed a plan for occupation/restoration, or anything else past winning the war?

Now Rumsfeld bought into this ridiculous self-delusion and, in the spirit of his much vaunted "military transformation", decided to ignore every signal he received from the military that told him he couldn't do what was planned for with the troop levels he was dictating - he was CEO of a company somewhere, and was the SecDef once before, what need he for generals, their training, experience, and good common sense? He of course knew better and frankly he, more than anyone else, with the possible exception of generals like Franks and Meyers who essentially supported the man's plan, is responsible for the large number of dead and wounded - their blood is on his hands, but he's too damn obtuse and self-rightous to likely ever been particularly bothered by that.

Each of the books I mentioned at the start of this provide an outstanding picture for how the Iraq adventure became so incredibly messed up, and it didn't start after we got there. Cobra II, as does Fiasco make clear that the planning leading up to the war was rife with problems from poor direction from the Pentagon; the Pentagon excluding the State department from any part in the planning for the war or its aftermath, resulting in eliminating the expertise that would have helped to identify, address and possibly correct the problems we eventually ran into; a rush to make the war happen which guaranteed that the military was not appropriately prepared to take on what it would have to deal with after it won the war; and the list goes on.

Thomas Ricks quotes an Iraqi blogger by the name of The Mesopotamian who shares a possible outcome, which would arise when we left the country, to our involvement in Iraq:

"That would be followed by fighting between Shiite and Sunni groups along the murky ethnic dividing line running southwest from Baghdad. In the capital, 'all shops and markets are closed and start to be looted.' Next, the Kurds would move to capture the key oil city of Kirkuk, on the edge of their historical territory. 'Turkey cannot allow that and invades from the North.' The Kurds would turn to Iran for protection, as would the Shiites, who would feel abandoned by the west and betrayed once more by the United States. In response to the Iranian intervention, he predicted, a torrent of Arabs from Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia would pour into Iraq to support their Sunni brothers. 'All join an infernal orgy of death and destruction the likes of which have seldom been seen,' he said, and oil prices would rocket past one hundred dollars a barrel as 'fanaticism sweeps the region.'"

Now of course this is just one man's speculation for what might happen, but the problem is that something like this can't simply be scoffed at - the possibility of it, or some variation of it occurring is real. Why? Because we went into Iraq without good reason, completely ill-prepared due to an extraordinary hubris, and worse than and of that, we had no plan for what we'd do after we inevitably won the war. This administration has created the chance that we may find ourselves going back to war in the Middle East, fighting a very different enemy, not to mention potentially providing the keys to the Middle East to the Iranian government and leaving us with a much larger problem that we may never resolve.

So I ask you, how is it that an act of oral sex that was lied about trumps all of this?

2006-08-01T12:12:00.000-04:00

Doctors Are Just Special - Part II

My hero!

Now this time out I actually find a doctor that seems to "get it", unlike last week with Doctors Are Just Special. So it's not that she's so special, really, she's simply exhibiting the sort of ethical behavior I'd expect of any responsible professional who's sensitive to conflicts of interest (COI) or with the perception of COI. Anyway, the person I'm talking about is the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Dr. Catherine D. DeAngelis. We get to know a bit about her in today's NY Times in an article by Donald G. McNeil Jr., Tough-Talking Journal Editor Faces Accusations of Leniency. Now if you read the article you soon come to appreciate that Dr. DeAngelis is being anything but lenient. But detractors like Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, apparently thinks they're being sloppy over at JAMA because a number of writers who submitted papers to the journal didn't fully disclose potential conflicts of interest (COI). Kassirer of all people should know better, I mean really, what's DeAngelis to do, hold a gun to the head of doctors to make sure they disclose possible COI? I'm sure that NEJM NEVER had this problem because guys like Kassirer were striking the fear of God into all authors submitting papers to his journal - righto.

Of course Dr. Kassirer should have talked to one of his colleagues before he went and shot off his mouth as we have Dr. Gregory D. Curfman, the current executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, agreeing with DeAngeils that checking up on every author submitting papers to a journal was impossible, and he went so far as to express admiration for Dr. DeAngelis - gotta love it, I do.

But then there's Dr. Thomas B. Stossel, a hematologist at Harvard who's a living example of the fact that even Harvard can hire the clueless. Let's be enlightened by the good Dr. Stossel:

“ ... academic socialists and the conflict-of-interest vigilantes” are stifling the biotechnology revolution by exaggerating the fear that doctors who own patents or company stock will fabricate data.

“This idea that money is evil and academia is made up of saints is nonsense,” Dr. Stossel said. “Some of my vaunted academic colleagues would run their grandmothers over.” He favors disclosure, too, he said, but journal editors “have acquired halos and become arbiters of scientific morality.”

“There’s this myth that if Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Catherine DeAngelis got up and told us what to do, the public’s health would be better off,” he said. “That’s not true.”

Wow, little did I know that it's all about stifling doctors' ability to make money, and the reason my biotech mutual fund has been going down lately is because of people like Dr. DeAngelis - darn! The "conflict-of-interest vigilantes" - how do these nefarious vigilantes go about stifling the capitalist opportunities of doctors? Well, by insisting that they make clear their business associations when what they write about in a scientific journal bears on that business. What in the world is so hard about THAT? Stossel, though, in the spirit of the best spin malarkey, turns this into a "money is evil" crusade, though he does let us know that he, too, favors disclosure - so what's the problem? But those of us concerned with COI are either academic socialists (well, I'm not an academic so I'm excluded) or COI vigilantes, or COIV's for short - Carl Rove surely must love this guy.

What's DeAngelis, as I'm not aware of Mother Teresa, long dead, or the Dalai Lama having a dog in this fight, telling guys like Stossel to do? I'm confused, inasmuch as it seems to be exactly what Stossel says guys like he should be doing, at least with regard to disclosure in journal articles. Is it that the public's health would be better off? Well, yeah, maybe in fact it would be, in fact I'd bet it would be when financial interests compete with patient interests who's likely to lose that fight? Disclosure, getting it out there in the open, doesn't prevent a doctor from writing an article or making money on anything, but it does make it clear that he/she has potentially less than a totally impartial view on what's being written about and disclosure, I would think, would likely make them more careful about putting their name to something they weren't 100% certain, or as close as anyone can reasonably expect to be, confident wasn't a product of some agenda. But I'm sure Stossel is the sort of saint that would never put his pocketbook above his patients, in fact all doctors that seem to have a problem with this issue feel that way; they're special, as I pointed out last time.

Here are some of the entitlements that Dr. Stossel seems to want to protect that Dr. DeAngelis is combating:

... she says pharmaceutical companies do try to corrupt researchers by asking them to put their names on ghost-written articles and by using journals like hers to implicitly endorse their products.

Dr. DeAngelis will not let companies buy advertisements in issues in which their products are studied, and when she attends a medical dinner and discovers a drug company has paid for it, she said: “I don’t eat. It kills me, but I only drink water. Tap water.”

So being paid simply to put one's name on a research paper isn't a real problem in the world of Dr. Stossel, and there should be no concern with thinking that if someone pays for your meal, and is repeatedly allowed to do so, that you might be running into an ethical quandary. Dr. Stossel, being of Harvard, apparently thinks doctors are made of finer stuff and would NEVER be influenced by such things, in fact in his world it would seem that doctors are entitled to every freebie they can get because they would never be swayed by petty trifles like lunches, dinners, trips to the Bahamas ... hmmmm, we likely have to draw the line somewhere, but where oh where should it be? Well, no worry, doctors like Stossel aren't like us, they're special.

The idea isn't to keep doctors from making money, it's to make sure that any possible undo influence that may exist is clear and out in the open, which on its own sets a stage for conferring a doctor benefit of the doubt, unlike when some sort of possible COI is discovered later when an investigation into a drug, machine, or procedure is required due to death or harm. In addition, we get into a whole other area of concern and that's medical-focused companies, big Pharma, with their pretty faces that ply doctors with various freebies, surely not to unduly influence (cough, cough, and no, I'm ot being checked for a hernia as a write this), but rather to show some supplier/customer collegiality, or something like that.

Within DoD, which often enough has it's own ethics problems, there are specific guidelines regarding what you can accept from a vendor or anyone you do business with for whatever reason, and the limits are pretty stringent when you get right down to it - here you're trying to protect the interest of the taxpayer and sustain confidence in the viability of our defense establishment. With medical COI there's a real possibility of doing patient harm, something not quite as abstract as protecting the taxpayer's fiduciary interest. Isn't it about time that the medical community created something of the kind, laying out clearly what's acceptable ethically? My guess is that guys like Dr. Stossel, who seem to be more focused on protecting their right to capitalistic indulgence and apparently obscuring one's professional associations, might have a problem with this, which is likely why COI has been a problem for so long.

2006-07-29T18:59:00.000-04:00

A Conservative Christian Minister with the Right Message

Interesting article in the Times today by Laurie Goldstein, Disowning Conservative Politics Is Costly for an Evangelical Pastor. Makes for a good comparison with an article in this week's The New Yorker by Frances Fitzgerald, Holy Toledo: Ohio's Gubrnatorial Race Tests the Power of the Christian Right. Fitzgerald's article talks about evangelical Christians in Ohio becoming more and more actively involved in politics to the point of doing what they can to elect the next governor of the state who supports their agenda. This involvement has gotten to the point that the IRS has begun to investigate the tax free status of a large number of churches in the state (due to other clergy bringing the problem of religion mixing too closely with politics to the attention fo the IRS), and causing the head of the IRS to warn that there's a problem out there with where churches are taking themselves when the start to dance with politic activism. The tendency we're seeing in Ohio fits nicely with what Michelle Goldberg warns us about in her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, which I've discussed on more than one occasion here.

Rev. Boyd, highlighted in the Times article, has the right message: the church doesn't have a place in setting the agenda for the country, certainly not in running the country, and there's no reason to assume that even a conservative congregation should be lining up behind the Republican party and its agenda. Of course, as the article title hints, espousing this to his
congregation comes with a price, in this case losing about 20% of a 5,000 strong following.

The religious right is not to be ignored, and I applaud Rev. Boyd for this principled stand on where politics and religion should and shouldn't meet. I fear, though, that the good Rev. is in the minority and we're just beginning to see problems with the religious, i.e. evangelical Christian, right's push to tell us all how to live and believe.

2006-07-28T17:16:00.000-04:00

They're Killing Me ...

A quick afternoon perusal of the news finds the following, Republicans Tie Minimum Wage to Tax Cut. The house Republicans don't want to approve the minimum wage unless tax breaks are given to the rich - to smooth it out a bit and not make it seem so much like a welfare program for rich people they're throwing a bone to middle-class folks by including tax deductions for college tuition in their tax proposal (the middle class and everyone else is already allowed to save for college tuition tax-free using 529 plans or a Coverdell Education Savings Account, so what more they can gain from this I'm not entirely sure).

The minimum wage presently stands at $5.15 an hour. If you work a 40 hour week you're making $10,700 a year and that's barely a wage you can support one person on, much less a family. So of course anyone making solely minimum wage is barely getting by and more likely than not working two jobs, very often with neither providing health insurance, to scrape by. The minimum wage is not indexed to inflation, as common sense would indicate to me that it should be, and it hasn't been changed in ten years. So as we learn today, the Republicans will only buy into changing it now if the inheritance taxes on wealthy estates are eliminated. So regular people aren't entitled to a working wage unless people who haven't a worry in the world financially pay less taxes - how does that work?

So we're talking about cutting the taxes on the rich, but not eliminating or appropriately index the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) which more and more middle class, two-income families are finding themselves subjected to. I've sort of beat the AMT to death, the last time being in April: The Alternative Minimum Tax: Watch Out!. We're presently taxing our children at a higher tax rate than the old "children's rate" between the age of 14 to 18 because a cash strapped congress is trying to scrounge for revenue, and the Republicans are looking to cut "inheritance" taxes for the rich. I could go on and on ... but then the real point here is that the less well-off, the working poor as they're called, are entitled to a working wage without having to give anyone else bennies to justify it. But the working poor just don't count as much to the Republicans, of course, so ...

I don't know when the average Jane or Joe middle-class person is going to wake up to the fact that they're the ones paying for subsidizing the rich, which means that on a percentage basis of income they're paying more to support this government and its expenditures in places like Iraq. The little guy is being made to pay, while our Republican leaders in Washington, D.C. seem to be mostly interested in making sure that they take care of the primary campaign contributors. People should be getting pissed, very pissed ...

Addendum (5/31): It turns out that the 529 college saving plan, which is tax free, is due to stop being tax free for deductions from the account in 2010. Part of what this tax bill is intended to do is keep the tax-free status of the plans in place for good, i.e. not end after 2010.

2006-07-27T09:38:00.000-04:00

Beware the Homosexual Agenda!!!!

Lifted from Ms. Betty's Web site at CafePress.com

Imagine my surprise, my utter stupefaction, to discover how little I know, dupe that I am, about all those gay people who apparently have, of all things, an agenda. Frankly I'm besides myself now with disgust and anger over how I've been taken in. All this time I simply thought gay people wanted to be left alone, treated like everyone else, a few wanted to be a bit flamboyant at times but then I always figured why shouldn't they have the same rights as Paris Hilton; God, I was such a SAP!

You haven't heard of the Homosexual Agenda? Thank the Lord that you visited this blog! After doing some in-depth research (ok, I only Googled it, but if it's good enough for my students it's good enough for me) I found the following at CitizenLinkQ&A: The Homosexual Agenda (Note: CitizenLink is maintained by Focus on the Family, founded by that really neat Christian right wing fun-loving guy, James Dobson, who'd just love to have the opportunity to help you straighten your life out through the healing message of Jesus and his organization's intervention - Praise the Lord!) Here's the agenda:

1. "Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible." That was aimed at making people so tired of the issue they would want to give them anything they want to make them shut up. [Wow, those clever and extremely sneaky homosexuals, they take their tactics right out of "How to be an Obnoxious Four-Year Old or Teenager".]

2. "Portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers." That's why they exploited things like the tragic murder of Matthew Shepard. It was a tragic murder, yet they have used that and spun that to demonize people like Dr. James Dobson and other Christian leaders who have taken a biblical stand on homosexual behavior — people who have love and compassion for those trapped in that behavior. [Damn right. We all know that the biblical stand on homosexuals is to beat them silly or kill them any opportunity we have, or if we don't have the cujones to do it ourselves to tell the world "Well, those sodomites got what was comin' to 'em as everyone knows that Jesus don't like 'em and neither should we - but we'll be happy to save their sinning souls if they just let us, otherwise we got no use for 'em and they can rot in hell, and the sooner the better."]

3. "Give homosexual protectors a just cause." That was designed to tap into and exploit the almost innate sense of fairness that Americans have; to the sympathy that we have — especially liberals have — for those who seem to be disenfranchised. [God, how on target this is! Those gays who can be denied housing, the right to marry, the opportunity to have families (icky, icky, right?), any legal protection afforded us Jesus-sanctioned heterosexuals simply because they're gay, so they have absolutely no right to claim disenfranchisement and take advantage of those poor liberals looking for a cause to champion - have those homosexuals no shame?!?!?!?!] {Warning: your blogger is starting to get dizzy}

4. "Make gays look good." That's what they've done through media campaigns, through television programs, like "Will and Grace" and others, where homosexuals are portrayed as the most normal, stable people in America. [This one sort of confuses me, I mean the majority, though not all, of the gays I've known had no trouble making themselves look good - well, it must be to do with the media coverage thing and really, how dare they be made to look good by Dan Rather or Katrie Kouric, or whomever it is these days, when Jesus so clearly doesn't want them? The simple nerve of these people sometimes just takes your ever-loving breath away!]

5. "Make the victimizers look bad." They portray people of faith — people who have legitimate and biblical reasons to oppose homosexual behavior — as homophobes and bigots. They also try to "muddy the moral waters" by getting liberal churches, many of which have thrown out a great deal of the Bible, to say that homosexual behavior is just fine from a theological perspective. [Now everyone knows that people of faith are victimizers who in no way earn our scorn or admonishment when they dump on gays. Of course people of faith have legitimate reasons for not liking gays, and then there are those biblical reasons which are all they really need, and if Jesus says it's not ok, well dang it that's all I need, and to hell with those liberal churches that throw out any part of the Bible! Everyone knows you simply can't pick and choose what you want out of the Bible, you either buy into it in toto or it's off to hell you go!]

6. "Get funds from corporate America." In fact, they have. They have gotten corporate America to sign on to their agenda, and it is very interesting how they have done that. It's based on fudging the truth — and outright lies. [Would you believe it? We actually have corporations giving money to gay causes? What's the world coming to? Who cares that gays like to spend money like the rest of us, and in some cases spend a lot of money, and therefore other than for their gayness make excellent customers that any business would like to keep happy? To think that the gays have been "fudging" (the guy talking about the agenda used the word, NOT me - maybe he does have a sense of humor?) the truth, and engaging in outright lies with which they've managed to take in those gullible business people in order to get their corporate sponsorship. Have these gays no shame?!?]

Disclaimer: What got me on this rant was an article in today's NY Times, Washington Court Upholds Ban on Gay Marriage. Of course someone in there from a religious group was quoted about the homosexual agenda and I was wondering what it was exactly. I had encountered the expression in Michelle Goldberg's book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism but she doesn't lay it out quite as succinctly as does CitizenLink above, likely because she didn't want to be accused of making fun of the Christian Right, which isn't overwhelmingly as obtuse as those writing for CitizenLink would seem to be - though let's not underestimate group obtuseness and how that frames an issue, especially one where a group of people is being set apart and denigrated for no particular reason than prejudice and hatred. If you don't believe me ask any good Nazi.

What especially got me in the Times article was the following quote from one of the Washington state Supreme Court justices:

“Limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples,” Justice Barbara A. Madsen wrote in that opinion, “furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents.”

Little did I know that I married to help with " ... the survival of the human race" - the higher causes that I buy into that I don't know about simply overwhelm me sometimes (I'm typing this with my right hand as I wipe away a tear streaming down my cheek with my left)! I'm not into this "activist judges" horse manure, but in this case you have to wonder what agenda Justice Madsen has in mind. I mean marriage is intended to sustain the survival of the human race, and being raised by your "biological" parents is what matters, not that you're loved, cared for, and nurtured into being the best possible addition to the human race that you can be - i.e. not just a human of one, in a manner of speaking. Well, I can only wonder what Justice Madsen thinks of birth control and a whole list of issues I won't belabor here.

Well anyway, if after reading this you're not compelled to go out and bash a gay for Jesus, then good for you. Hug your kid instead and hope it's a better and more understanding world by the time they have to really go out and play in it - but don't count on it.

P.S. Another take on the Homosexual Agenda, better than mine, can be found at: The Homosexual Agenda Revealed! Conservative Christians discover what radical homosexual activists are up to! Christians Proudly Hating Through The Anointing of Jesus, by Ms. Betty Bowers who has some great stuff to sell if you make your way to the bottom of the site (I highly recommend it.)

2006-07-25T17:49:00.000-04:00

Is NCLB Encouraging Dumbing Down?

If we're seeing this in science my guess is that it's happening in the other subjects as well. I'm talking about a move on the part of school systems to "dumb down" curriculum, maybe without specific intent (though I'd hazard to say that this may indeed be the case in some places) but the end result seems to amount to just that, "dumbing down".

This occurred to me regarding chemistry as I find myself in the middle of a course on how to use a textbook called "Chemistry in the Community", otherwise known as ChemCom or CC for short. CC falls under what is more and more known as conceptual science, which in short means that we take out the math (not entirely, but if it involves very large or very small exponents it's gone, and most equations found in a "traditional" text are not dealt with) and we drive at chemistry through a basic, non-mathematical understanding of chemical concepts and how they're seen in the world around us, i.e. the community. CC courses tend to be populated with a higher number of IEP/504 students, students with behavioral problems, and students with poor math skills - they're not necessarily mixed together, but that would depend on the school. For this population of students CC seem to work based on the emphasis of the text and how the course flows from that, which is different enough that you're encouraged to take a special course on how to teach the text. The fact is that traditionally these students were the ones chemistry teachers really didn't expected to have to deal with in the past as it was not expected that any of them would ever take a chemistry course.

First, why the new interest in CC? There's an argument to be made that a course like this should have always been available, especially for those students who have poor math skills and who would likely legitimately get something from taking such a course. But there's now a big push to get those students who traditionally never stepped into a chemistry class to take courses like this because NCLB says, essentially, that all students should be striving to attain similar levels of learning, therefore all students should have the opportunity to take chemistry. That's not a bad thing, though I'm sure some chemistry teachers would disagree. What's bad is when an entire curriculum throughout a department is driven by the less rigorous course.

CC is not a traditional chemistry textbook, there's little emphasis on the math that normally comes with chemistry in HS, the problems are more conceptual vice mathematical, and the classes tend to be driven to more hands on exercises/labs, which tends to work well with the population of students that CC is normally used with. What has surprised me is the number of
teachers in the course I'm taking who are using CC for ALL of their chemistry courses. On the whole, based on my assessment of the text (and I've informally surveyed a large number of teachers through two listservs and my take on this is overwhelmingly supported by chemistry teachers) CC would not work as a college prep textbook, nor would a CC class be considered a college prep class if one were solely using the CC text. Of course there's the trick, use the CC text for college prep/honors, that's fine, but you need to "supplement" it. Of course all textbooks require some supplementing, but if you take a textbook like CC and use it with a more advanced class to what degree is it reasonable to expect to have to "supplement"? Of course we're talking more work for the teacher, which we can only hope that he or she is up to. In addition, the more advanced students have to rely on handouts and in-class lectures outside the scope of the text to get the information that they'll find themselves needing in college, or for the SATs/ACTs for that matter.

So let me lay this out: NCLB drives a chemistry program to accommodate ALL students. CC, or something like it, is brought in to do that. The school needs new chemistry textbooks for all its classes, so let's buy CC for the entire chemistry curriculum and expect the teachers to simply supplement whatever is felt should also be included in the curriculum for the more advanced
students. A lrger textbook buy is a plus for the school district as more books per school means lower prices and more bennies like extra teacher editions, software, pre-made overhead slides, etc., to come with the purchase.

This isn't entirely a problem with NCLB, hardly. I don't know if NCLB legislation includes a provision for funding schools that have to introduce new courses, my guess is that this isn't the case, so indirectly NCLB sets the situation up. This situation is more the problem of school districts which are trying to save money, and in this case rationalizing that a less-than-ideal
textbook buy, in this case a significantly less-than-ideal buy in my mind, can be compensated for by dedicated teachers who'll supplement the text - and of course many will, and some won't.

Part of the problem is that there's a lack of standards laying out what a conceptual science course should be, what a regular chemistry course should be, and what an honors/accelerated course should be. We don't have that problem with AP chemistry as everyone knows what they're shooting for there, and what sort of textbook should be used to get there; not at all the case with all the other chemistry designations. This lack of clarity allows one to substitute a text like CC which most chemistry teachers would say is not appropriate for students who have decent math, class, and study skills. In the end a situation is created where meeting the standard means meeting a minimum requirement, and for those districts looking to save money the minimum requirement can then be stretched to an entire departmental curriculum, which without question sets up a situation where that curriculum is easily watered down at the higher levels.

2006-07-24T19:26:00.000-04:00

Bush's Assault on the Constitution

Some may wonder what assault I'm referring to here. Is it the recent NSA wire tapping, which appears to have skirted normal Constitutional protections by holding up the "War on Terror" as a shield to hide behind? Or is it the Patriot Act, which many feel stretches the powers of the government too far into the rights and protections afforded the average American citizen? No,
none of these, I'm referring to Bush's use of "signing statements" which effectively allows him to gut any legislation that comes his way that he doesn't like. No need to veto a bill, simply append a signing statement to the bill in question and you can effectively eviscerate it, obviating any need at all for a veto. So while something of a big to do was made over the fact that Bush's recent veto of the stem cell bill was the first veto he has exercised in his five plus years in office, the fact is that he hasn't had to use a veto when he didn't like a particular bill, instead relying on signing statements which effectively did to the bill what a veto publicly does. You see as a rule no one really pays attention to signing statements, though I'd hazard to guess that this is no longer going to be the case after this administration's shenanigans.

This issue has been running around for some time. It first came to my attention back in May on Fresh Air, specifically Reporter Highlights Bush's Executive Decisions, which was an interview with Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe who happened to hit on what Bush was up to and wrote about it in the Globe. This in turn prompted Arlen Specter, Senator from PA, to call for hearings on the matter. In today's Times we find Legal Group Faults Bush for Ignoring Parts of Bills- the "legal group" in question was a group of lawyers put together by the American Bar Association. In the article Specter and Patrick Leahy, Senator from Vermont, are quoted as follows:

"At a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the chairman, Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said Mr. Bush seemed to think he could “cherry-pick the provisions he likes and exclude the ones he doesn’t like.” Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the committee, said the signing statements were “a diabolical device” to rewrite laws enacted by Congress."

The ABA had the following to say:

The American Bar Association said Sunday that President Bush was flouting the
Constitution and undermining the rule of law by claiming the power to disregard
selected provisions of bills that he signed.

In a comprehensive report, a bipartisan 11-member panel of the bar association said Mr. Bush had used such “signing statements” far more than his predecessors, raising constitutional objections to more than 800 provisions in more than 100 laws on the ground that they infringed on his prerogatives.

These broad assertions of presidential power amount to a “line-item veto” and improperly deprive Congress of the opportunity to override the veto, the panel said.

This is all part of a move by Bushies to "strengthen" the Presidency. The New Yorker ran an interesting article by Jane Mayer on this, and the man considered to be the eminence grise for the administration on this specific issue and who's otherwise specifically Cheney's chief of staff and legal advisor, David Addington. The article is The Hidden Power: The Legal Mind Behind the White House's War on Terror, and Mayer was also interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, David Addington and 'Hidden Power'.

I suppose that's far more reference material than most blogs should carry, but it's actually worth going through some of this to get the feel and, hopefully, the understanding that there are those in this administration who truly believe in some version of the Imperial Presidency, where the President gets to make whatever rules he feels like and Congress, and hence the American People, be damned.

2006-07-23T22:21:00.000-04:00

Doctors Are Just Special

The Bad Doctors

This past week hasn't been a good one for the medical profession. I won't even get into the doctor and nurses in New Orleans, that's something that's more likely than not going to wind up before a jury to try and get the facts and particulars straightened out. The issues that jumped out to me were more longstanding ones, and are ones where doctors seem to hold themselves up as above considerations that the rest of us have to make. Somehow I had the sense that there are too many doctors out there who think they're just plain special.

First issue, published in the Times, Report Finds a Heavy Toll From Medication Errors, informs us:

"Medication errors harm 1.5 million people and kill several thousand each year in the United States, costing the nation at least $3.5 billion annually, the Institute of Medicine concluded in a report released on Thursday. Drug errors are so widespread that hospital patients should expect to suffer one every day they remain hospitalized, although error rates vary by hospital
and most do not lead to injury, the report concluded."

Well, while 1.5 million errors a year may occur most don't lead to injury - I'm sure we can all take comfort from that. Now why does this situation exist? Because the medical profession has done a totally piss poor job in digitizing prescriptions. It's not just a matter of being able to write out more legible prescriptions, a problem many make a joke of in spite of the fact that this, too, leads to injury and possible death, but that with digitized systems errors in dosage or potential drug interaction problems may be caught by an intelligent system - we're not talking Einsteinian intelligence mind you, we're talking the sort of "intelligence" that's well within the capability of systems that have existed for ten years or so now. FedEx can track your package to the point where you know when it's been put in a truck in some city in Turkey, but we can't digitize hospitals and standard medical administrative systems. Yes, there's more to it in medicine than FedEx requires, but not so much more that there's any reasonable excuse why it hasn't happened to date.

Next we have, again from the Times, Journal Editor Again Says She Was Misled. In the last two months there have been three occasions where the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association has discovered that authors publishing in the journal wrote papers regarding topics that the doctors in question had been paid by pharmaceutical companies to do research on. No one would automatically impugn a doctor's ethics because he/she published such a paper - well, really, no one would were the doctors in question thinking that normal ethical considerations that seem to apply to everyone else also apply to them and they in fact identified the association in their paper. I don't know how many times I've seen journalists writing about something to which they had a connection. For example, the journalist identifies that he/she indirectly, or sometimes directly, work for a parent company which the reporter was writing directly or indirectly about and this association would not have been immediately obvious to the average reader. It makes perfect ethical sense to put out into the open that what you write about, be it a paper or an article, any association you may have that may cause people to think that what you're writing may be in someway swayed by this association. Journalists can figure this out, doctors can't - why?

The last one really got my head spinning, not least of all because the psychiatrist in question has obtained a public defender because he has convinced the courts that he can't afford to hire his own lawyer. Mind you, this doctor admits that last year he made about $100,000 just for endorsing a drug called Xyrem. Well, that's besides the point, this doctor, Dr. Gleason, was arrested by the FDA for stretching the line regarding Xyrem, specifically with regard to something called "off-label" prescriptions. Off-label prescriptions are when a drug is prescribed for something that it wasn't originally intended for. Drug X was designed to combat depression, for example, but it's also discovered that it clears up acne. The drug is only approved by the FDA for use against depression, but nothing stops a doctor from putting together an "off-label" prescription to help some teenager with the angst of Acne.

So off-label prescribing is legal, but it's illegal for a company to advocate any off-label uses for its drugs. The company in this case (the company in question didn't invent this, be sure, and some variation of this is common practice in medicine) was getting around it by essentially hiring Gleason to give "talks", for which he could make up to $3000 a day, to fellow doctors, in their office, at professional meetings, at medical schools, etc. So Gleason was a paid shill for a drug company, and he, and many of his fellow physicians, don't see any problem with this. Why? Because they believe in these drugs. Ok, great, but of course they have no scientific evidence, certainly Gleason didn't (though he did at one point tell investigators differently), to support their experiential/anecdotal experiences with these drugs. As it stands any doctor can come up with a ridiculous theory as to how a particular drug could be used to cure a problem in spite of the fact there's zero evidence to support the claim in question. A good example of this is testosterone being administered to men of a certain age. While testosterone will make a man in his 50's feel like he's 25 again, there's no scientific evidence to support what a normal level of testosterone is in any man, or what administering testosterone to men in their 50's will do to them; that, though, doesn't stop doctors who can make a lot of money from administering those testosterone shots.

The hubris of Gleason, who was willing to be a paid talking hand puppet for a drug company and didn't see a problem with it, is shared by the many in the medical profession. It seems that in the medical profession that it's ok if fellow doctors are paid shills for drug companies, doctors somehow know better and aren't swayed by this, or at least so they seem to say. Or somehow they're entitled to the money because ... well, whatever, there's rationalization there,
I'm sure.

Now I see the value of off-label prescriptions, but not with paid-representatives of drug companies, who may not work directly for these companies, being able to pitch those drugs to their fellow doctors. If you're getting the word out for free, fine, and it'd be really nice if the medical profession would on some level police the whole off-label practice, maybe with some sort of minimal review process so that any ties between the interest of big or little pharma and those of patients are kept in appropriate perspective. Something else that doctors need to keep in mind: they're not trained scientists. Just because someone has "M.D." tacked next to their name doesn't make him/her a person of science. Yes, they've some measure of scientific training, but it's minimal compared to PhD's, and the vast majority of doctors don't have the training to function as "scientists", but yet they're making drug usage determinations based on ... well, really, personal experience, which in science doesn't add up to a whole heck of a lot.

2006-07-16T14:26:00.000-04:00

Asymmetric Warfare

Asymmetric Warrior par excellence, Gandhi

I was so quick Friday to get what I had written earlier posted that I didn't realize how the title to the post didn't quite fit with what I was writing about, or at least it only half fit. My intention was also to address this other issue, the "one down" in contrast to the "one up" otherwise addressed in that blog entry. That said, this issue on its own seems to be to be deserving of its own post, and so here we go.

A few days ago the Times ran the following article by Damien Cave, U.S. Says Inmate Legal Notes May Have Aided Suicide Plot. The article discusses the legal paperwork tied to the detainees in Guantanamo Bay who killed themselves, and how the government contends that the detainees were using this paperwork to communicate with each other to coordinate their suicides. It also highlights the different perspective that the government has about the suicides, specifically:

"Detainees' lawyers have described the suicides as acts of desperation, while Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the facility's commander, has described them as acts of 'asymmetric warfare.'"

RADM Harris is not an official government spokesperson so it's not entirely fair to characterize what he says as the "government line", as it were. To what degree anything he said is representative of what DoD itself may think is also not clear, at least to me from my limited perspective. I'd be surprised that he came up with the asymmetric warfare comment on his own, and if he did I'd expect that he's likely a man who doesn't much figure he's going to be promoted past his current rank so why not speak his mind. It's possible this line was fed to him by DoD spinmeisters or whatever, in which case he became the sacrificial goat to put this sort of stupidity into the daily newspapers.

First, I want to clarify something: I don't equate Guantanamo detainees with Gandhi, far from it. I have little doubt that some of the men there are very bad people, though they and everyone else held in Guantanamo (Gitmo for short) do deserve better due process than we're presently giving them. No, the whole Gandhi thing came to mind when I thought about others who've put their lives on the line for a cause, Gandhi certainly being one of them, Martin Luther King Jr., Vietnamese Buddhist monks self-immolating to protest the Diem government in Vietnam, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Susan B. Anthony, and the list goes on and on. These people were willing to give their lives for what they believe in, and historically we look back on them now as great individuals, people who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for what they believe, which invariably we look back now and say, "Why of course it's worth believing in, and even putting your life on the line for". How the detainees fit into this calculus of sacrifice is not clear to me, but it's worth thinking about and certainly deserves more than to be written off as an act of "asymmetric warfare."

RADM Harris too easily conflated, deliberately or per some oddball DoD script, the domain he's living in, the "war on terror", with his prisoners who may or may not be guilty of crimes in whatever way the current administration defines such. Warfare indicates warriors engaging on similar terms, and asymmetric warfare would indicate some manner of divergence from the normal rules of war. Traditionally asymmetric warfare has meant a guerrilla engagement, such as the U.S. now finds itself engaging in Iraq, though we don't call the "insurgents" guerrillas likely because it would imply some manner of legitimacy equivalent to the last frequently guerrilla war this country engaged in, which was in Vietnam. A man locked in a cell who kills himself is not engaging in warfare, he's making a statement, a rather profound statement when
you get right down to it. But of course we don't want to bother ourselves with such messages, and indeed it's far easier to say the bastards were engaging in asymmetric warfare where the only possible casualty of said warfare was themselves - what kind of war is it when the only victims are the perpetrators? Lordy would wars be a hell of a lot shorter were they all like that.

I have to admire a man or woman who feels so strongly about something that they're willing to kill themselves for it. Now the person in question may have committed acts that weren't worthy of admiration, but then in this case I haven't a clue about these detainees. What I do know is that they were willing to coordinate a group suicide and then act on it, resulting in three of them dying. As I said, that's a profound statement, one worthy of more respect and consideration than our government and the majority of Americans seem interested in giving it's due, and I believe we do this at our peril.

2006-07-15T20:48:00.000-04:00

Sogand on Block Island

We day tripped over to Block Island today. We're all pretty exhausted right now, but it was overall a good day - though be prepared to pay a pretty penny for fast food when you're on Block Island during "high season" - $34 for two grilled chicken sandwiches, a Thai chicken wrap, 2 side orders of fries, and 3 sodas isn't anywhere close to Mickey Dee's rates, for darn sure. Here's Sogand between mom and grandma - this kid always has a serious face on, trying to capture her smiling is NOT easy. Not sure what that says about older Sogand, and I don't care - I just adore her.

2006-07-14T16:05:00.000-04:00

U.S. Military: One Up, One Down

An interesting article by Seymour Hersh in last week's New Yorker, Last Stand: The Military's problem with the President's Iran Policy. Overall it was heartening to me to read that the military, of which I was a part for 22 years of my life, isn't solely populated with right wing ideologues who are foaming at the mouth to do the bidding of this administration. No, indeed, it seems that there are people populating the ranks who are trying to realistically assess what we should or shouldn't do with regard to an exercise of military power, and who are also a bit fed up with how this administration misuses those it gets information from.

Hersh reports that military leaders in the Pentagon are sending signals to Bush that they're not in favor of military action in Iran. The reasons are many, but they boil down to first not being sure where the targets are, and given that this would have to be an air campaign, i.e. we'd be bombing the country, it's pretty certain that any such bombing campaign would result in Iran entering into Iraq in a significant way with the result being many American and Iraqi deaths and God only knows what end result, but whichever one you can think of isn't pretty.

The military brass is also put out by the fact that the "nuclear" option was put on the table, which made it into the press some weeks ago. The idea was to us nuclear "bunker busters" to get to the buried Iranian nuclear facilities. Of course where those facilities are exactly isn't known, but the Bush administration was indirectly trumping the possibility of using nukes to get to Iranian nuclear materials. It turns out that the military was asked to provide all possible options, which in this situation included the possibility of using bunker busting nukes. Apparently that wasn't intended to mean that this was an option the military seriously considered, though that didn't stop the Bushies from putting it out there as if it were, and this ticked off the Pentagon brass.

An interesting twist on this for me is that the military’s stand on Iran is not unanimous. Indeed, the Air Force feels it can do the job well enough and is all for dropping bombs. In this case it’s not what’s good for the services, i.e. ALL service members regardless of whatever uniform they wear, but what’s likely good for the Air Force, though in what context the Air Force could see this as good, other than sucking up to bomb/invasion crazy neocons I have no clue. When you’re dropping bombs from 35,000 feet you’re not too concerned about losing your pilots, planes, or what it looks like after you’re done. Soldiers and Marines have to get in close and personal, clearly putting their own lives on the line, and they get to take home the visions of what they’ve done. In the case of the Navy, while that service doesn’t play as much of a role on the ground (medics with the Marines do, as do support personnel such as medical types in general), but if it has to sail its ships into the Persian Gulf, which it would surely need to do if it were to launch aircraft into Iran, then the vision of martyr aspiring Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen coming at aircraft carriers and destroyers in explosives laden 50 + knot cigarette boats just doesn’t settle well with a lot of folks when the return on what’s expected is so up in question.

However you cut it, we have enough problems in the world without inviting more by going after Iran. Here’s the deal: If the Iranians want the bomb they’re going to get it, period. There’s not a whole hell of a lot that can be done about it by force or threat of force. If we try it’s almost a sure bet that the Iranians will dump even more time and money into going after the bomb when we’re through as there’s no chance in hell that we’re going to be able to occupy the country like we are Iraq.

The Bush administration’s policy on Iran has been unrealistic and dramatically lacking in imagination and original thinking. Yes, Iran’s a problem, one the Iranian people themselves are trying to figure out and deal with, but it’s theirs to deal with, not ours. We don’t like it, in many cases understandably, but trying to bully the Iranians into doing our bidding when so much of what we ask for is hypocritical is ridiculous. If the American people allow this administration to get away with the same misdirection and saber rattling that it used to get us into Iraq, then God help us and Iran.

2006-07-10T21:58:00.000-04:00

Sogand at 5 Months

Sogand in daddy's arms at 5 months old. She's becoming a person in so many ways, it's amazing to watch. Daddy is trying to learn how to be a daddy, while mommy seems to have fallen into the "mommy" role much more naturally and with much greater style than daddy.

I am so totally in love with this small human - I am very lucky for her and for having her mommy in my life.

2006-07-07T17:20:00.000-04:00

Well Just Thank God ... We're Protected!

In today's Times, Shield Was Set to Stop Missile, Bush Says, we learn about how the nation's
missile defense shield was "set" to stop the nefarious long-range North Korean missile launched a couple of days ago. The president assured the American people when he told us "I think we had a reasonable chance of shooting it down." Of course, as with most things Bush has anything to say about, he's misinformed or was deliberately misinforming us - I go for the latter myself.

The missile defense shield in question hasn't adequately tested per the DoD requirements for testing major defense programs, and of what testing there has been the system has consistently not performed up to expectations. So the fact is that there's no reasonable certainty that it can hit anything, much less a North Korean missile. Of course the president covered himself on the
matter of the particulars by saying that there's a "reasonable chance of shooting it down" - one person's "reasonable" is often times another person's "you're out of your mind if you think that's going to work"; my reading of our president is that something's reasonable so long as it in some way, regardless of however statistically unlikely it might otherwise be, supports something he
wants or at least thinks he wants.

Let's first consider the circumstances: North Korea has yet to show that it has mastered the technology to launch a long range missile. The fact that you have a missile doesn't mean you have the capability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon (no small feat in itself) that you can then stick on top of the missile you want to lob it with. So we were set to intercept a threat that, on
the whole in this case, didn't really exist. But we were ready to intercept that nonexistent threat, yes we were, and we wanted to be sure you knew that.

"The president said the missile tests ordered by North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, were another example of why "we need a ballistic-missile system.""

Now this is ridiculous, but it seems to play well in Peoria. We tracked that missile from the second it was being fueled, and we had a radar beam up its tail the second it was launched and we followed the thing until it broke into pieces shortly after launching. Now I'm still trying to fathom the logic, and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on trying to make something like this work, that has North Korea, admittedly a bit out there on the fringe when it comes to logic and reasonableness, sending a missile our way when we're watching the thing from the second it makes its way to the launch pad. How long would it be after a launch with an actual nuclear weapon on board before Kim Jong Il would find himself the totalitarian dictator of a cinder of a country, assuming he survived the multiple thermonuclear warheads this nation would launch against him and his domain? In the old Cold War days mutual assured destruction, MAD, worked well enough with the Soviets because they realized, as did we, that resorting to nuclear weapons pretty much assured that the other's country would be destroyed. Why some version of this doesn't work with North Korea escapes me, though the argument seems to go that we should never have to suffer a nuclear detonation on our soil before we destroy the other guy. Ok, I can see the logic to that, which is why the other guy is more likely than not going to deliver his nukes in a way that obscures where they came from, not using a rocket that can be possibly intercepted.

Bush's timing on this was particularly propitious inasmuch as the DoD is looking for some $9.3 billion dollars for missile defense for the coming fiscal year. Yep, let's dump more good money after bad, on a defense system that doesn't defend us from a whole lot, and which sucks up money that could be better used in other places if only we had the imagination and values to put it there.

2006-07-02T09:33:00.000-04:00

Trudeau Does It Again ... Excellent!

2006-06-14T19:35:00.000-04:00

Hard to Find Telephone Numbers

Hard to Find 800 Numbers

I was sent the link above today by a friend. If you go to the site you'll likely find the 800 number for some business that you've gone crazy trying to find some sort of number for. I had this experience with Amazon; no matter how hard I looked I couldn't find a number to call to get an order straightened out and ... well, more likely you've been there and been through it. So here you go, the Hard to Find 800 Number directory, enjoy.

2006-06-11T09:05:00.000-04:00

A crazy week as we head into finals, students suddenly waking up to the fact that they're failing or borderline passing, and, well, such as it is. That said, if you have some time check out:

Tangled Bank #55

and

Carnival of the Vanities 193

2006-06-04T18:52:00.000-04:00

Sissy-boy Male Leads?

The Magnificent Seven

Today my wife and I were watching The Magnificent Seven the 1960 movie starting Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Eli Wallace, and a actors of lesser renown today, though of the names listed how "renown" they are today is directly related to how old the person is that you're talking to.

My wife raised an interesting point as we watched the documentary that came with the DVD. Apparently Anthony Quinn was supposed to play the lead role in the movie, but Yul Brenner was cast (the reasons for this are convoluted, and the feelings attached to it are well-represented in the fact that Quinn subsequently sued the direct and Brenner for $600K for being bumped from the part - he lost), and as Quinn's picture was shown she asked how many of today's leading men look like Quinn, or any of the men in The Magnificent Seven? We brainstormed this for a bit and came up with Russel Crowe, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, Sly Stone (though it's something of a question as how much of a leading man he'd be taken to be these days), Ahhhhhnold (here we're stuck with trying to figure out how much he can seriously be considered an actor vice a body/personality, which many would say is also a consideration for how well he's doing as governor of California), Denzel Washington, to some degree Antonio Banderas, and ... we sort of hit a wall at this point. As it turns out we could only come up with 6 possible actors to fill out, in what we saw as the appropriate demeanor and attitude, 7 roles in a classic western. Now that's not to say that there aren't many more actors than that who could meet the bill of particulars here, but they weren't coming to mind.

It seems that today's actors are more "pretty boys" than the testosterone laden creatures that seemed to dominate the screen way back when. We tried to think through some of today's "name" actors, coming up with Brad Pitt, Jude Law, Orlando Bloom, Colin Farrell, Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Keannu Reeves, Adrien Brody (doesn't ring a bell? Late of The Pianist and King Kong), and Hugh Grant, and however much we tried we really couldn't see them filling the shoes of any of the actors in The Magnificent Seven - well, maybe Tom Cruise could be the Horst Bucchholz role in the movie (Bucchholz, playing a Mexican wannabe gunslinger who hooks up with what would have otherwise been the Magnificent 6, was a German - an odd twist of casting that seemed to work.) What each of these male leads seemed to have in common is that they're, for lack of a better way of putting it, "pretty".

When you look at Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Spencer Tracey, John Garfield, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Anthony Quinn, Robert Mitchum, James Cagney, and the list goes on, these guys weren't pretty. They may have been handsome, and in the classic sense not all of them were, but what they all seemed to share was that they exuded some level of testosterone, a certain scent of maleness that, for the life of me, I can't detect to any degree with the likes of Jude Law or Keannu Reeves. Far too many male leads today just aren't especially "male" it seems to me. I'm not sure what this says, or even if I'm especially right, but my definite sense (and my wife's, though she thinks Johnny Depp definitely has "maleness" about him) is that many of today's male leads aren't selected for their jobs based on their being able to convey any obviously apparent maleness about them.

Well, anyway, just a thought to share. Much better that you check out The Magnificent Seven yourself, it truly is timeless, and while you're at it check out the movie it's based on, Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai , a movie that's great and classic entirely for reasons of its own.

2006-06-02T19:58:00.000-04:00

Well, Gee, I'm an anti-Semite? I Just Never Knew ...

Some of you may recall my blog entry from May 20th, Israel and the U.S.. The crux of the post was about AIPAC and a paper written by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, entitled "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" which was published in the London Review of Books and then posted to Harvard's The Kennedy School of Government (KSG) web site as a working paper. Without re-hashing that blog post, let me hit on something I mention in it that spoke about the reaction to the paper, specifically that both men have been accused of being anti-Semites. Well as it turns out, unbeknownst to me (isn't that often the case, though?) I'm apparently one, too, thanks to my writing about the paper and, my biggest sin, agreeing with a number of the points laid out in it, or at least as explained by Michael Massing in the NYRB (see the original post to get where I'm coming from here.)

I wasn't aware of my anti-Semitism, and how it rang so loudly, until I received the following email from a person I'll leave as anonymous:

I have just finished reading the interview in Der Spiegel with the Iranian president, and was talking to someone about how important it is to have this interview presented in all our newspapers. Only by shining the light of day onto such darkness can the public begin to understand the true insanity of this man and the religious zealots that are in
charge of Iran at this time. From that page I went on to find your blog about Israel and the U.S. Let me inform you that only anti-Semitics and Neanderthals refer to the Jewish people as 'Jews'. From your unfortunate editorial I gather that you fall into both those categories. You share much in common with the Iranian president - how sad for both of you! Unfortunately, you state that your occupation is that of teacher. I can only conclude that it is a private school whose teachings are awash with conspiracy theories and the rantings of other madmen. We have been G-d's Chosen People for over 5,000 years, and
still there are those who do not understand the light and the beauty that our religion brings. Perhaps one day, an epiphany will occur and the truth will be before you. Until then, I think it is so important for you to keep stating your thoughts. Only by shining the light of day onto such darkness can the public begin to understand such true insanity ...

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to mention that I'm also a Neanderthal - thank God my daughter didn't inherit my extended, sloped eyebrows.

I love it, though, I mean really - I indulge in conspiracy theories, refer to members of the Jewish faith as Jews (I need to re-think what I'm saying when I call someone a Catholic, Muslim, Animist, or ... well, whatever, and that's just with reference to religion, I haven't begun to get my mind around the idea of the more subtle nuances of ethnicity), don't understand the truth or beauty of the Jewish faith (well, that comes with not being Jewish, and frankly with looking askance at any faith, especially when it compels adherents to write tripe like this), and ... well, you get the idea.

My response was as follows:

Thank you for your input.

People of Jewish descent are commonly referred to as Jews by many people, to include Jews, who are actually quite normal, fun loving, etc. Your own tendency
to prejudge and lecture people on the basis of knowing someone solely on the basis of a single blog entry is, to say the least, disconcerting. Mind you, the entry in question was one which clearly in no way reflects anti-Semitism, in fact indicates support for Israel, Jews as a whole, and a horror at the evil of the Holocaust, so your extreme conclusions regarding me personally puzzle me, but then, if I may indulge a facile leap of conclusion such as you have, people such as yourself find what they can in what they don't like, and attack as best they can.

My problem with Israel, which really was the point of the blog (i.e. not Jews), is flaunting the Holocaust with "Never again" while the subject of "Never again"
occurs all the time, all over the world. That, and the fact that Israel receives billions of dollars in U.S. aid and there's so little to show the American people for that money that should make them happy it was spent as it was. The first two were sort of side issues, the main thrust and concern for the blog entry was concern that American Jews, through lobbying efforts, are exerting the sort of influence on politicians here in the U.S. that should be as much of a concern to the average American as the influence of the NRA. When politicians support Israel at the cost of American interests and values, then there's a legitimate question to be raised regarding the appropriateness of this, and in the corruption of a political system so easily swayed by money.

You'll be not so happy to know that I teach at a very normal public school, one where conspiracy theories don't abound and which doesn't engage in hate rallies. Moreover, whatever my political or religious perspectives I keep them to myself
in the classroom - not because I have any reason to be ashamed or defensive of either, but because I don't teach either subject, and even if I did I can well enough differentiate between my personal perspective and what I should be teaching per the curriculum.

You're part of the problem Ms ____ - you're too busy making demons out of people you don't even know, and frankly God, who granted you your wonderful religion (amazing how many other faiths feel the same way ... God's a mysterious force in the universe, surely), couldn't possibly find this healthy, worthwhile, nor in keeping with his intentions.

You've had your say, I've had mine, I doubt any further correspondence is in order, so I'd appreciate the favor of your not responding.

Unfortunately this woman didn't respect my closing request but I shan't bore you with that.

Ok, I got that off of my chest, I feel a bit better for the catharsis, and that's good enough. Religious fanatics, with their defensiveness, G_d, and all the other garbage that comes with a single and simple minded certainty in the "rightness" of something they have no way of knowing is right, clearly comes in all flavors. My usual concern with such fanatics has been Christian here in this country, and Islamic in others, and thankfully this lady has evened the whole thing out for me and for this I'm grateful - well, maybe not quite grateful, but you get the point, I'm sure.

2006-05-30T20:50:00.000-04:00

Do You Really Need That HS Diploma?

Now this article in today's Times got my attention, Can't Complete High School? Go Right to College. Of course it strikes straight at any high school teacher, like myself, who is often asked by kids "Why do I need this?" Good question, why should you learn how to work out a net-ionic equation, write a compound's formula correctly, understand the quantum leaps of electrons, and a long list of things that, on the whole, you're not going to remember much about by the end of this summer (for many of them it'll be the end of the mid-term or final) and which, on the whole, doesn't necessarily do much in any concrete way for the quality of your life - why is it important?

I'm maybe focusing a bit much on my specific area of concern, so why is the HS diploma that important? Clearly a there are colleges out there that are coming to the conclusion that it's not that important and are letting in students who don't have one. So maybe we should do away with high school all together -- ok, maybe that's something of a stretch. The question is, should students without HS diplomas be allowed to enter college? My answer to this is an emphatic no.

I suspect that I come by my perspective from a slightly different view than most teachers. Having done 22 years in the Navy, and of that a thankfully short tour as a recruiter, I know that from the military's point-of-view that what you learn in high school isn't what's important, what was important was that you made it through the high school and walked out with a diploma. From the military's perspective high school was more a right of passage than it was a place where it was expected that specific knowledge was imbued. With the military the question was more along the lines of did you have the self-discipline and the drive to get yourself through HS. This was an important question because if you couldn't hack the requirements of HS it was reasonable to expect that you weren't going to be able to hack the far more arduous and at times critical requirements of the service. The fact was that the military had a lot of experience with non-high school grads and they were a proven liability - they didn't finish training in higher numbers than their graduate equivalents, they were far more often discipline problems than their high school grad counterparts, and therefore they were a bad investment of time, resources, and money.

Here, with the colleges that accept non-high school grads, I think we have a far more pernicious problem. The fact is that the difficulties associated with non-grads are little different for colleges than they are for the military. When a college lets in a non-HS grad he or she is then entitled to financial aid, aid that's essentially a bet on the student that he or she will make it through to a degree. But the fact is that the student in question is high risk to begin with, and from that perspective is a bad bet. Maybe in more flush times taking such a bet wouldn't be much of a problem, but in today's environment of stingy financial aid non-HS grads are taking money away from students who in fact are a better and more reasonable bet, i.e. the ones with HS diplomas or, the next best thing, GEDs. And let there be no mistake about it, getting a GED, which for most colleges is accepted as a HS diploma equivalent, is not that hard to do.

However I look at accepting students into college without HS diplomas I see it as wrong. While I question that high school should be looked at as not much more than an obstacle course that students make their way through, I don't question the numbers that show that kids who make it through to a HS diploma do perform better in college and in the "real" world, and, therefore, are far more deserving of the money available to help students through college.

2006-05-30T15:16:00.000-04:00

Do You Think You'll Ever See One With
Mohammad In It?

I found this at my buddy's Hedwig's blog, Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted), and I just had to have it posted on my blog. Don't be fooled by the play button in the middle of Jesus' chest, go with the standard play button and you'll get the video.

Could you even imagine a Muslim version of this? In fact I'd guess I'm pissing people off for even so much as mentioning that. Oh well, for those with religious tolerance or indifference, I hope you enjoy.

2006-05-29T19:45:00.000-04:00

Let's Remove the Radioactive Metals Spewing Out from Coal-fired Power Plants!

Did the title to the blog get your attention? Good - a bit misleading to start, but bear with me and you'll find I'm not pulling your leg here.

This isn't the first time I've written about this, in fact either indirectly or directly I've written about it twice before. What has me on it again is Sunday's article in the Times, 2 Industry Leaders Bet on Coal but Split on Cleaner Approach. As you might guess the "cleaner" approach is tied to Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle Technology (IGCCT), and as you might otherwise guess it's on the losing end of the split.

I first ran into IGCCT in a Times article back in May of last year, Dirty Secret: Coal Plants Could Be Much Cleaner. Knowing that at present coal provides about 50% of the energy for producing electricity in this country, that with the increasing cost of a barrel of oil the option of using coal even with its traditional dirty reputation goes up, and, most importantly, that this country is presently an exporter of coal and has enough of the stuff to meet a significant portion of our overall energy needs in one form or another into the next 100 or so years, I therefore know that ignoring something like this isn't smart. No matter how much any of us don't like coal there's nothing coming anytime soon that'll replace it so finding more "green" ways of using the stuff does seem like a smart move - that's where IGCCT comes in.

Here are some of the particulars on IGCCT from last year's Times article:

The operating savings of such plants start with more efficient combustion: they make use of at least 15 percent more of the energy released by burning coal than conventional plants do, so less fuel is needed. The plants also need about 40 percent less water than conventional coal plants, a significant consideration in arid Western states.

... the primary virtue of integrated gasification combined-cycle plants is their ability to chemically strip pollutants from gasified coal more efficiently and cost-effectively, before it is burned, rather than trying to filter it out of exhaust.

Proponents say that half of coal's pollutants - including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which contribute to acid rain and smog - can be chemically stripped out before combustion. So can about 95 percent of the mercury in coal, at about a tenth the cost of trying to scrub it from exhaust gases racing up a smokestack.

The biggest long-term draw for gasification technology is its ability to capture carbon before combustion. If greenhouse-gas limits are enacted, that job will be much harder and more expensive to do with conventional coal-fired plants. Mr. Lowe, the G.E. executive, estimated that capturing carbon would add about 25 percent to the cost of electricity from a combined-cycle plant burning gasified coal, but that it would add 70 percent to the price of power from conventional plants.

As far as the carbon dioxide that results from these plants is concerned that's still a problem, but with IGCCT it's easier than it would be with a standard coal-fired plant to adapt the plant to some mode of sequestering, should such a mode be found. But let's look at this apart from the CO₂ issue: More efficiency, less acid rain, and less mercury. Mercury wouldn't be the only heavy metal you could more easily scrub from the plant's gas emissions and the fact is that we'd all be interested in pulling out radioactive heavy metals, which occur naturally in coal as well. Oh, you weren't aware of this? Gee, go to Coal Combustion (an Oak Ridge National Laboratory paper posted to their web site, for those of you immediately skeptical of where I'm heading here) and you'll find the following:

Former ORNL researchers J. P. McBride, R. E. Moore, J. P. Witherspoon, and R. E. Blanco made this point in their article "Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants" in the December 8, 1978, issue of Science magazine. They concluded that Americans living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to higher radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants that meet government regulations. This ironic situation remains true today and is addressed in this article.

The article, while not talking directly about IGCCT (the technology hadn't been considered for coal-fired plant use when this article was written in 1978), mentions that it'd be possible to pull the radioactive metals out from the stack emissions with technology that existed back then.

So, however you cut it, with the fact that coal isn't going away anytime soon and there's a strong likelihood that it's use in this country will increase, what would you rather have, a traditional coal-burning power plant, or one that uses IGCCT to burn that coal? Well, you'd think that this was something of a no-brainer, at least I certainly would, but no, that's not the case at all. Which brings us to the article in yesterday's Times, Industry Leaders Bet on Coal but Split on Cleaner Approach - New York Times. Michael Morris represents one perspective in the coal-power industry: while IGCCT may be initially 15 to 20% more expensive to build than regular coal-fired plant they're the right thing to do for reasons to do with the expected eventual imposition of carbon caps, something that will strongly bear on the energy-producing sector in this country, and because on the whole the things are just plain better investments when it comes to greater efficiency and green-friendliness, something that consumers are increasingly concerned with.; it's also believed that over time the plants will re-coup their higher cost. The other side to this issue is represented by Gregory Boyce for whom there's not enough proof to justify anything IGCCT brings to the table. Boyce clearly represents how we're doing business in this country as of the 140 new coal-fired plants to be built in the coming years, only 12 will use IGCCT.

This blog post is a bit longer than I expected, so I'll cut to the chase here: Boyce and his crowd tend to throw out two things to justify their position. In this case one of those things Boyce specifically throws out to justify his take on where coal-fired plants should be going, i.e.:

Mr. Boyce was chairman of an advisory panel for the Energy Department, organized by the National Coal Council, that produced a controversial report in March calling or exemptions to the Clean Air Act to encourage greater consumption of coal through 2025. The thrust of the report, which Mr. Boyce outlined in an interview, is that improvements in technology to limit carbon dioxide emissions should be left to the market instead of government regulation. [Italics added by the blogger.]

I love this - the market, NOT government which specifically represents the majority of the people and their collective interests, should determine whether we primarily invest in IGCCT or not. How does Mr. Boyce measure when the market has made its determination, and what specific part of the market is he looking at? It can't be the fishing "market" which finds itself having to work under a government recommendation that pregnant women and young children eat no more than 1 helping of fish per week due to the mercury found in fish these days. Of course that mercury will continue to come from Mr. Boyce's new plants as it does from his old ones.

The second argument in favor of the status quo with regard to coal-fired plants is that third world countries don't have to meet the more stringent environmental standards and our doing so costs us money, so why should we? This is the quintessential Republican line, the party of Christianity, where "do for others" is somehow lost in the Christian message. We had over 100 years to foul the environment and the air with our industrial detritus, it seems to me that both India and China, and any other third world country for that matter, should have some time to get themselves on their feet before they're expected to meet a standard that a conscientious and concerned rich first-world country should be able to meet without too much hassle; of course I'd be wrong about the leaders in the "concerned first-world country I happen to live in.

Coal is not going to go away, and using it conscientiously and with concern for the environment demands we use technology such as IGCCT. No, the market should not be what makes this decision as the market is a mystery to me, as it well is to anyone who tries to follow and understand it, and I would much rather have some input and control over my future, not leaving it to some invisible hand which cares not a wit, and why should it really, for my existence or that of those I love. If we're going to use coal, and God knows it's likely a deluded person who thinks we won't, then we should be using IGCCT and doing what we can to influence decisions in that direction.

2006-05-29T11:59:00.000-04:00

Patrick Henry College and Dominion

A picture of Patrick Henry College (PHC) taken from Affordable Building Concepts

Last week on Fresh Air Terry Gross interviewed Patrick Henry College's Michael Farris. I highly recommend listening to the interview, first for all the usual reasons to do with listening to an excellent interviewer such as Terry Gross, and second because if you listen to Farris you realize that whatever this guy may be he's not a foaming at the mouth zealot who makes no sense and shouldn't be taken seriously; Farris and those like him need to be taken very, very seriously.

Two weeks ago Gross had Michelle Goldberg, author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism to discuss Christian Nationalism. I've just started the book myself but Farris has no small part in it, at least in the Introduction titled "Taking the Land":

Michael Farris, the founder and president of the evangelical Patrick Henry College, calls his campaign to turn Christian homeschooled students into political cadres Generation Joshua. The name has a very specific biblical and martial meaning. Joshua was Moses's military commander and successor as leader of the Israelites; while Moses brought his people out of Egypt, Joshua led them in seizing the holy land. Farris's Generation Joshua has a less bloody mission, but it is imbued with an Old Testament dream of exile redeemed by conquest. The holy land is America as Farris imagines it. The enemy is America as it exists now.

And then on the next page:

What Farris wants is a cultural revolution. He's trying to train a generation of leaders, unscathed by secularism, who will gain political power in order to subsume everything -- entertainment, law, government, and education -- to Christianity, or their version of it. That might sound like fantasy, but it's worth pondering what Farris has accomplished so far.

Goldberg then goes on to detail how PHC, with an overall student population of about 500, has the highest placements of interns, 7%, of all colleges/universities in the U.S., with the exception of Georgetown. Generation Joshua students, not just PHC students, actively work on the campaigns of politicians they believe will support the PHC agenda - this certainly is their right and there's no question of this, but we're talking about people working on issues that are equivalent to what the Taliban imposed on the Afghanis, though with a Christian flavoring. These aren't people out there simply demonstrating, they are very much intertwined into our political system and are very much interested in using that system to project and impose their Christian perspective.

It's worth being aware of this so that we don't kid ourselves into thinking that there aren't people out there who don't believe in the secular foundations of the Constitution, who believe that this is a Christian nation destined to carry out Christ's work, and who are very much interested in all of us living under the Christian version of Sharia, the Islamic flavored legal system imposed in many Muslim countries. Farris and those who believe like him want to take over this country in a very real sense, and in the course of this completely change what many of us take for granted as fundamental freedoms and inalienable rights. Don't think that these people are out there roaming the streets proclaiming the imminent end of the world; no, they're out there working to end your way of living and what you're expected to believe, and they're very, very serious about this.

2006-05-24T17:39:00.000-04:00

Let's Stop Those Non-Existent Iranian Nuclear Missiles Now!

Monday I ran into U.S. Is Proposing European Shield for Iran Missiles by Michael Gordon in the NY Times. The Bush administration wants to shield Europe, apparently with Poland and the Czech Republic at the top of the list, from Iranian nuclear missiles which don't exist yet - well, of course the Iranians would have first to get their hands on a nuclear weapon that was small enough to stick on top of a missile that could fly far enough to reach Europe, and all indications are that neither is going to happen any time soon. But I'm sure that Poland and the Czech Republic, both mortal enemies of the Iranians, countries that have had long-standing bad blood with the Iranian government over ... well, I haven't a clue, and I'm sure neither does the average Pole or Czech who likely is somewhat surprised to learn that the U.S. government feels it should be necessary to defend them against missiles they have no reason to believe are aimed at them.

Up to now missile defense has shown itself to be a pipe dream. To date no U.S. test of a missile defense system has shown itself to be capable of anything like defending against even rudimentary intercontinental ballistic missiles, and those are "controlled" tests, ones where the variables associated with the test are stacked in your favor, unlike what you'd find in a real-world anti-missile situation. Of course it begs one to wonder why missile defense, issues of practicality aside, is such a hot item. The main reason offered has been to defend ourselves against North Korea and Iran, both countries neither owning an intercontinental ballistic missile system worth the name. In addition last I checked Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon (when that will happen depends on whom you ask, the Israelis say months, the CIA says ten or more years, the Iranians say never ... I get so confused sometimes) and while there's rumor of North Koreans having an atomic bomb one hasn't been tested, and having a nuclear weapons in no way means it's anything you can stick on the top of an intercontinental rocket that's yet to be made.

The whole thing is classic: Create a threat and then offer up the solution to the threat, especially when it's one that shows you're strong on defense and supporting those all important defense contractors who circle the D.C. beltway.

Here's the deal: If any nation was so crazy as to want to nuke Europe, or anywhere else for that matter, it's not apt to do so via ballistic missiles. They'll use bombs concealed in trucks, ship containers, the inside of the hulls of ships, in planes, or any of a huge number of possibilities where the origins of the weapon are not easily traceable, unlike a ballistic missile which the U.S. would be tracking almost from the point of its ignition and would then invite a rain of nuclear weapons from the U.S. But you and I the taxpayer will be paying for missile defense for here, AND for Poland and the Czech Republic, and I'm sure we'll all go more peacefully into the night, though the Poles and Czechs, and the truth be told most Americans, too, won't quite know why.

2006-05-23T20:42:00.000-04:00

If you have some time, take a look at:

Carnival of the Vanities, this week hosted at Blog d'Elisson

and the Carnival of Liberty, this week hosted at Left Brain Female . . . in a Right Brain World

2006-05-20T19:50:00.000-04:00

Israel and the U.S.

How it's seen to work by the world at large - courtesy of Aljazeerah

An interesting article in the The New York Review of Books, The Storm over the Israel Lobby. It raises a question I've often pondered, and that is how it is that a country we pour some $3 billion a year into is one that provides no small amount of grief to us in return. I'm talking about Israel in this case, which is the only country that gets that much money and is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, followed by Egypt which gets somewhere on the order of $2.2 billion a year. We don't get very much out of Egypt for our money, either, but then on the flip side we don't get nearly the trouble as well.

The NYRB article addresses a paper by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science and Stephen M.Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, entitled "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" which was published in the London Review of Books and then posted to Harvard's The Kennedy School of Government (KSG) web site as a working paper. From the web site we get the following abstract:

In this paper, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science and Stephen M.Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government contend that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is its intimate relationship with Israel. The authors argue that although often justified as reflecting shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, the U.S. commitment to Israel is due primarily to the activities of the “Israel Lobby." This paper goes on to describe the various activities that pro-Israel groups have undertaken in order to shift U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.

I didn't read the paper inasmuch as the NYRB article, by Michael Massing by the way, hit on the central issue behind the article, and addressed some of the weaknesses contained within it, and on the whole made a very strong case for why the paper addresses a legitimate issue and problem that this country has with its apparent unqualified support for Israel. What I found especially interesting in Massing's article was how the Mearsheimer/Walt paper has been received, and on the whole it's fair to say that it hasn't been well received by many - Alan Dershowitz, also of Harvard and author of The Case for Israel, apparently has a particularly scathing rejoinder to the paper which can also be found at the KSG working paper site.

What's galling about this are the charges of anti-Semitism that come with many of the comments. Frankly I'm of a mind that many of the Jews who went to their deaths during the Holocaust would have a hard time with how Israel has comported itself lo these last 55 off years, and I'm pretty fed up with anyone who's response to criticism of Israel is to throw the Holocaust in one's face. Many Israelis and not a few American Jews ("not a few", but FAR from all, a point Massing makes in his article regarding specifically those individuals involved with funding the DC lobbying effort and unequivocal support for Israel) need to stop hiding behind the Holocaust, an event which was the emodiment of evil and horrific in its magnitude but it's too often used a manure shield to deflect any criticism of Israel and that's becoming something of a worn record. I also love when I hear "Never again!" - I have such a hard time understanding why anyone says this these days when we have so many hundreds of thousands dying in other countries over these years since the Holocaust, recently many of them Muslims such as in the Sudan, or whatever denomination or ethnicity in a number of other African countries - though few if any Jews - why is it that "Never again!" isn't a rallying cry for action to stop post-Holocaust genocide, with Israelis at the head of the line screaming it at the top of their lungs?

The point Massing makes is pretty simple: there's an Israeli lobbying effort afoot in DC (funded by American Jews, NOT Israel) that can make life hard or easy for many a money-sucking politician. When you read the article you begin to appreciate how much of a problem this really is. I can't tell you how many times I've heard from Middle Eastern and Iranian friends about how they believe that the Jews run our government. That's old hat and definitely not true and frankly too many people from the Middle East have far too much of a fascination with conspiracy theories and paranoia regarding Jews. But have little doubt, this article makes you wonder to what extent our system of government has bent itself to the interests of Israel over the interests of ourselves, and you also get to appreciate why non-Americans looking from the outside in, especially those from the Middle East, begin to think as they do.

I am not suggesting that we not defend Israel's right to exist - unfortunately in this case I believe that the sins of Europe in fact do get to be paid for by the Palestinians and the rest of that region of the world. It's not fair, it's not reasonable, but it's a done deal and I don't see it changing. That said, the Palestinians are owed recompense for what they've given up, they're owed a state, and some dignity, and this country is owed more for well over $75 billion given to support Israel and its often anti-Arab policies than the grief we have to show for it up to now, specifically when it comes to peace in that part of the world.

2006-05-19T21:01:00.000-04:00

Reach Out and Touch Someone ...

Courtesy of The Economist

Given all else that's going on lately this is sort of old news, but maybe not ...

This week's US News & World Report ran the following articles: The United States and Iran are locked in a test of wills over Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Is there a way out short of war? , The man in Tehran in his own words, Much rests on whether Iran's leader is a shrewd nationalist or an end-times nut, and Fouad Ajami: Son of the ayatollah, all of which will give you more than you're likely to find about Iran in nearly any other American publication (unlike say, The Economist, a British publication, where you can find regular articles on the country, starting with Search Results) and more than I'd guess many Americans would care to read about the country - but then that's the way of it with us Americans, understanding why a country is the way it is isn't so much the issue as whether or not it's doing what we expect or want it to. Anyway ...

I'm very interested in the country, for a number of different reasons, and in turn tend to follow the news about it quite closely. Ahmadinejad, the current president, is legitimately a bit scary, a man with an apocalyptic perspective apparently. U.S. News focused on his being a populist president, having beaten out the "reformist" Rafsanjani in the run off election - which just goes to show how we tend to oversimplify things here in the media. Rafsanjani is old news in Iran, associated with endemic corruption at least indirectly if not directly, and had been president for eight years nearly ten years ago, and the Iranian people on the whole didn't seem to think he'd be much better on a second go around - go figure. So it's not as simple as Ahmadinejad beating out the reformist he was up against, instead he was really for many people the only palatable option, especially after the ineffectual presidency of the honest-to-God reformist Khatami, who had been president for the 8 previous years.

I read that the administration is looking to take a new tack in how it's negotiating with North Korea (U.S. Said to Weigh a New Approach on North Korea). Well if we're looking to take a new tack with North Korea I can only hope it's something that we're starting to consider with Iran. I don't think Iran should be treated with kid gloves or in anyway coddled, but then at the same time I think that the level of animosity in the relations between our two countries have been out of line with any reasonable rationalization for why things should be that way and fundamentally detrimental to a long list of considerations for both countries. Maybe by taking a new tack we can also help to more subtly undermine an Iranian president who, frankly, comes across as a whack job. There are many Iranians, even conservatives, who can see the virtue in trying to better relations between our two countries, and maybe a reasonable effort on the part of both countries to move towards some level of reconciliation would cause a lot of bad behavior to go away, making things better for all concerned.

2006-05-17T16:01:00.000-04:00

I guess I hit some sort of blogger’s this week, with posts at three different carnivals. Of course it goes without saying that since they’re plugging me I should plug them, so here we go:

The Carnival of Education at The Education Wonks

Carnival of the Vanities hosted at Accidental Verbosity-Yay!

Carnival of Liberty at Below The Beltway

2006-05-14T11:57:00.000-04:00

Places I've Visited

I suppose this would be even more red if I counted places I simply passed through in a car or airport, but then it's not a bad showing as it is. After seeing this, and appreciating that I've been to at least 16% of the world's countries, I had a better sense that indeed, I'm a fairly well-traveled fellow. Hopefully in the next few years I'll increase my percentages.

create your own visited states map or create your own visited countries map

2006-05-12T20:29:00.000-04:00

Here Comes Killer Jesus!

Obtained from here

Ok, I've been sort of down this path before with Yo! Jesus Has Arrived, and He Ain't Happy. That was about an article written by Nicholas Kristoff in the NY Times regarding Tim LaHaye and his "Left Behind" series of books (if you're not familiar with them, go spend some time at
LeftBehind.com: The Left Behind Book Series and enjoy.) Yesterday I tuned into Fresh Air
and got to listen to Michelle Goldberg, a writer for Salon.com, talk about her new book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. She's also written what appears today as the lead article for Salon.com, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism [Note: you may have to go through some advertising to get to the article based upon my recent experience - nothing too bad, and worth it to get to the content.]

I think many of us, to include myself, would like to believe that in this great society of ours, where tolerance and pluralism is an important consideration in how we shape policy and govern, that we'd never see anything like what we see in many parts of the world, but most vividly exemplified by the Islamic Taliban who are apparently undergoing something of a revival in Afghanistan as the Bush policy regarding that country continues to unravel. But we learn from Goldberg about dominion theology:

...dominion theology, which asserts that, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, godly men have the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.

Dominion theology comes out of Christian Reconstructionism, a fundamentalist creed that was propagated by the late Rousas John (R. J.) Rushdoony and his son-in-law, Gary North. Born in New York City in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had recently fled the genocide in Turkey, Rushdoony was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and spent over eight years as a Presbyterian missionary to Native Americans in Nevada. He was a prolific writer, churning out dense tomes advocating the abolition of public schools and social services and the replacement of civil law with biblical law. White-bearded and wizardly, Rushdoony had the look of an Old Testament patriarch and the harsh vision to match -- he called for the death penalty for gay people, blasphemers, and unchaste women, among other sinners. Democracy, he wrote, is a heresy and "the great love of the failures and cowards of life." From Salon.com Books: "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism"

It seems pretty clear here that Rushdoony and his adherents wouldn't have a problem with a Rambo Jesus, out there clearing the world of gays, blasphemers, unchaste women, and heck, it's sort of hard for me to see how this wouldn't include a good chunk of just about any interesting neighborhood. Goldberg touches here on the Christian Reconstructionism, which she explains as follows:

Reconstructionism is a postmillennial theology, meaning its followers believe Jesus won't return until after Christians establish a thousand year reign on earth. While other
Christians wait for the messiah, Reconstructionists want to build the kingdom themselves. Most American evangelicals, on the other hand, are premillennialists. They believe (with some variations) that at the time of Christ's return, Christians will be gathered up to heaven, missing the tribulations endured by unbelievers.

I personally would like to think that reconstructivists were so far out on the fringe that no one could possibly take them seriously, but I'd be wrong. It's not just from Goldberg that I've heard his. I was aware of the fringes of this movement, though not its name, when I wrote Whether You Like It or Not, where I wrote about Patrick Henry College, a Christian right institution where the students by and large are home schooled prior to admission, and which has a primary goal of putting as many of its graduates into the government as possible. According to Goldberg in the NPR interview, PHC, an institution with only about 500 students, is matched by only Georgetown when it comes to the numbers of its students interning in the White House. Then there's Onward Christian Soldiers, Airmen, Politicians, etc. and from that piece I offer the following from Cong. John Hotstettler, Republican from Indiana:

The long war on Christianity in America continues today on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. It continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats. Don't get me wrong, Democrats know they shouldn't be doing this ... But like a moth to a flame, Democrats can't help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonizing Christians.

The Christian right, but specifically the reconstructivists talk about our being a "Christian" nation, hence our "Christian heritage", built by founding fathers who never intended for there to be anything other than a Christian focus irregardless of whatever they may have written into the Constitution, which shows up in the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...

Now I personally see nothing here that says that this will be a Christian nation, but reconstructivists seem to have a unique ability to read into the minds of the framers of the Constitution which allows them to come to the conclusion that the intent was for there to be a
Christian nation, even if it's not explicitly put that way.

According to Goldberg there are many mainstream politicians who may not directly associate themselves with this movement, but they're there on the fringes, they lend tacit and indirect support to the movement, and Sen. Rick Santorum, Cong. Hotstettler, ex-Cong. Tom Delay, Sen. Trent Lott, to name but a few, are tied to this movement. But let's hit the "BIG" name catering to those crowd of late, and that's John McCain. Here in The Economist we read about John McCain's soon to happen to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University to give the commencement address. Let me quote The Economist as it certainly puts this wonderfully:

Mr Falwell is a hate figure on the left—one of the leaders of the now defunct Moral Majority and a man much given to fulminating against homosexuals (“brute beasts”), feminism (“a satanic attack on the home”) and all those whose search for an alternative lifestyle “helped” September 11th to happen [Blogger's note: does this man sound like a disciple of Rushdoony or what?]. Liberty University is a “Bible boot camp”, in Mr Falwell's words, that forbids its students to drink, smoke, dance or watch “R”-rated films and specialises in producing “champions for Christ”. Mr Falwell exhorts his students to burn the university down if it ever turns liberal. No wonder Jon Stewart, a particularly sharp comedian, asked Mr McCain whether he's “freaking out on us”.

McCain believes people like Falwell and support for issues of the religious right (creationism, anti-abortion, and supporting anti-same sex legislation, to name but three), are what's needed to build a base for his making it to the presidency. In essence, these whack jobs, who in the past we all figured were hicks who were easily ignored, are now considered king makers.

Our congressional representatives have already been involved in attempting to pass legislation that would re-define what cases courts in the United States would be able to rule on. Under this new way of doing judicial business, issues related to school prayer, state's putting in place laws respecting above all others the Christian faith (you see, per the reconstructivists, it's Congress that's restricted in its ability to "respect" an establishment of religion, NOT the individual states), and a long list of other reconstructivist issues that today are decided in our courts on the basis of there being no preferential religion, would not be admissible in court but decided first and foremost by legislators.

These people are out there, the reconstructivists and their ilk, and they want to take over, have no doubt whatsoever about this. I know myself that I'm seeing more and more of their kind and we should not kid ourselves into thinking that they're a whacko fringe that will never be in a position to impose their way of looking at the world and specifically this nation on the rest of us. Goldberg leaves us the following from George Grant, a leader of the Christian right, at the end of her article:

"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.

But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.

It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.

It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.

It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less... Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ."

Gee, can you just see the Holy Rambos now? They mean it, they believe it, and they intend to make you believe it to - barring that, they'll make you live it if they have their way.

2006-05-10T20:20:00.000-04:00

Have You Had a Day Like This?

The story you are about to read is true, the names haven't been included to keep me from having to worry about ... hell, in education these days, who knows? I sent this out to colleagues about ten minutes after it happened, thanking God the whole time that I had a free period in which to do it in:

Sorry to put this together this way but right now I'm a bit put out and I want to run this one to ground ASAP and since I don't know the perpetrators responsible for making me write this missive this is the quickest way I have of tackling this quickly, so ...

During second period advisory I made the mistake of leaving the door to my classroom open. Sometime around 12:25, as I sat at my desk, in slides, literally, a tall, thin young man, whose insouciance alone, which borders on sloth, surely makes him a standout amongst his peers (though, alas, I may be kidding myself). This takes me by surprise, but no less than his immediately starting to hawk something to do with Mother's Day. Mind you, I LOVE Mother's Day, especially now that I'm responsible for someone having become a mother who's not my mother, but you see there was no knock on the door, no, "Excuse me, may I talk to the class for a minute about something important", nothing at all to give me a sense at all that this young man was at all imbued with any sense of a finer appreciation for the rudimentary manners we'd hope that all of our students would understand and, better yet, exhibit in their daily behavior.

I immediately told the young man, "Hold on, you didn't even knock!" - of course I was thinking something else, but I, fortunately, do have manners. The young man got the message though, and proceeded with all the showiness of Harpo Marx in any of an innumerable number of Marx Brother's movies, to ostentatiously go out of his way to knock on my door, from the inside of my room, of course.

I said thank you, and then immediately asked him and his companion, who I adn't seen up to now as he had stayed out of the room, to leave. I then went to close my door, and oh how I had wished I had done this from the start of my advisory (C'est la vie, as they may say over in the foreign language department, and sometimes in science, too). It was at that point that the partner in alleged
Mother's Day blandishments informed me that I was "ignorant".

I then stepped out of advisory, and asked the second student for his name, which
he didn't seem to want to give me as he and the skinny fellow walked away. The second gentleman was a big student, though not what I'd exactly call corpulent -
more the type you wouldn't want to run into on a football line or behind the back of O'Leary's on 44th and 8th in Manhattan. He also had a lovely diamond stud in his left ear, which I had opportunity to admire as I followed him a few feet, and, given my general sense of cold this day, the fact that he was wearing shorts caught my attention as well. As I attempted to get his name, at one point saying, "You, the large guy with the box" -- I think he was the one who took the money, a role I'm sure Tony Soprano would have conferred on him as well -- the skinny guy then made a comment to the effect, "Whooooa, he called you a large guy, you should give him his ass ...", or words to that effect.

So here, dear reader, I should hope you can appreciate my sense of ire, and moreover my heartfelt desire to see these young men identified and appropriately instructed, if not flat out disciplined for these incidents, all of which took place in the space of about 60 seconds, as well as their being instructed to come by to talk to me and hopefully render a soulful apology (yeah, well ...). Your help with this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Toodles!

At this point both students have been identified, I've had a discussion with the asst. principal who told me he appreciated my "subtle sarcasm" and he'd be seeing these young men sometime tomorrow, and I've tracked down the teacher they were doing this for and working to arrange a face-to-face, though what merit that may have is questionable at this point.

Education, ya gotta love it.

Update as of today, 5/11: The young men came by, separately, and both apologized. And, to top if off, I had the impression that they were sincere ... ok, yeah, I may be kidding myself, but it makes for a reasonably happy ending and I'll leave it at that --- too damn few of those in the world nowadays.

2006-05-06T17:51:00.000-04:00

Look At My Underwear, Pleeeeeeease!

Courtesy of the 8 May edition of The New Yorker

I swear that some of my male students, sartorially challenged as they are to begin with (there's something about that XY chromosome combo that doesn't bode well for the average male fashion sense), expect that when they're fitted for that first business suit, that someone is really going to ask them the question in the cartoon. I mean why shouldn't they show their BVDs or Jockeys in the business world the way they do in the classroom?

If you teach in a fairly standard public high school you've at some point been inadvertently (well, not entirely inadvertently as the "intent" is there, though it may not have been directed specifically at you when it happened) you've been assaulted by this at some point. It happened to me, but again, yesterday. I had broken my kids up into groups and they had gathered around the classroom lab benches. I turned around at one point to see one of my students bending forward to get a pencil sharpened and there were his Jockeys in all their ... I can't say glory, I mean really ... whatever, and I just shuddered. I immediately yelled out across the room, "John, kindly hike up your pants." The underwear display was not due to the kid being without a belt. No, there was the belt and it was set such that his pants were accommodated to allow him to flash the world his un-metionables when his shirt hiked up just enough, and "enough" wasn't all that much.

I'm sure there are all sorts of interesting sociological reasons for why this became a fad in the black community, and frankly I'm not interested in them. But the community I teach in, though you would hardly tell it by the condition of the high school, is definitely upscale, high income, and the kids are as white bread as you'll find in any such community. Yet they're there emulating rappas and the like, doing their best to make themselves into the best imitation boyz-from-the-hood hoodlings you can find. So underwear is an "In-your-face" sort of thing, and maybe it's better than a safety pin piercing going through a kid's left eyebrow, but ... God forbid these kids ever have to run while they're dressed like this, I mean no way are they getting anywhere very fast with their pants around their kneecaps.

What I'm finding especially bothersome of late are the girls who seem to be moving in the same direction as the boys. They tend to be a bit more subtle, they're fledgling women after all (but try to convince some of them of the "fledgling" part, yeah, right ...), but they'll come in with just a hint of pink undergarment waistband showing. Now here male teachers have to tread carefully - call a guy on his underwear and you're ok, but you're not to do this with a girl, no, no, no. With a girl if you as a man call her on her inappropriate attire there starts a discussion as to why in the world you should have noticed that to begin with - one day some kid's going to come in naked and we'll see how far that travels and I'd bet a paycheck she'll get through at least the first two periods if no female teachers have encountered her. So you go and find a female colleague to take note and let her dish out the fashion correction.

I guess every generation has to have its "something" to put it in contrast with the generation before them, and in some cases the "generations" before them who are the gatekeepers of their learning and responsible for their education; I just wish they chose something besides their underwear to do it with.

2006-04-29T19:13:00.000-04:00

Hypocrisy Deluxe

Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D-RI)

For those not familiar with it, there's an organization called Cape Wind that's proposing to put a 130-unit wind farm in Nantucket Sound. The wind farm would provide for about 75% of the energy needs of the Cape Cod area and the surrounding islands, which includes Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. You sort of get the idea that there's a lot of money tied to the denizens of the region, which happens to also include the Kennedy enclave in Hyannis Port, MA.

Now there may be legitimate questions concerning the wind farm (honestly, I don't believe that myself, but for argument's sake let's say there are), but the powers that be aren't interested in discussing those problems out in the open, in front of the American people. No, they're trying to kill the whole thing through some political sleight of hand. Senator Kennedy, the father of Congressman Patrick Kennedy, has managed, with the help of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, to have an amendment tied to the Coast Guard appropriations bill that gives the governor of Massachusetts the authority to block the wind farm. If the Coast Guard bill passes, and as a rule there's no reason why it shouldn't, then the amendment kicks in, and it turns out that the Governor of Massachusetts happens to oppose the wind farm. Here are the problems with all of this:

- We have a sitting President telling the country we need to develop alternatives to fossil fuels. Bush happens to be enamored with hydrogen, which at present doesn't wean us from fossil fuels, but hey, he's trying, right (I say this with tongue-in-cheek)? Now we have a proposal for a wind farm that would serve to help with the weaning process, and you'd think that all politicians, especially from this part of the country (New Englands, were new power plants are few in coming), would be behind it; not the Kennedys.

- How is it that a Republican senator (as we all know the Kennedy clan is Democrat) from Alaska cares so much about Nantucket Sound? Stevens was in a position to get the amendment included in the Coast Guard bill and was apparently approached by Kennedy to do so; he obliged. Stevens says that this is a state's rights issue, but the consensus seems to be that he's helping a fellow senator.

- Why shouldn't the governor of Massachusetts have veto power over Cape Wind? Well, why should the governor have veto power over this when he doesn't have veto power over other similar power plant proposals? Ok, maybe that's indeed a legitimate enough question, one that should be addressed via open hearings and debate, not by slipping the effort a mickey via an appropriations rider.

Now maybe Cape Wind is the wrong thing to do, maybe it will unfairly reduce property values, impair navigation in the Nantucket Sound, and otherwise produce an eyesore in the area of huge proportion - there's no evidence to support any of this, and in fact there's evidence to support quite the opposite (see the Cape Wind site), but let's be fair, right? So let's do this through an open process, not by tying it to an appropriations bill for the Coast Guard, in effect sneaking a killer option through without hearings or a fair and open debate of any sort.

Now here's where Patrick Kennedy's hypocrisy comes in. The following is from the business section of today's Providence Journal :

"Much like the LNG proposals for Providence and Fall River, I believe there are many unanswered questions including the overall impact on local communities, safety, commerce and environmental and navigational concerns," Kennedy said.

"In a situation such as this, I believe local elected leaders have the best understanding of the impact this has on their communities. For that reason, I do support the governor taking an active role in the approval process. We cannot go about the siting of these facilities in a piecemeal fashion where businesses have the power to run roughshod over the interests of the local communities and consumers."

Now of course he's not the one sneaking an amendment through on an appropriations bill, his father is, but give me a break. If he believes what he's saying here, vice throwing up smoke, then he should be calling for hearings on the Cape Wind project. Instead, since daddy is doing his dirty work for him, he gets to spout some otherwise plausible reasons for opposing this project while knowing full well that the fix is in to have this taken care of through the senate.

Kennedy doesn't get my vote in November, and if you're as much put out by this as I've been definitely visit the Cape Wind web site and find out who you can get in touch to express your disapproval of the amendment and having this decided in the open, which is how so many of us mistakenly have believed was the way we did things in this country; don't kid yourself.

2006-04-26T21:32:00.000-04:00

Undocumented Workers? Cheeessssh ...

I was listening to NPR's Day to Day on the way home this afternoon. One of the stories had to do with the semantics of illegal aliens. Interesting ... you know you're dealing with a hot potato when one of the parties, usually the one perceived to be on the wrong side of the issue, starts trying to bludgeon you with how you're abusing semantics.

Apparently illegal aliens, and their advocates, are taking exception with the term illegal aliens - it somehow seems to make it seem like they don't belong here, and otherwise diminishes their humanity, or something like that. I found this especially curious inasmuch as my wife is a "legal alien". I don't hear about the "legal aliens" getting up in arms over being called aliens. But the inference, per one of those interviewed for this piece, is that somehow we're equating illegal aliens with monsters as we all know that aliens are something that come from the Zed quadrant in the Crab Nebula. But apparently it's only the illegal ones that are monsters.

My understanding was that the term "alien" denotes someone who wasn't a citizen of the place that they happen to be residing in at the time. The adjective "illegal" as applied to alien would mean a person who isn't a citizen of their place of residence who managed to get there by means other than legal ones. What's so demeaning about this? I mean to me it's perfectly descriptive and totally apropos.

Then someone else is interviewed, some professor who, along with his students, tracked all the metaphors used to write about "illegal aliens" in, if I remember correctly, LA. Apparently when you use the word "ferret" to talk about pursuing illegal aliens, e.g. "They were working to ferret out the illegal aliens in Pasadena Country", what you're inferring is that you see illegal aliens as rats or rodents since that's what ferrets like to chase after. I swear it makes one begin to regret any time spent building a vocabulary or leery about ever using a thesaurus - God only knows what you're supposedly actually saying when you use more than a 9th grade vocabulary to describe something.

Of course the problem now is what should you call "illegal aliens"? There's still some controversy over this, though you'll be happy to know that the President is in tune with the new term "undocumented worker" - but of course G.W. knows a large voting block when he sees one, and he also appreciates how "undocumented workers" are good for his business buddies. I happened to visit www.illegalaliens.us where I read the following:

"Calling an illegal alien an undocumented immigrant is like calling a burglar an uninvited house guest."

Well, I have to admit, that does seem to hit the nail on the head.

They're aliens because they're not citizens, they're illegal because they got here illegally regardless of however much I may sympathize with their reasons for coming here, and that's that. Now what to do about them well that's something else all together and a name change, i.e. from illegal alien, a.k.a. undocumented immigrant, to "guest worker" won't really solve the problem.

2006-04-23T10:15:00.000-04:00

More From Our "In-The-Future" President

How can you not be touched by that picture? Being a new father, with a toddler of about the same age, this just pulls at my heart, I mean right down there in the right ventricle. Of course the problem comes in when I engage my brain - Goddamn logic! The brain pipes up, and soon the right ventricle thing starts to rapidly fade into oblivion. Why, you may ask? This isn't G.W. simply sharing a touching moment with a new born, no, no, no, that's not it at all. Bush is actually explaining to the kid how he's loaded our national debt, social security problems, and so much else on him and his generation, and G.W. is likely interpreting the loud belch he's getting in return as a sign of approval. The only possible redeeming aspect of this conversation that might have resulted would have been if the kid power-chucked his formula onto the deceiver-in-chief (oh God, my animosity here is really starting to show, I need to get this in check as it might start affecting my blogging), but that would have been hoping for far too much - the spin-meisters here likely made sure the kid hadn't been recently fed and dusted G.W.'s hands with Similac or Enfamil to throw the kid off from howling.

Ok, what's gotten me onto this most recent rant? I read a story line on CNN yesterday, Bush: 'Hydrogen is the fuel of the future' and it got my blood pressure up a tad. I tend to use CNN as the warning bell that tells me to look for more in-depth coverage somewhere else, so I then went to the Times where I found Energy Politics on Earth Day as Bush Tours California. Here I read:

"I strongly believe hydrogen is the fuel of the future," Mr. Bush said, adding that he thought that today's children would take their driving tests in hydrogen-powered cars.

Of course taken in the collective consideration of all the other things that are "in the future", it raised my BP a few additional points. I have little doubt that at some point in the future, after we've actually perfected an economical means by which to harness the power of fuel cells, that hydrogen will make a dandy alternative fuel source. I mean if it's good enough for most of the U.S. rocket inventory, as it has been, in combination with its good buddy oxygen, for so, so many years, why shouldn't it be good enough for cars? Of course the means by which hydrogen is used for cars is vastly different than it is for lifting rockets into orbit, though otherwise the fuel cells used inside a spacecraft would not be vastly different with regard to the basic physics. But therein lies two problems: 1. figuring out how to make powerful enough fuel cells economically, and 2. obtaining sufficient hydrogen to make this work. A subset to #2, which I won't get into but is worthy of some mention, is how one goes about constructing the infrastructure for delivering hydrogen, a tricky gas to store given the size of the hydrogen molecules, that would be roughly equal to how we distribute gasoline - no easy, nor cheap thing to do.

Where does hydrogen come from? Today it mostly comes from fossil fuels, and one of the government's main areas of focus in this area is to get hydrogen from coal, to wit, as found at
Experiments examine hydrogen-production benefits of clean coal burning:

"While some day we may be able to produce hydrogen by breaking up water
molecules in association with the high-temperature heat from nuclear power
reactors, or through renewable energy technologies, right now the most cost-effective way to produce hydrogen is with coal," says Chris Shaddix, principal investigator for clean coal combustion at Sandia's Combustion Research Facility.

The fact that the U.S. has an extraordinary supply of coal in the ground (we in fact export coal) makes a technology that would extract hydrogen from coal that much more attractive. Of course one still has the problem of what to do with the by-products of the use of coal, to include the carbon dioxide that would be produced and the heavy metals that come with various grades of coal - the radioactivity put into the environment by a coal-fired electrical plant from the radioactive heavy metals in the coal far exceeds what one gets from an equivalent nuclear powered one (and let's not talk about the mercury, another not so nice heavy metal, from coal-fired plants.) So while today's children may be taking their driving tests with hydrogen-powered cars (unlikely, actually, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt), the hydrogen they'll be burning will likely be from a fossil fuel source.

Mr. Shaddix at Sandia mentions renewable energy technologies, which would certainly seem to make hydrogen more attractive. This would mean taking energy from the sun, wind, or some other "renewable" energy source, and directing it into the breakdown of water into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen. The problem here is cost, and here I turn to the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance, specifically Hydrogen--The new fuel of choice:

Cost is a significant factor limiting the use of renewable hydrogen. It now costs several times more to make hydrogen from renewable energy than by producing hydrogen from fossil fuel. The OEA is involved in several promising demonstration and research projects for renewable hydrogen, but it will be 5 to
10 years before these technologies approach the current price of obtaining hydrogen from fossil fuels.

From my general reading I'd say that 5 to 10 years is an optimistic estimate, though with the price of oil climbing the way it is who knows what sort of stimulant that would provide? The problem is that perfecting the technology is one thing, building the infrastructure to support the "hydrogen" economy is something else all together different and that's not going to happen in 5 to 10 years.

So yes, hydrogen may be a fuel of the future, but we'll still be sucking on a fossil fuel teat, like we are with ethanol. Corn is a great sort source of ethanol, as any whiskey drinker can attest to, but to grow that bushel of corn and then transport it somewhere takes an incredible amount of fossil fuel, something that's not often mentioned by gasohol advocates, yet General Motors for one has the nerve to hype this as a "green" alternative.

Hydrogen, alcohol, and many other wonderful alternative sources of energy may well have a place to play in our future energy needs, but they're all "in the future", they're an abstraction when it comes to comprising a signifncant portion of this country's energy needs. Right now they're being used by this administration to sway us into thinking that something substantial is actually being done to address our energy problems and needs, when in fact they're being used as a near term deception and may indeed also be a long term deception. Conservation and a realistic energy policy, which certainly aren't nearly as sexy as technology dependent solutions that arrive in some indeterminate future, are what's needed, but no one in a position to make a difference seems to be pushing this. Why? It means pain for the average American, having to make a sacrifice, and we're now being led by a government that's loathe to make you feel any pain for the ostensible war we're in, in fact they want to reduce taxes though that's by and large for the well-to-do. So in the no child left without huge debt mentality of this administration we'll just let our kids feel and shoulder our pain, though no one reading this should have any doubt that they'll be around long enough to share it with them.

2006-04-22T18:29:00.000-04:00

Reflection on Immigrants: Part II

Apparently this picture was taken while these young men and women were out demonstrating against the proposed new immigration laws. Now there's been little in the way of demonstrations here, and I haven't followed the media closely enough to know how common it is for people involved in these demonstrations to feel compelled to fly Mexican flags in their zeal to show displeasure with American immigration policy. I mean if these people love Mexico so much, and all the more power to them if they do, then stop demonstrating in the U.S. and go to Mexico where I'm sure they'd be welcome, though how gainfully employed they'd be I'm not sure. So is the purpose of waving a Mexican flag to show support for Mexico or to wave it in the face of Americans to let them know that the flag wavers, or someone they know, are likely to get their way here in the U.S. in spite of the fact that they're actually Mexican citizens?

The Times had the following article today, Crackdown on Workers Brings Dismay and Anxiety. I have to admit that it's hard to appreciate why a crackdown on something that's been illegal for so long is getting so much press, but then if you're cynical about it then some of the reasons for what's going on do come out in this article. Here's some grist from the article:

"What happened yesterday, I think, is a tactic that they are using to scare us so we don't keep on pushing to get rights," said Ms. Perez, 38, who came from Venezuela 10 years ago. She was referring to an announcement on Thursday by Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, that the stepped-up enforcement would continue.

I don't think Ms. Perez understands that she has no rights as an American citizen. Yes, she's here, and yes the Constitution doesn't quite explicitly say you have to be a U.S. citizen to be entitled to the rights of an American, but then it's ridiculous to assume that anyone who steps off a plane or ship from somewhere is now imbued with full-fledged American rights and privileges. Oh, and that would include someone who managed to sneak into the country 10 years ago and didn't get caught in all that time.

The following really got me as it's so typical of what is used to excuse what's going on right now with illegals that it's taken for granted:

Some employers also criticized Mr. Chertoff's plan, under which Immigration and Customs Enforcement will increase the number of worksite enforcement agents and efforts to root out businesses that submit fake Social Security numbers for workers.

"If we didn't have them, we'd really be in a bind," Roy Pace, a mechanical contractor in Austin, Tex., said of immigrant workers.

and then followed a bit later in the article with:

Billy L. Heller Jr., chief executive of Pacific Tomato Growers in Palmetto, Fla., said companies were not equipped to verify their workers' status, a task he said belonged to the government, not employers.

"Does this mean I have to have people spend the whole day on a government Internet site double-checking numbers?" said Mr. Heller, whose company grows
produce in Florida, California, Georgia, Virginia and Mexico. "We are not document police, and we can't discriminate. If folks present what looks to be reasonably legitimate, then we have to act as if it is."

"If we didn't have them we'd be in a bind ..." --- yeah, you'd have to pay regular wages, with decent benefits, or invest in machinery that would do the job more safely and efficiently, so yep, those illegals are a God send. By artificially, i.e. by not making appropriate technology investments and otherwise not paying a livable wage and benefits, holding down their costs they also help to kid the American people into believing that they shouldn't have to pay prices commensurate with supporting a livable wage because look how the value of dollar has gone up, in terms of what it can buy anyway, over time, especially when it's due to being dumped on the backs of immigrants willing to work for substandard wages.

And Mr. Heller thinks the government should be verifying documents. I'd guess that Mr. Heller is otherwise from the school of thought that the government should be as small as possible and he should pay as little tax, if not flat out no taxes at all, so kicking this responsibility over to the government is a sure way of sending it to a place where it'd never be properly overseen if the Heller's of the world (ok, I'm being a bit presumptuous here, but it's not so much Heller as the many who disenguously espouse this "dump it on the government" credo) had their way. One day to check documents really isn't a hell of a lot out of the number otherwise worked so forgive me for not quite appreciating the problem here. I mean I have to have police checks out the tail end to get a teacher's job, and many jobs come with some sort of rudimentary background check, and the cost is folded into the cost of doing business. I guess if you're a contractor hiring illegals or a farmer doing the same, you don't want that added expense for what's otherwise standard operating procedure anywhere else.

I don't know, maybe I'm just not getting it, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for 12 million people who are here who shouldn't be because they weren't invited in by the government (not that I'm a big lover of government invitations, but something has to be in charge here) nor did they become citizens during their time here. I appreciate that citizenship for these people isn't an easy thing, but then it's that way to help control immigration and indeed to make it reasonably difficult to become an American citizen. I also don't have any sympathy for those who employ illegals - yes, it keeps the prices down, and I'm sure I've been the beneficiary of this at some time in my life, but it's wrong and such employers should indeed be taken to task for their aiding illegals. I'm also not a fan of amnesties which seem to happen every 20 years or so - let's secure the border, hold Mexico to task for making it more attractive for illegals to come here than staying at home, and take anyone to task who assists the process on this end. That'd be a start, and we can see where we need to go from there.

2006-04-20T05:21:00.000-04:00

Telescope

Roger Smith/NOAO/AURA/NSF

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
Participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

--- Louise Glück

2006-04-19T20:59:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of this week's U.S. News & World Report

2006-04-17T07:41:00.000-04:00

Thoughts on a Possible American Misadventure

From the Asia Times

“Spain at that time was far behind all the other countries in Europe. Napoleon considered the Iberian Peninsula another world - with people from the Dark Ages - dominated by clergy, according to Napoleon, who were illiterate, ignorant, and fanatical. He thought that there would be no resistance whatsoever. Napoleon didn’t take the trouble to study the country he was going to invade. He didn’t think the Spanish people had the will to hold on to their independence.” (Nicole Gottieri, Chief Curator, National Archives, France)

In 1808 Napoleon entered Spain expecting to be proclaimed a liberator of the oppressed
Spanish people. Instead he found himself embroiled in a six-year counterinsurgency effort which tied up 118,000 French troops, that in the end exhibited levels of barbarism on both sides which were unseen in Europe up to then (thanks to LCOL Peter Ahern’s article, Cultural Understanding: The Essential Ingredient for Developing War Time Intelligence.) Historical lessons for what we’re now engaging in Iraq seem to have been either unknown, ignored, or misunderstood at the Pentagon. When it comes to winning the war and then having to stand one’s ground in the conquered country to affect “regime change”, or “bringing democracy to the people”, it’s a matter of understanding the culture, not the terrain that will sway matters of life and death, and success or failure.

Iran and Iraq are vastly different countries. For any invading army the terrain of Iran is difficult and hazardous, and militarily so would be the people. Unlike the Iraqis the Iranians share a cohesive culture and history that stretches back for thousands of years. Unlike the Iraqis the people of Iran are responsible for putting in place the current leadership; there was no coup d’etat as there was in Iraq, the 1979 Islamic Revolution was a people’s movement. That said, it’d be reasonable to assume that many Iranians don’t care for the current intersection of religion, politics, and governance, and very likely they will one day change what they live under, but for now enough are happy under the government to assure its stability, and it’s a sure bet it would be supported if ever there was military action taken against the country.

For however much there is talk about the current Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad being “Hitleresque or a demagogue, he was elected by the people in an election first against 7 candidates, one of whom was a reformist like the previous and largely ineffectual president Khatami, and then in a runoff election against Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a previous president who wasn’t nearly as “hard line” as Ahmadinejad, though shrouded in a cloud of corruption and cronyism which increased the appeal of his opponent. The democracy of Iran may be tainted with theocratic heavy handedness, but the presidential election was considered fair and representative of what the people of Iran wanted. The reasons for this are complicated but however one looks at it Ahmadinejad was elected by the people, not the clerics. There are many good reasons to want to see Ahmadinejad not re-elected, and one would hope this will be the case, but as we first saw in Iran, and as we’re seeing in other parts of the world, the machinery of democracy does not always spit out what American policy would like to see or live with.

Militarily the Iranians would be fierce fighters and unlikely to evaporate when confronted with an imposing American military. Iran fought off the Iraqis during the 1980 – 1988 Iran-Iraq war in spite of a larger, better equipped and trained Iraqi military, which was also receiving intelligence help from the U.S. (Pre-revolution Iran was arguably militarily better than that of the Iraqis, but post-revolution purges of the military decimated the Iranian army and air force, which was largely what prompted Sadaam Hussein to invade Iran.) By any measure Iraq should have vanquished the then disorganized Iranians and, at a minimum, annexed a large chunk of southern Iran. The ferocity and fanaticism of the Iranian defenders, and the professionalism of those Iranian Air Force pilots not killed in the initial revolutionary purges, threw back the Iraqi invaders early in the war, resulting in a stalemate that lasted for nearly six years and no Iraqi gains. Any foreign army entering Iran today would find a vastly better organized military than that in 1980, and would be up against Iranians who while otherwise positively inclined towards the U.S. would not tolerate a U.S. invasion.

There are those in Washington who cling to the notion that the Iraqi people will overthrow the Ayatollahs and the hard line conservatives if only we provide them a pretext around which to do so. Iranians living in the U.S. who advise that the Iranian people are simply waiting to be mobilized to throw off their government should be given as much merit as anyone in retrospect would their Iraqi predecessors. Unfortunately the administration seems to buy their urgings as it recently won congressional approval to spend $75 million to fund “Iranian Opposition Groups”; one can certainly be forgiven a certain sense of déjà vu.

In Iraq many of our problems are laid to misunderstanding the consequences of our actions, woefully misunderstanding the Iraqis themselves, and inadequately training and sensitizing our military to the socio-cultural environments in which they were to be thrown into. We will never cause regime change with laser-guided bombs, cruise missiles, techno-centric and highly mobile ground forces, and certainly this will never happen with a military ill-suited to serve in the role of occupiers and counterinsurgency operatives. Weapon systems don’t win hearts and minds; well-intended, well-trained, and honorable people who are sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the people they’re interacting with might, but even with the utmost best of intentions American steel or boots on the ground in Iran will come at a terrible cost (to get a good sense of how much of a cost I recommend reading Richard Clarke’s and Steven Simon’s article in the Sunday NY Times, Bombs That Would Backfire) and never be accepted by the vast majority of the Iranian people, and the people in the surrounding region.

2006-04-16T15:40:00.000-04:00

The Alternative Minimum Tax: Watch Out!

If a few of you may have a sense of deja vu with the title of this post, you're right, I've been here before, specifically The Alternative Minimum Tax: Be Afraid, VERY Afraid. way back in December of last year. Another recent article in the NY Times has brought this to the fore again, with Tax Break Expired, Middle Class Faces a Greater Burden for 2006 and this has but again gotten me a bit riled up.

The Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT for short, was put in place back in 1969 to catch taxpayers who were making what today would be over $1 million dollars in income, at that time it was $200,000, and who were otherwise managing to legally avoid paying federal income tax. The problem with the AMT took some time to rear its ugly head and we're now to the point where it's making a full frontal display unless congress does something about it. The fact is that the AMT is not indexed to inflation, so while the original intent of the tax was to snare the richest taxpayers who were avoiding taxes, it's now creeping down into the pockets of upper-middle to middle class families who are making what would be deemed a "comfortable", but hardly "rich" wage. From the Times article:

Unless Congress takes action, one in four families with children — up from one in 22 last year — will owe up to $3,640 in additional federal income tax come next April.

Few of them realize that their taxes have increased, because Congress has not voted to raise taxes. Instead, Congress let a tax break expire. That break limited the alternative minimum tax, which takes back part of the tax cuts sponsored by President Bush.

To put this in a starker light:

The A.M.T. will cost Americans who earn $50,000 to $200,000 nearly $13 billion more next April. That is about how much people who earn more than $1 million will save because of the break on investment income like dividends and capital gains.

So what this means is that while the rest of us in the middle class get to pay more tax via the AMT, the rich get that money back through the tax break that Bush wants to extend for dividend, i.e. UNEARNED, income. Let me clarify, "earned" income is what you make when you are paid for your skills, labor, talent, or the simple sweat from your brow that you exert to obtain a wage. Unearned income is what you get from your bank account interest or the investments you make that provide a return for your money, but that return has nothing to do with anything you do other than how wisely you chose your investments. In this country, or at least with this administration, it's considered fairer that one should be taxed higher for their earned income over their unearned income, mostly because it's expected that the rich, by and large the largest beneficiaries of this largess, will take that money and plow it back into the economy and create more jobs. Alas, it's not very clear where good jobs are going to these days, and if one were to look at where a good number of new jobs are created it's not here but somewhere in Asia, so there's a huge question as to whether the American taxpayer is getting much benefit out of this tax break for the rich, or nearly the benefit that this administration would like one to believe is the result.

With the AMT deductions such as for children and paying state and local taxes evaporate. If you fall within the window of the AMT you have to figure your taxes out using both a standard and an AMT basis and if the AMT number works out higher than the "standard" one, you're hit for the AMT tax. That the AMT was never meant for the vast majority of those within the zone of it matters not at all, and unless an another exemption is put in place, or better yet some sort of indexing to inflation that would keep the AMT as a tool against the well-to-do vice the middle class, then the average taxpayer who's making a decent wage can potentially find themselves a victim of the it.

I urge any reader potentially to be affected by the AMT to get in touch with your congressional representatives ASAP and let them know you want the thing done away with, or at a minimum indexed for inflation such that it remains in place to go after the audience it was intended for. That Bush wants to pass an AMT break extension is not to be trusted: he also wants to continue the dividend tax break for the rich and there's only but so much tax that can be cut and with the way things are looking now the difference in revenues in and out is being put on the middle class vice instilling a fair and equitable tax, for as much as this current system ever allows for one, for the rich.

2006-04-14T20:48:00.000-04:00

Bomb Iran, or Worse? Gawwwwwwd ...

Oh yeah, righto, just like we did in Iraq!

Ok, this clearly isn't the first time I've addressed this issue (see Regime Change: Here We Go Again), and now this is in the news but again. Seymour Hersh, on the staff of The New Yorker, wrote The Iran Plans in this week's issue of the magazine, and he was on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, 'New Yorker's' Hersh on Iran to discuss his piece which, on the whole, has caused quite a bit of stir in the media and, apparently, elsewhere.

One of the points Hersh makes and one which I think bears keeping in mind, is that the administration, in the form of the president, vice-president, and the secretary of state, is making a case for going into Iran very similar to the one made before we jumped off into Iraq. The administration is talking about how they're trying to work through a diplomatic solution, yet at the same time doing very little to facilitate diplomacy. In fact, again as Hersh points out, the bellicosity of this administration to Iran has done little to make the Iranians think that there's any reason they shouldn't keep moving forward with acquiring nuclear weapons inasmuch as there's every reason to believe that the U.S. is going to attack the country.

Hersh makes clear that at this point the Pentagon appears to have taken planning for operations against Iraq from just the planning stage to the point where people are actually out there, in- country no less, scoping out what would be needed to be done to cripple Iran's nuclear weapons program, and, since we'd be there anyway, take out a whole lot else, too, just to make sure the Iranians know who's boss. What's truly amazing is that there are people in DC who believe that once we did this that there's a contingent of Iranians in Iran who'd go up against the government and instigate regime change. In fact the administration, in what would appear to be another bout of wishful thinking reminiscent of Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Conference, has recently obtained approval from congress to spend some $75 million to support/fund Iranian opposition groups; does anyone but me have this odd sense of deja vu here?

In Iraq many of our problems are laid to misunderstanding the consequences of our actions, woefully misunderstanding the Iraqis themselves, and inadequately training and sensitizing our military to the socio-cultural environments in which they were to be thrown into. We will never cause regime change with laser-guided bombs, cruise missiles, techno-centric and highly mobile ground forces, and certainly this will never happen with a military ill-suited to serve in the role of occupiers and counterinsurgency operatives. Weapon systems don’t win hearts and minds, well-intended, well-trained, and honorable people who are sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the people they’re interacting with do, but even with the utmost best of intentions American steel or boots on the ground in Iran will come at a terrible cost, and never be accepted by the Iranian people.

2006-04-11T20:26:00.000-04:00

Immigration

I don't think any conscious American could have missed the flail over immigration that's been going on over the last few weeks. Conscious I may have been, but particularly thoughtful about it I haven't. Here in Rhode Island, as near as I can tell anyway, there's not much of a hotbed of illegal immigrants and, consequently, this issue hasn't seemed to have hit as many buttons here as it has in many other places. But Ms. Cornelius at A Shrewdness of Apes had a recent blog on the issue and I found myself reading and nodding my head - so I figured I'd join the discussion.

My wife's an immigrant. She came here a little over three years ago and I managed to somehow get her to fall in love with me (how I did this will forever remain a mystery to me, and I'll be happy with just counting myself VERY lucky), and we married two years ago. At this point she has her green card, an interesting trick given the time it took to get it (all together about 18 months), but I'm guessing it had something to do with the fact that she's a researcher at a fairly prestigious university and I'm an ex-military officer and otherwise all-round nice guy, factors that I'd hazard to guess tend to push the "Let's let her in" button a bit quicker. So she's legal, she didn't come here to escape oppression or to find a better life, in fact she had a position waiting for her when she went back home and God knows that's where the family she adores is, but she managed to meet me and, well, there you have it. It turns out that she was also taking a job that has been hard of late to find Americans willing to take, with American PhDs being on the decline over the years, but in this case that, too, likely worked in her favor vice against it.

Ok, we're talking about "illegal" immigrants. Now there's a distinction between legal and illegal, regardless of what some would like to otherwise make a case for. Let's go back to the start here in the U.S., with the Pilgrims who, a few would make a case for, were the first undocumented aliens. In fact the Pilgrims were not "illegal". In fact they were British citizens entering into what at the time was claimed to be British territory, with the permission of the British government, ergo by any standard of "legality" at the time they were quite legal. Now of course there were inhabitants here when they arrived who, in a manner of speaking, had first dibs and who took exception with the new arrivals, but back then "might made right" and they lost. After a government was set up here in the U.S., and territorial boundaries established, we gradually began to regulate who came into the country and got to stay. If you got in and you weren't vetted and given permission to remain, you were illegal, and that's what I'm talking about here, illegals.

I've had to wonder why Bush and company have been so big on this issue. Of course Oliphant in his cartoon above makes a good point - heck, 10 million illegals who are suddenly given amnesty make for a fair number of votes, no question about it. And then there's the business interests. The illegals work for a pittance, and they work hard for what little they get so they're just the sort of employees WalMart and anyone else supporting a business on the backs of its employees is just happy as a pig in manure to see. Such businesses get to keep the cost of employment low, and in turn the cost of what we pay equally low. Overall we benefit from this indirectly by paying less for what we buy, though as with many cases of paying too little for something the residual and largely hidden costs, or in the case of California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Arizona he "not so hidden costs" build up on the side and we pay for them through our taxes. But businesses love immigrants, and guest workers or illegal immigrants allow prices to be kept low, and money to flow into the pockets of the employer - how much more Republican can this get?

The last time we had a major to do over immigrants and granting an amnesty was some 20 years ago, and of course that was supposed to be the last time we were going to do such a thing. As with most such proclamations it was a smoke screen as those who could be expected to profit from it did, and the basic cracks in the system that allowed the illegals in to begin with never got the attention it deserved to fix the problem(s). So now it's 20 years later, and some 10 million or so illegal souls more, and we're talking about amnesty and then setting up a guest worker program, but then on the whole doing very little to fix the faults that create the problem of the influx of illegals. So what should we expect to have to do in another 20 or so years?

Part of the problem is our being able to manage our borders, and that's a real problem. I listened to an immigration activist go on about how none of the 9/11 terrorists had Hispanic last names, but there were many Hispanic last names amongst the American dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's great, but the point isn't that there have been Hispanic terrorists coming across our southern border, it's that if an uneducated Mexican can manage getting in how would a well-educated terrorist, of whatever ethnicity, fair?

Here's an interesting chart from USA Today, courtesy of the Pew Hispanic Center:

Of course there's the fact that Mexico has been such an economic basket case for so long that its people want to come here. When is that going to change, and why isn't more being done to help facilitate the change? I'm no expert, and maybe there's a lot being done, but this has been going on for a long time and things just don't seem to be getting better, and somehow those of
us who feel we shouldn't be absorbing everyone's displaced workers at the tune of about some 500,000 per year are told that there's something wrong with us, that we're not open enough, or generous enough, or kind enough, or ... well, you get the trend. This is, of course, a complicated aspect of this entire problem when one factors in globalization and all that, but somehow Canada manages to keep most of its people happy enough such that they're not making a routine run on our border, what exactly is Mexico not doing to cause this problem to be what it now is?

So maybe it's not nice of me, but this has to change, and we can't be encouraging illegal immigration by deciding every 20 years to say, "Hey, it's ok, you're here now, and the construction guy you're working for would be REALLY put out if we deported you, so you get to stay." I think we should also be doing more to stem the tide on our borders not because the tide is by and large Hispanic, but because we can't be sure what the tide is. And lastly, we should be doing more to address the problem at the root. I well understand that desperate people will do whatever they can for themselves and their loved ones, and we need to be doing more to help alleviate that desperation, but not by opening our doors wide every 20 years, and not by playing footsie with guest workers who really should be working at home and not giving business excuses for not paying decent wages and benefits, and better utilizing technology to address their needs --- but of course that doesn't garner 10 million potential votes, and would tend to piss off some big-money campaign donors.

2006-04-10T20:40:00.000-04:00

Rumsfeld Needs to Go

There’s a growing chorus of retired military officers of flag rank (i.e. in this case generals, moreover by and large, though not exclusively, Marine generals) calling for the removal of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. This morning’s Times ran the following article, Third Retired General Wants Rumsfeld Out. The general in question in this article is retired LGen Gregory Newbold, who has joined the company of retired Generals Anthony Zinni, Bernard Trainor, both Marines, and Major General Paul Eaton (Army).

Newbold says things that anyone who has given thought to what’s been going on in Iraq since this country invaded it and has done any reading about it (I strongly recommend George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, and Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War) has to have concluded for quite some time: Rumsfeld has fouled this whole thing up from start to now, and if anyone’s to be held accountable for this debacle it’s him.

I won’t get into the merits or lack thereof for our being in Iraq to start with. Let’s assume we should have been there, that it was the right thing to do (this, for anyone not sure, is decidedly not what I believe). What was Rumsfeld responsible for that earns his being taken to task for our results in Iraq so far? Let me count the ways:

1. He didn’t listen to his senior military advisors, to wit General Eric Shenseki, the then Army Chief of Staff, who believed, based on his extensive experience, that the number of troops that would be necessary to first win the war and then secure the peace was on the order of 300 to 400,000, which was not the sort of numbers Rumsfeld wanted to hear. Shenseki was effectively forced to retire and, in a manner of speaking, pissed on by Rumsfeld on the way out.

2. Rumsfeld gave little to no consideration to what would be done after the war was won, a result no one seriously questioned. Not being in the “nation building” business at the time he apparently didn’t feel it was worth his bother to consider what would happen after the Iraqi government and its institutions were destroyed, and the results have spoken for themselves ever since. Initially Rumsfeld wrote this the initial chaos after the war was over to “Democracy is messy”, or words to that effect – little did he know we’d be stepping in that mess for a long time afterwards.

3. Really an addendum to #3, Rumsfeld did everything he could to prevent knowledgeable experts who could at least prognosticate what we’d get ourselves into after the way was over from participating in any part of the planning process. He and his folks were more interested in listening to the likes of people like Ahmed Chalabi, an exiled Iraqi looking for a way back in to a position of power, who predicted we’d be greeted with flowers and kisses and all would be wonderful, especially if we put Chalabi in power; of course what the Iraqi people might have to say about Chalabi and company, and much of anything else, wasn’t given much consideration.

In addition it was Rumsfeld’s main assistant at the time, Paul Wolfowitz, who told Congress that not only would we be greeted as liberators, but soon thereafter the Iraqis would be paying for our adventure in pre-emption with their oil. Now nearly $500 billion dollars later
we still have a large bill to pay ahead of us.

4. By not adequately planning for our role in Iraq we sent over soldiers and Marines who were inadequately prepared for what they found themselves eventually having to deal with: insurgents, sectarian violence, death squads, and IEDs. The equipping of our personnel on the ground was inadequate, and we’re still trying to make up for this today, but Rummy had the nerve to stand up in front of a group of service men and tell them, “We go to war with the Army that we have, not the one that we want.” Well damn – if Rummy knew what he was doing to begin with maybe what we had to go to war with would have been more clearly elucidated such that what we went to war with was really wanted.

Of course the training of our personnel was just as inadequate – not for the war, that they did wonderfully, but for the peace. Abu Ghraib likely wouldn’t have happened had we sent an adequate number of personnel over to begin with, specifically personnel properly trained to handle what was thrust on them. It’s interesting to note that only a reservist brigadier general
and a number of enlisted personnel have been hung out to dry over Abu Ghraib and you really, really have to wonder why the buck stops there. We also likely wouldn’t have pissed off a huge number of people had we taken the time for cultural training and inculcating some basic respect for a culture and way of life that, by and large, is totally unfamiliar to the average American.

The problem with the cartoon above is that it shouldn't be showing just democrats trying to take "Rummy" out; any reasonable thinking Republican has to by this time appreciate that Rumsfeld is an unmitigated disaster who needs to be booted out. My main problem with having Rumsfeld leave now is that given this administration's past proclivities the man will be awarded a presidential medal of freedom as soon as he's out the door, or right before he's out the door. Actually I guess I shouldn't be too upset with this given how the Bush administration has abused the thing. Ostensibly the highest award that the American government can give to a civilian, sort of, but not quite, tantamount to the military's Medal of Honor, it's described as follows:

The nation's highest civilian honor award given to citizens who have enriched our nation through their achievements and service. It was established in 1963 and replaced the Medal of Freedom.

In 2004 it was given to Paul Bremer, late the lead honcho for the Iraqi CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) who fired all the Baathists and the entire Iraqi military, and what better job can an ex-Baahtist/Army type have than insurgent, right?; George Tenet, late of the CIA and the man who proclaimed the justification for going into Iraq, i.e. weapons of mass
destruction, a "slam dunk"; and last but not least, retired Army general Tommy Franks, who conquered Iraq and let the place go to hell in a hand basket immediately thereafter because he never had a plan to do otherwise. Hell, with that kind of company Rumsfeld is certainly a shoo-in for the thing.

2006-03-29T11:02:00.000-05:00

The Future of Employment: Where Are We Going?

As a teacher one of the things you want to be able to help your students with, and one of the things they're hoping that adults can in fact help them with, has to do with what they should do for employment, and why it is that what they're doing in school is a step in the right direction for them to in fact become meaningfully employed. An article in Sunday's NY Times by Louis Uchitelle, Retraining Laid-Off Workers, but for What?, would surely give any reasonable person concerned with this issue some pause. The article tells a couple of stories, but the one that made the biggest impression on me focused on what our thinking in this country is regarding jobs. Our running philosophy essentially boils down to if you're well enough educated and you try hard you'll find a good paying job, and if you don't, well somehow that's your fault.

Uchitelle tells about United Airlines aircraft machinists who were laid off. Aircraft machinists are reasonably well-paid, and they represent a section of the job market where those who are in the profession often don't have college degrees. Many machinists go to a trade school, on their own or through their employer, to acquire their skills, or otherwise come into the profession via the military where they've had extensive training before they go to work for an airline. The United machinists were reasonably well-paid, having worked out a top-end $60/hour wage with their 2002 contract with the airline. This, of course, was before United declared bankruptcy.

United's machinists were considered, prior to 1999 anyway, to be very efficient when it came to overhauling and repairing aircraft. The industry norm for a plane overhaul was 22 days and United machinists were doing it in 11, using genuinely original methods and cross-workshop teamwork to significantly reduce turn-around time on aircraft. The United machinists were so good that American West airlines contracted with United to have American West aircraft worked on by the United machinists. All this came to serious crash in the summer of 1999 when the machinists engaged in a work slowdown which in the end prompted United to begin outsourcing its aircraft overhauls to companies that didn't use union labor. United soon discovered that outsourcing was less expensive than in-house maintenance, making it worthwhile to outsource planes even if it took longer to complete the overhauls. The trend towards outsourcing continued when the cost of United's mechanics increased, and an airline considering and finally entering into bankruptcy was looking for ways to save money.

Ok, so a convergence of unfortunate circumstances put the machinists in a bad situation with regard to their long-term employment, with many of them being laid off. But they were well-trained to begin with, and on top of this they were eligible for federally subsidized re-training and job placement.

'The presumption — promoted by economists, educators, business executives and nearly all of the nation's political leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike — holds that in America's vibrant and flexible economy there is work, at good pay, for the educated and skilled. The unemployed need only to get themselves educated and skilled and the work will materialize. Education and training create the jobs, according to this way of thinking. Or, put another way, an appropriate job at decent pay materializes for every trained or educated worker.

"If the workers were already trained, as the mechanics certainly were, then what they needed was additional training and counseling as a transition into well-paying, unfilled jobs in other industries. If the transition failed to function as advertised, well, the accepted wisdom suggested that it was the fault of the workers themselves. Their failure to land good jobs was due to personality defects or a resistance to acquiring new skills or a reluctance to move where the good jobs were.

"That was the myth. It evaporated in practice for the aircraft mechanics, whose hourly pay ranged up to $31. Not enough job openings exist at $31 an hour
— or at $16 an hour, for that matter — to meet the demand for them. Jobs don't
just materialize at cost-conscious companies to absorb all the qualified people
who want them."

But surely with some additional training and education we can tweak that mechanic into something professionally useful and well-paid, right? Well, no, not really:

"Saying that the country should solve the skills shortage through education and training became part of nearly every politician's stump speech, an innocuous way to address the politics of unemployment without strengthening either the bargaining leverage of workers or the federal government's role in bolstering labor markets.

"But training for what? The reality, as the aircraft mechanics discovered, is painfully different from the reigning wisdom. Rather than having a shortage of
skills, millions of American workers have more skills than their jobs require. That is particularly true of college-educated people, who make up 30 percent of the population today, up from 10 percent in the 1960's. They often find themselves working in sales or as office administrators, or taking jobs in hotels and restaurants, or becoming carpenters, flight attendants and word processors."

I'd throw working at Wal-Mart or the local national supermarket chain of your choice (I suppose these are the "sales" jobs that Uchitelle's referring to, this makes it a bit more stark) as also topping the job opportunities list for those once in relatively high-paying jobs who now need jobs. And are there really jobs out there to be plucked from the tree of employment, ones that will make students, or anyone really desirous to work, adequately employed? Well that's not clear, and the evidence would suggest that the answer is no, there's not:

The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics offers a rough estimate of the imbalance in the demand for jobs as opposed to the supply. Each month since December 2000, it has surveyed the number of job vacancies across the country and compared it with the number of unemployed job seekers. On average, there were 2.6 job seekers for every job opening over the first 41 months of the survey. That ratio would have been even higher, according to the bureau, if the calculation had included the millions of people who stopped looking for work
because they did not believe that they could get decent jobs.

So the demand for jobs is considerably greater than the supply, and the supply is not what the reigning theory says it is. Most of the unfilled jobs pay low wages and require relatively little skill, often less than the jobholder has. From the spring of 2003 to the spring of 2004, for example, more than 55 percent of the hiring was at wages of $13.25 an hour or less: hotel and restaurant workers, health care employees, temporary replacements and the like.

That trend is likely to continue. Seven of the 10 occupations expected to grow the fastest from 2002 through 2012, according to the Labor Department, pay less than $13.25 an hour, on average: retail salesclerks, customer service representatives, food service workers, cashiers, janitors, nurse's aides and hospital orderlies.

So if you're able to find a job that pays decently and you're able to keep it, good on you. But if you lose it you may find yourself out there working in some flavor of the service industry. But that's not what we sell ourselves, and that's certainly not what we sell our students. In point of fact, as near as I can tell, the whole issue of what students should do with their education and where they should go for work is something of a black box - in high school we're focused on preparing our charges for college, which begs the question as to what the 50% or better who either don't go to college or otherwise don't finish college should be doing, and whether they might have been better served with some realistic job counseling/training while they were a junior or senior in high school. But heck, even if they walk out the door with a good job in hand, as many an airline mechanic surely thought they had, they could well enough still face the possibility of losing that job and then find themselves vying for what's left out with everyone else out there.

I'm told, and surely read enough about it, that we're not training our students sufficiently in the math and sciences. Being a chemistry teacher I can attest to that with the paucity of infrastructure and pedagogical investment being a real problem. But what, exactly, are we training these kids for? Some know they want to be doctors, engineers, physical therapists, or nurses, so they're not so hard to get on the right track. But what are the other kids, the vast majority as it stands, supposed to be looking forward to in the future? How are we supposed to prepare out students for jobs in a realistic fashion when life-long employment no longer is a reasonable expectation, outsourcing, overseas and here in the U.S., is taking jobs left and right, and the protection that our parents once may have enjoyed from unions has withered away to the point where non-union jobs are the ones most directly in competition to union ones, as the United aircraft mechanics discovered to their dismay? I think these are important questions, and in all honesty I don't see much being done to address them, but I know that politicians love NCLB and think we should be doing a better job at teaching math and science, for what specific purpose it seems we all just somehow know without really being sure.

2006-03-29T05:19:00.000-05:00

The Future of Employment: Where Are We Going? - The Book

Monday's post, The Future of Employment: Where Are We Going?, was based on an article in the NY Times by Louis Uchitelle. His book, The Disposable American: Layoffs And Their Consequences (the hyperlink will take you to Buy.com which seems to have the least expensive copy of the book that I could find here in the U.S.) has just been released and is reviewed in this morning's Times. Topics worth some attention, especially by educators.

2006-03-24T21:51:00.000-05:00

I Was a Sailor Once
(Original author unknown, and this author extensively modified the original to his own experiences.)

I miss standing on the bridge wing at sunrise with salt spray in the air and clean, brisk ocean winds whipping in from the four quarters of the globe - - the ship beneath me feeling like a living thing as her engines drove her swiftly through the sea, the vibrations of her engines pulsing in my legs.

I miss the sounds of the Navy - the piercing trill of the boatswain’s pipe, the clangor of the ship's bell on the quarterdeck, the harsh squawk of the 1MC, and the strong language and laughter of sailors at work.

I miss Navy vessels -- nervous darting destroyers, plodding fleet auxiliaries and amphibs, sleek, silent submarines and steady, solid aircraft carriers.

I often think of the proud names of Navy ships: Midway, Lexington, Saratoga, Coral Sea, Antietam, Valley Forge, Yorktown - - memorials of great battles won and tribulations overcome, or the lean angular names of Navy "tin-cans" and escorts --Barney, Dahlgren, Mullinix, McCloy, Damato, Leftwich, Mills - - mementos of heroes who went before us, and a wide range of ships and submarines - - San Jose, San Diego, Los Angeles, St. Paul, Chicago - - named for our cities.

I miss the underway replenishments which were, at the same time, thrilling and fearful events as officer-of-the-deck. You brought your ship alongside within 100 yards another, usually of much larger size, battling the hydrodynamics of attraction between two ships in such close proximity, and maintaining station as lines came across connecting you to another vessel, while maintaining 12 knots the entire time you were there, and you hoped that no sudden emergencies would call for a quick disconnect, and you practiced what to do if such happened the whole time you were at it. Helicopters would be flying back and forth delivering stores and mail, and excitement would be subdued yet palpable, as your ship was reinvigorated for her continuing time at sea. Then would come the final tempo of a break-away song as the ships disconnected and went their own way, distinctive to each ship, chosen to instill pride and aplomb, blaring through the topside speakers as we pulled away from the replenishment ship after refueling or receiving stores at sea.

I miss liberty call and the new scents of a foreign port, the adventures to be found, the excitement they held, and how much they made me miss home.

I even miss the never ending paperwork, PMS, PQS, fitreps, evals, messages, and on and on; sometimes the ship seemed to float more on paper than it did on water.

There were the “all hands” working parties as the ship prepared for underway, filling her with the multitude of supplies, both mundane and crucial, that made independent life at sea possible. I miss the surge of adventure in my heart when the word was passed: "Now set the special sea and anchor detail - all hands to quarters for leaving port," and I miss the infectious thrill of sighting home again, with the waving hands of welcome from family and friends waiting pier side.

I miss Sailors, officers and enlisted men from all parts of the land, farms of the Midwest, small towns of New England, from the cities, the mountains and the prairies, from all walks of life. I trusted and depended on them as they trusted and depended on me - for professional competence, for comradeship, for strength and courage. In a word, they were "shipmates"; then and forever.

The work was hard and sometimes dangerous; the going rough at times; the parting from loved ones painful, but the companionship of robust Navy laughter, the "all for one and one for all" philosophy of the sea was ever present.

I miss the serenity of the sea after a day of hard ship's work, as flying fish flitted across the wave tops and sunset gave way to night, and in warmer climes the bio-luminescent trail left behind as the ship made her way to wherever she was going, or departing port at high speed to find dolphins effortlessly riding the ship's bow wake as we headed out to sea.

I miss the feel of the Navy in darkness - the masthead and range lights, the red and green navigation lights and stern light, the pulsating phosphorescence of radar repeaters - they cut through the dusk and joined with the mirror of stars overhead. And I miss drifting off to sleep lulled by the myriad noises large and small that told me that the ship was alive and well, and that my shipmates on watch would keep me safe.

I miss quiet mid-watches with the aroma of strong coffee, the lifeblood of the Navy, permeating everywhere from coffee pots rarely scoured. Quiet, save for the thrumming and vibration of the equipment permeating the ship, red lights only to maintain night vision, and a night sky the likes of which is nary to be seen by anyone ashore.

And then I miss hectic watches when the exacting minuet of haze-gray shapes racing at flank speed kept all hands on a razor edge of alertness, reading signals sent aloft as signal flags to yardarms for orders and acknowledgements, signals read and understood, finding the course to station, “Make it so”, and executing smartly.

I miss the engineroom, the smell of oil and fuel, the heat, humidity, and noise; where the snipes worked as a special breed, sustaining the heart and nearly all the other essential organs of the ship, providing speed, power, air, and water to those who otherwise take these things for granter. Snipes, first to arrive, last to leave, and usually only appreciated and understood by fellow snipes.

I miss the sudden electricity of "General quarters, general quarters, all hands man your battle stations," followed by the hurried clamor of running feet on ladders and the resounding thump of watertight doors as the ship transformed herself in a few brief seconds from a peaceful workplace to a weapon of war -- ready for anything.

I miss the traditions of the Navy: 12 O' Clock reports; Crossing the Line; Colors; the respect conferred to the wardroom and chief's mess; the use of the ship's bell to announce arrivals and departures, and so much more.

I recall the proud names of Navy heroes: Halsey, Nimitz, Perry, Farragut, John Paul Jones, Burke, and Hopper. A Sailor could find much in the Navy: comrades-in-arms, pride in self and country, mastery of the seaman's trade; an adolescent could find adulthood.

In years to come, when sailors are home from the sea, they will still remember with fondness and respect the ocean in all its moods – the impossible shimmering mirror calm and the storm-tossed green water surging over the bow. And then there will come again a faint whiff of stack gas, a faint echo of engine and rudder orders, a vision of the bright bunting of signal flags snapping at the yardarm, a refrain of hearty laughter in the wardroom and chief's quarters and
mess decks.

Gone ashore for good they will grow wistful about their Navy days, when the seas belonged to them and a new port of call was ever over the horizon.

Remembering this, they will stand taller and say, "I WAS A SAILOR ONCE."

2006-03-21T17:31:00.000-05:00

Regime Change: Here We Go Again

Mohammad Shah & Reza Shah - You can't trust either one them.

Three weeks ago in The New Yorker, Connie Brucks wrote "Exiles", about Iranian expatriates and, more importantly, what the U.S. government and those that try to influence it think about what the U.S. should do with regard to Iran. Given my own interest in Iran and my country's misadventures of late, I can't help but comment, even if belatedly.

According to Brucks there's a significant number of neoconservatives running around who'd love to see the U.S. overthrow the government of Iran - after the neo-con screw up in Iraq it's hard to believe that these people still show their faces and get attention, but then that's how you survive in DC - you're shameless and do what you can to get press. Apparently the neo-cons are looking for an Iranian version of the Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi, a chameleon who certainly couldn't have made his neo-con supporters very happy given his tap dancing in Iraq once he was on his own. What's really amazing, given it's fundamental idiocy, is that Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, is potentially in line to be the anointed recipient of American support to cause regime change in Iran, something only the geniuses that brought us the Iraq debacle could come up with.

There are many reasons to have a problem with Pahlavi, not the least being that he's every bit as insipid as his father, Mohammad Shah, was. Then there's the historical clumsiness that's attendant to this. Mohammad Shah was on the outs with the Iranian government in the early 1950's, and for all intents and purposes was out of a job as a monarch; the government of Mossadeq was in charge and a new dawn was coming to Iran, and Mohammad had fled the country. The British, who after WW II had the most to lose by an Iran-first government such as Mossadeq's, and it was not happy about Mossadeq and his clique. The British decided to do something about Mossadeq, but it needed the U.S. government to help it. So with funding from the CIA the British and CIA agents in Iran at the time were able to stage a coup against Mossdadeq and they brought the Shah back to the throne and control over the government. He immediately proceeded to work out oil terms that were highly favorable to the British and which essentially guaranteed his place on the throne until his abuses came home to roost in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution and Ayatollah Khomeini. So the neo-cons want to send Reza Shah back to Iran, repeating a historical incidence of meddling by the U.S. government which Iranians, who otherwise tend to like this country, still feel very strongly about. How clever is that?

Reza Pahlavi apparently has a strong following from monarchists in the DC and LA ( the LAranians) Iranian communities. How anyone but an Iranian monarchist, especially in the U.S. government, could take seriously putting a Pahlavi back on the throne simply stretches the imagination, regardless of the historical stupidity it calls up. But then we're talking about neo-cons, and, well, what's another silly contradiction, like a democracy supporting a monarchist, when we have such a wonderful track record of contradictions lately, largely attributable to neo-cons, to wit:

- Going after non-existent WMD in Iraq actually encourages nuclear weapon development in Iran.

- Fighting terrorists "over there instead of here" has increased the overall number of terrorists over there, and the enmity felt towards the U.S. by many living "over there" has increased as well.

- Exporting democracy puts theocratically-inclined organizations like Hamas, the Islamic Brotherhood, and the Iraqi Shia majority into power.

- And to facilitate regime change in Iran, the neo-cons support the Mujahideen-e Khaleq (the People's Mujahideen, or otherwise the MEK), a group our own government lists as a terrorist organization, with the ultimate hope that they'll be the spearhead to change in Iran - so in our war on terrorism we're apparently not above employing terrorists we happen to agree with, or who may otherwise serve our purposes.

There's a great deal of talk these days about how Iran is a major threat to this country. I question to what extent that this is true, but what I'm sure of is that if the people who got us into the mess in Iraq are the ones trying to plan how we handle Iran, then we're in for a world of hurt. I have a hard time believing that anyone in the government would seriously think of military action against Iran, but I suppose "all options are on the table", as the president and vice-president like to tell the world. I for the life of me can't understand why aggressive diplomatic moves, wherein the U.S. swallows its pride with regard to its embassy being taken over in '79 (I mean, really, we helped to overthrow one of their governments, stuck them with a Shah they didn't want for some 25 years, show down one of their airliners, isn't it about time we were a bit more conciliatory here?), and really pushes positive initiatives to come to terms with the Iranians that would make the peoples of both countries happy, vice feeling like the other country is a threat to happiness, prosperity, and, on the whole, existence.

2006-03-19T21:08:00.000-05:00

How Am I?

More than a few of you have asked me how I was now with a baby in my life, and the last one to ask was my cousin Jennifer. In the interest of efficiency, and let me tell you a baby either makes you VERY efficient or otherwise insane, I will share with the rest of you what I shared with Jenn:

How am I ... it's hard to say. On the whole happy and amazed, but there's so much that goes into this that I hadn't a clue about, was warned about but never to the degree that reality seems to bring it, and there's nearly never a twist or turn that occurs right now that was in the least bit anticipated. The idea that you're so totally at the beck and call of someone that's only two weeks old, there's just no way in the world to be totally prepared for it, aside quite possibly from having gone through it before but even then I doubt you're fully prepared the next time, you just have less of a reason to be surprised by it all when it happens again.

With Feri's mom here getting sleep during the week, i.e. for work, has been possible, leaving the baby care with Feri and her mom - part of me feels guilty, but a more common sensical part of me kicks in and appreciates that a sleepy daddy riding on I-95 at 6 in the morning likely doesn't have a very good long range survival prospect and if he doesn't survive there's one less bill payer and occasional caregiver around, so get the sleep when you can and feel blessed about it. I sleep on the couch-bed during the week and mom takes the bed with Feri, and on the weekend we swap places - I never had a reason to completely look forward to work days before ... I mean I enjoy work, I like going to work, but there's this part of me still that would just love to stay home, read, and do whatever. Now the work week comes with a pretty set guarantee of getting a full night's sleep, which isn't what comes with the weekend. My quality of life of life and ability to go to work with an unmuddled brain would be vastly different were it not for my wife and mother-in-law, especially this mother-in-law who's willing to take on all that she does.

The baby's in good shape overall, and apparently doing better than the pediatrician expects for a baby her age. I'll just nod my head with that, be
grateful for it now, and hope that it continues. Overall she's lovely, I'm totally smitten, and therefore don't mind nearly as much as I might otherwise that I'm a total slave to the mood, desires, and needs of this bundle of humanity who seems right now to live to sleep, defecate/pee, and occasionally give a look that seems like a smile, which in turns captures your heart, but really, with a realistic assessment, you have to admit is likely her passing some sort of gas. How sick is that, really - your life with this person hinges on the happiness you derive from a smile that's likely just a belch in disguise? Weird ...

So that, in a not so small nutshell, is how I'm doing. I guess it's normal, and on the whole I'm not complaining so there's something to be said for that, so therefore life is good, and thank God tomorrow's Monday and I can go to bed right after I send this - who'd have thought a baby would make me be happy for Monday's? Go figure ...

2006-03-11T14:50:00.000-05:00

Sure We Have a Vaccine, But We Want You Scared!

Taken from I am the Boss of You

The White House vs. the Laboratory is Michael Specter's piece in this week's The New Yorker
[Note: all quotes in this blog are taken from Specter's article ]. Anyone who has visited this blog with any degree of regularity knows I have no love for this Administration and so much of what it is responsible for, but Specter's article highlights another flavor of Administration Christian fundamentalist horse manure that constitutes a threat to public health and safety.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) comes in about 100 different strains, two of which are responsible for genital warts, and another two that have been tied to cancer. As one would rightly suspect, the two tied to cancer are of particular concern in the medical community. The carcinogenic versions are STDs, and while they may affect either sex they predominately are responsible for cervical cancer. The problem with HPV is that there are no tell-tale indicators that you've been infected with the cancerous version until the damage is done, and there's little to protect oneself from the virus with, though condoms are better than nothing - well, of course there's abstinence and that's pretty much 100% effective against all STDs . About 5,000 women die from cervical cancer every year in the U.S., and it's believed that a large majority of those cancers are attributable to the virus.

But there's good news, GlaxoSmithKline has come up with a vaccine for HPV and it appears that when given early enough, in childhood before sexual activity has begun, it effectively protects women from HPV infection. So what we have here is a bonafide cancer vaccine and we should all be very happy. Of course that's a bit too simplistic, i.e. we have a vaccine against a deadly disease and therefore should rejoice. No the Christian Right, with its odd logic and perspective, weighs in with Leslee J. Unruh, the founder and president of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, telling us:

"I personally object to vaccinating children when they don't need vaccinations, particularly against a disease that is one hundred percent preventable with proper sexual behavior. Premarital sex is dangerous, even deadly. Let's not encourage it by vaccinating ten-year-olds so they think they're safe."

Wow ... don't need vaccinations ... what calculus of life does anyone use to determine if one needs a vaccination or not? Ok, I can appreciate not being vaccinated for smallpox, a disease which has effectively been eradicated from the planet (barring that stored in U.S. and Russian government freezers), but HPV is everywhere so how do you rationalize not vaccinating against a reasonable possibility of infection, which may result in a deadly medical condition? Should we also not provide liver transplants to alcoholics? I mean why should we give an alcoholic the hope that they may be able to live a normal life after they destroyed their liver, doesn't that just encourage their addictive behavior? Should we withhold insulin from type II diabetics who managed to incur their disease due to bad life habits - let them know that a miserable death is the penalty for eating too many Krispy Cremes? Or more directly in keeping with Ms. Unruh's philosophy, let's withhold antibiotics from anyone who gets a bacterial STD, surely anyone who indulged the folly of premarital sex deserves the dementia that comes with late stage syphilis.

And this isn't just about HPV, no indeed, as Reginald Finger, who sits on the Center for Disease Control's Immunization Committee, which is responsible at the national level for recommending vaccinations and when they're provided, in discussing the possibility of an HIV vaccine, stated:

"We would have to look at that closely. With any vaccine for HIV, disinhibition [a medical term for the absence of fear] would certainly be a factor, and it is something we will have to pay attention to with a great deal of care."

Finger's point is that the "fear" aspect of HIV is a good thing, it supports a rationale for abstinence. So if an HIV vaccine is a dis-inhibitor then the disease itself must be considered to be an inhibitor; only some religious loop job would come through with a logic that involves a virus in some grand moral design in support of abstinence, and this particular loop job is part of the process that determines if, when, and to whom vaccinations are given.

The problem is that this application of morality to disease is rampant in government these days. Specter's article brings us Senator Tom Coburn (R-Ok), a family physician no less, who argues that since condoms can fail, the nation should stop relying on them, and who from personal experience with treating HPV infected patients states that "Studies have indicated for years that promiscuity was associated with cervical cancer." Well, yes, fine, and what does that have to do with trying to prevent or cure the disease? What logic causes one to think that they're going to cause an entire nation, or world for that matter, to suddenly come on board to abstinence? And do these people have evidence to support that strictly abstinence-based programs are the cure-all to diseases like HPV? No, they don't, in fact what's out there supports quite the contrary. So fundamentally they must expect that at least good Christians will be abstinence adherents and the rest of the world can go waste away and die - a sort of indirect religious-based genocide.

Non-abstinence is not illegal in this country, or for that matter in most countries, and people like Unruh, Finger, and Coburn would relegate those they consider to be "promiscuous" to a death sentence, or with otherwise having to wrestle with a deadly disease for the rest of their lives all in the name of a faith-based moral agenda. That is morally wrong, in fact unconscionable in any rational perspective except, it appears, the Christian Right's. There are many good reasons to be working to cause a change in this government, and frankly Specter's article highlights an excellent one.

2006-03-07T13:27:00.000-05:00

Wal-Mart Taking Over the Blogosphere, Too?!?

Taken from The Black Commentator

Ok, the blogosphere is mostly free so there's really nothing for Wal-Mart to take over, but then like a lot else the company does it doesn't have a problem with abusing the blogosphere as we find in an interesting article in today's NY Times by Michael Barbaro, Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in P.R. Campaign. Apparently Wal-Mart's trying to buff up its image and is using blogs in its campaign. I guess desperate situations warrant desperate measures, but then you have to wonder about a company that has to spoon feed bloggers with lines for their blogs in order to help them put a shine on a company that deserves an awful lot of the bad press that it gets. What I find especially interesting is how the corrective effort is essentially focused on PR, vice actually trying to do something positive about the legitimate problems people have with the way it treats its employees, all in the name of reducing cost.

I appreciate how the lowest cost is important to a lot of people, but I also appreciate that when the lowest cost comes on the backs of people who work to help provide that low cost that there's something fundamentally wrong with that. I guess in a strictly libertarian or Adam Smith sort of way of looking at the world this is just the cost of capitalism, but in point of fact it's not just those working for Wal-Mart who get shafted, it's everyone who pays taxes. When a Wal-Mart employee has to go on public assistance, and many do, or are unable to afford healthcare and have to apply for healthcare financial assistance, it's the taxpayer who gets to pick up the bill. Yes, you paid less for that cheapo Wal-Mart product, but that's just less money out of your pocket at the checkout counter, not in lower taxes or being able to use your taxes for something other than subsidizing Wal-Mart's piss poor healthcare program. Now of course we can get into a very good discussion regarding whether an employer should be responsible for healthcare, and good arguments can be made for why they shouldn't, but the de facto system now is that the employer is the principal healthcare provider and Wal-Mart, in the interest of cost efficiency, shucks that responsibility everywhere it can, though with recent legislation apparently not in Maryland and a few other states with similar legislation designed to hold Wal-Mart accountable.

I don't shop at Wal-Mart primarily because I don't support how it treats its employees, especially in contrast to a company like Costco which has a business model that's similar to Wal-Mart's but pays its employees well and provides them with adequate healthcare. Yes, Wal-Mart is not the only company guilty of treating its employees poorly, and very likely it's not the most egregious company in this regard. But it's the largest, it's the one with the most press, and maybe by pushing it into correcting for treating its employees like anything else it can wring a cost reduction from, a standard for employment can be established in this country that's just, equitable, and respectful of the average American worker who, on the whole, just wants to do a good job, get paid a decent wage, and be treated with the same respect and consideration most of us take for granted, or at least should.

2006-03-05T13:28:00.000-05:00

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury for March 5, courtesy of UComics.com

2006-03-03T21:13:00.000-05:00

She Arrived This Morning

It all started around 4:30 in the afternoon yesterday, we wound up in the hospital around 6 that evening, and at 10:06 the following morning out she came, Sogand.

The nurses and doctors at Women and Infants' Hospital were flat outstanding. Helpful, caring, and professional to a person, doing everything they could to make this as easy and quick as possible, but making it clear that they were working with us, not just driving the show on their own, for their own reasons.

My wife is my hero. She never complained, never yelled, never screamed - I have no clue how she managed that, I have no idea where she got the strength, I have little doubt that I would have found it personally pretty damn near impossible to show the class and guts she did - I adore my wife.

And this one - here she is, maybe all of 10 mins old, and the second I saw her, this strangely formed human mass, first hung upside by her legs, covered in the mess of being born, whose umbilical cord I got to cut, separating her from her mother and suddently bringing her into my life, too. I fell totally, heads over heels in love with her in an instant. I never have experienced anything like this, I have no clue where this comes from, but I know she's now everything to me in a way that only my wife came close to filling before. I know that I have much to learn about her, but already I can catch a glimmer of personality and personhood, and my guess is that this is going to be a very interesting young lady indeed.

In the end this is what I know - I'm happy, a bit scared, and glad to have experienced this moment.

2006-03-01T07:19:00.000-05:00

The Carnival of the Vanities

The latest edition of the Carnival of the Vanities is up and running, give it a looksee if you have some time.

2006-02-28T21:48:00.000-05:00

My First Year in the Navy

Iwo Jima Class Amphibious Assault Ship, LPH

USS Jouett (CG-29)

It's been a while since I wrote about my adventure in the Navy, and I feel the urge to get back into it now, so ...

After graduating from Officer Candidate School in Newport, RI in Feb of 1981, I was to eventually to make my way to the USS Tripoli, which was homeported in San Diego, CA. The Tripoli was an LPH, an Iwo Jima class amphibious assault ship - all but one of this ship class, the "one" being the USS Inchon which is serving as a mine countermeasure ship, are decommissioned, with Tripoli taken out of service in 1995. She was large in size as ships go -
not as big as a modern aircraft carrier (though to get a sense of her size, the first three ships designated as LPHs, which were built differently from the later LPHs, were Essex-class aircraft carriers from WWII - today's carriers are about twice the size of the fully loaded Essex class ships) but bigger than the average surface ship floating around in the inventory at that time.

Going to the Tripoli wasn't what you'd call an ideal job for a new surface officer (the Navy's communities were broken into three main groups (there are many small communities as well, but the three main groups make up the lion's share of the Navy community), aviators who went to fly, submariners who went to submarines, and surface officers who went to any of the many ships in the Navy's surface ship inventory) inasmuch as LPHs weren't considered "fighting" ships like frigates, destroyers, cruisers, and, at the time once again, battleships were. Moreover an LPH supported two functions that the surface line community didn't have much use for, Marines (she carried a little over 1700 Marines during a deployment) and helicopters used to deliver Marines to the beach, or wherever they were to "storm". The ship's captain was a Navy aviator, similar to a "regular" aircraft carrier and in keeping with the ship's primary raison d’être, which was aviation focused. So Tripoli was designed to support Marines and aviation, which meant that surface warfare officers (SWOs), who were really on the Earth to support war at sea on board ships with guns and missiles, neither of which had much place on an LPH, didn't have much of a place on board. Bottom line, not what you'd consider to be an optimal assignment for a new surface officer.

The one good thing about the Tripoli was that she was on the west coast, which was ultimately where I wanted to go just to be somewhere different for a few years having lived in NYC my whole life. On the whole it didn't matter much to me that I wasn't going to an ideal SWO slot, though it did rub me wrong to some degree. This all came down to my class standing, never
particularly high due to my low grades in military bearing and the general sense of my company officer (shared with me in private one day during a "counseling" session) that on some level I didn't really see myself as belonging in this organization. The higher up in class rank you were the more options you had to for going to what you wanted to go, wherever that might be, and running in essentially in the middle of the pack didn't leave many options, though getting on the west coast wasn't that hard.

I left Rhode Island in February to go to Surface Warfare Officer School (SWOS) in San Diego, CA. At that time there was a SWOS on the east coast and one on the west coast, and those assigned to west coast ships went to San Diego for SWOS. SWOS training was a 20 week school for all new surface warfare officers going to ships for the first time, at least as officers (there was a number of us who were prior-enlisted personnel before going to OCS and they'd been on ships before.) You learned all the basics here, and if there was a need for follow-on schools you left from SWOS to those, and then finally wound up at whatever ship you'd be assigned to. The problem for me was that school didn't start until June, leaving me with three months in between. The Navy had a way of dealing with this, as one would expect, and that was to send new officers in-between schools as "stashes" on ships - this way the Navy didn't have to pay per diem or living expenses, and ostensibly the newly minted Navy Ensigns would get some bonafide experience to help season them as new officers. My stash assignment was to the USS Jouett (CG-29), a cruiser in what was termed at the time a baseline overhaul, which essentially meant she was having major work done on her from stem to stern, all at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. At the time Long Beach was a shipyard actually owned and operated by the Navy, a business it has since gotten itself out of.

The Jouett was a cruiser (she, along with the rest of her class, was decommissioned in the 1993 to 1995 time frame after 30 years of service), an honest-to-God fighting ship, with a weapons suite that at the time was pretty much going to be top-of-the-line as these things go as soon as she was done with her overhaul. Jouett was one of 9 Belknap class cruisers, which meant she had a single 5" gun aft and a double-armed missile mount forward (in the lingo of the day a "double-armed bandit".). She also carried torpedoes and anti-submarine rockets which gave her an independent anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capability, and she was outfitted with quad-tubes carrying a total of 8 Harpoon anti-ship missiles when they came into fad in the 80's. The Belknap stood in contrast to the other predominate cruiser class at the time, the Leahy-class cruisers (all nine of those decommissioned in the same time frame as the Belknaps), whose main difference was in having two missile launchers, a double-armed launcher both forward and aft; in all other respects the ships were essentially the same, with the same appearance and engineering suite.

At this point in my life, a new Navy Ensign, going to California, I was in for quite an adventure and one that at the start was so for reasons I wouldn't have expected. Long Beach Naval Shipyard, as it turns out, is found between the cities of Long Beach to the south, and San Pedro to the north. The facility itself was located on an island, very aptly named Terminal Island, situated in between both cities and connected to them via a long bridge, half of which started in San Pedro (or Long Beach, your choice) and ended on Terminal Island, and then started on Terminal Island and ended in Long Beach. My problem was that I came to Terminal Island sans a driver's license, which therefore meant that my only way of getting from the base to anywhere else was through the good graces of a shipmate or via public transportation, and I soon came to realize that California's notion of public transportation comes nowhere near what I came to expect and understand growing up in NYC.

Well that sets the stage for the first part of my beginning year in the Navy, till next time ...

2006-02-25T22:36:00.000-05:00

All Stolen From PostSecret

2006-02-25T16:17:00.000-05:00

The Memory of a Killer

A good movie for a snowy Saturday - well, I'll even go one better, a good movie, period, regardless of the weather. A Flemish cinematic experience and, to be honest, I'm not sure I've had one of those before. The story is not terribly original, but it has enough going for it with the actors and the overall fast pace that you're likely to enjoy it as we did. Give it a go, I doubt you'll be disappointed.

2006-02-24T08:32:00.000-05:00

Inasmuch as I'm reading James Risen's book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration", and Risen was one of the two reporters responsible for outing the NSA surveillance program, this cartoon seemed especially apropos with my mindset of late.

2006-02-23T13:17:00.000-05:00

Time for Another Bushie Reflection

Ok, maybe the cartoon's not entirely fair, I mean Hitler may have been intelligent but that didn't stop him from murdering some 9 million people, and winning military campaigns in the end doesn't matter much if, as it turns out, you in fact lose the war (just ask Robert E. Lee.) But it's sort of nasty enough as cartoons go and right now I'm particularly not happy with regard to G.W. Bush, but then you can legitimately ask, "So what else is not new?". Ok, so this go around I have the time to rant a bit about it and maybe that will make me feel better in the end.

I've been reading a lot in my time off, and, thank God, it's not all school stuff. I'm well into James Risen's "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" and have just read Paul Pillar's piece in the March/April 2006 edition of Foreign Affairs (Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq). I learned about Pillar from Terry Gross' "Fresh Air", specifically her show for 16 Feb, CIA Terror Expert Charges Politicized Intelligence, where Pillar came on to discuss his Foreign Affairs article. I would say that these three things have resulted in a tipping point for me vis-a-vis how not happy I am with this administration.

Risen, the reporter for the NY Times who was in part responsible for exposing the administration's wiretapping/email reading activities through the NSA, makes an extraordinary case for how the administration and its peons were doing everything they could to make a case for invading Iraq, regardless of however much the evidence supported the fact that Iraq was not a threat to this country. Anyone who's followed this issue knows that the administration was embarrassed when nothing was found in Iraq vis-a-vis weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but hey, anyone can make a mistake, right? Well, it goes beyond that, it goes to the point where there's flat out no reason why the administration should have concluded that such weapons existed at all, and the only reason that the CIA and anyone else out there gave the impression that there was a WMD problem was because the administration wanted one to exist so as to justify what it subsequently went off and did.

Let me be more specific, there was a CIA official by the name of Charlie Allen. Realizing that the CIA knew next to nothing about what was actually going on inside of Iraq he and right before the actual invasion came up with the rather clever idea of asking the American relatives of scientists involved in Iraqi WMD programs to go back to the country and speak to their relatives to find out from them where the programs were at. The relatives were provided very specific questions and in the end some 30 went in and returned. And this is what came from that:

"All of them --- some thirty --- had said the same thing. They all reported to the CIA that the scientists had said that Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long since been abandoned. Charlie Allen's program to use family members to contact dozens of Iraqi scientists had garnered remarkable results and given the CIA an accurate assessment of the abandoned state of Iraq's weapons programs before the U.S. invasion in March 2003." (page 106, Risen)

The end result of this amazing intelligence coup? Well as you might have guessed, it was ignored, flat out ignored, buried, no one in a position to make a difference was briefed on it, and it didn't see the light of day, at least at any point where it may have made any difference in how events transpired vis-a-vis this country and Iraq. Risen doesn't directly blame Bush for this. Rather he points to jealousy within the CIA itself, specifically against Allen and his success, so his information was ignored and now we're in a hole for thousands of American lives, many more Iraqi lives, and how much money I've simply lost track. Indirectly the case can be made against Bush - the fact was he, and those working for him, weren't interested in this sort of information as it didn't support his doing what he wanted to do.

Ok, any kind reader who's gone this far is no doubt saying, "Hey, something of a leap there big guy, I mean if the president wasn't informed why is he responsible for this withholding of information which, had it been known, would have ruined the principle casus belli for this entire adventure?" Well, here's where Pillar's article comes in (not that Risen elsewhere in his book doesn't make enough of a case for this). The following is the summary to the article:

"During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case."

The Bush administration and it's major cheerleaders, Rumsfeld and Cheney, were doing what they could to shape intelligence to tell the story they wanted it to tell, vice letting the intelligence tell the story on its own. This was most egregiously the case in the Pentagon, specifically under Douglas Feith who organized the "Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group." Feith's group was responsible for taking the "raw" intelligence mentioned by Pillar, and kneading and squeezing it into what the administration wanted to hear. Feith and his immediate boss Paul Wolfowitz, didn't trust the CIA, didn't trust the professional intelligence analysts, and they were strongly convinced, alas for largely ideological reasons, that the evidence to support what the administration wanted to do was there, it simply needed to be coaxed out and taken out of the hands of CIA naysayers.

So what do we get for all of this? Essentially we were lied to by an administration that:

- manipulated intelligence information that was only used after it was run through an ideological filter

- didn't conduct anywhere near the honest due diligence that, of all things, an invasion of another country would require

- has since changed its tune from entering Iraq because of the danger of WMD to that of exporting democracy to the world, something the American people would not have likely bought into when this whole thing started and the planning for which, if ever this was a serious "export" consideration, was lacking to the point of flat out negligence and ineptitude

- and, lastly, has handed the American people a bill for our folly in Iraq that's continuing to grow daily with no immediate end in sight, and with nothing close to a guarantee that what we get out of this is going to be substantively more in our favor than what we started with. What we do know is that it sure and hell isn't going to result in Osama bin Laden, or most of his followers, being caught - for 200 plus billions of dollars that might have ameliorated the wool being pulled over our eyes by our own officials, but not by much

and, bottom line, we have an administration that's not being held accountable for any of this, which truly stretches the neurons in my brain.

Later I'll rant about taxes, our love affairs with torture, and anything else about Bush that at the time has caught my ire - bet ya can't wait, right?

2006-02-20T21:17:00.000-05:00

Oh How the Time Flies ...

"Time Flies" courtesy of Barbara Wills Designs

I just finished moving my computer from the living room into, of all places, the kitchen. Not much choice there, my wife's computer has to come out of the bedroom to make room for the crib that I'll be piecing together tomorrow. Therefore the only place for her computer is the living room inasmuch as my mother-in-law, God bless her soul, is now sleeping there and I wouldn't be able to use my computer at the odd hours I'm inclined to if I didn't move my
computer. So, into the kitchen we go.

An odd day on the whole, one that was focused on doing lots of laundry. Of course there was the stuff we normally have to do on a weekly basis, but then there was the need to clean all of the baby's newly bought stuff and that was a funny experience. The baby's stuff wasn't washed with everything else, in fact she has her own detergent, Dreft. I never heard of Dreft before, but I suppose that just measures to some degree my parental obliviousness factor. As soon as the baby was solidly on the horizon little gems like Dreft popped up. After being told about it we found it in our local supermarket where we bought a box of the stuff. Yesterday, running through Costco, we found that it's also in liquid form so we bought a large 128 oz bottle of it there - I'm pretty sure that at this point I can do the neighborhood baby laundry for at
least a week.

But the laundry thing caught me. I never considered what goes through my mind when I took laundry out of the machines we use to clean and dry our clothes. On the whole it's a mindless activity really, at least it is for me. There are times, though, when you hit on something like, "Wow, I really like this sweatshirt and how it smells", or some recollection that's tied to a specific piece of clothing. It's a bit odder when you find yourself doing someone else's laundry as well, something I hadn't had to do for many years and now, in the last three, I've had my wife's clothes to deal with, too. There's an intimacy of a sort that goes with doing someone else's laundry, you're sharing secrets directly and indirectly, and it's been a change for me to have to mingle someone else's stuff with mine. But this baby laundry thing, that was different.

Of course the baby's not here yet, though we're at the 37th week so the baby is totally viable at this point and it's a matter of any day now. We have tons of clothing for her, from family and friends, in fact now that I think about it I'm not sure we've bought anything at all for the baby when it comes to clothes. Touching her clothes, smelling them after the first wash, and then loading them all into the laundry bag to bring them back into the apartment, was all so strange. I was handling the clothing for a person that's not here yet, that will be a major part of my life, that will be adding significantly to future loads of laundry, that ... well, you get the idea, or maybe I really can't adequately explain the whole thing. What I know is that I had this strange sense of so much changing very soon, and that it's not just computers being moved around the house that will drastically be different very soon.

I retired from the Navy four years ago, got married three years ago, started a new job as a teacher six months ago, and now we're having a baby. I must be a glutton for change, upheaval, or whatever one uses to describe pulling the carpet out from under one's legs on a fairly routine basis. I'm not sure that this is necessarily a bad thing, and on the whole I do seem to flow with the whole thing fairly well, but then it does cause me to wonder about myself and life in general, and where it's all going and the company I'll be keeping as I go along the way.

2006-02-12T09:42:00.000-05:00

Darn If He Isn't Right ...

Courtesy of Garry Trudeau and UComics.com

I don't think it would have ever occurred to me until seeing this this morning, but damn it's true. In this case the apple fell VERY far from the tree.

2006-02-11T15:04:00.000-05:00

How Ethical Are Scientists?

I suppose the title to this post would infer that I think the majority of scientists aren't ethical, and that's not the case at all. But there's a significant number of them out there that clearly have a problem with ethics. What seems to be a big problem with this group of people is that for some reason they don't seem to see there being any problem with doing something that's unethical, and not just something small but something that would be seen without much difficulty by the average Jane or Joe as unethical or certainly very ethically questionable. The case in point that caught my attention was University Panel Faults Cloning Co-Author in today's NY Times.

The article is about Dr. Gerald Schatten, a biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, who allegedly co-authored the now infamous human cloning paper published in Science with the South Korean scientist Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. Schatten's co-authoring in this case seemed to have amounted to little more than doing what he could (what that was is not made clear) to help Hwang have a paper addressing his cloning work, or rather his fabricated cloning work, accepted in Science after it was originally rejected by this prestigious journal. For this effort Schatten was made a co-author on a paper he apparently never bothered to critically read or otherwise in anyway contribute, he was provided $40,000 in honorariums, and he applied through Hwang for a $200,000 grant which was expected to be renewed yearly. While the grant would otherwise seem to be an unreasonable expectation, it needs to be recalled that Hwang, after his paper was published and the acclaim of the world and his country was being lavished upon him, was knee deep in money from the South Korean government and other sources, so funding Schatten would not have been beyond him to do.

Schatten at some point clearly went over the edge on ethical behavior, and of late we read about doctors receiving drug company honorariums that are far beyond anything the doctors in question could legitimately be doing besides being bought off. These are the more egregious examples of late, but what has me wondering are those cases that aren't likely to make it into the Times but are otherwise a part of the standard operating procedure in academia. It's the petty ethical breaches that occur so commonly which, I believe, lead to something extraordinary as exemplified by Schatten.

Why do American professors like foreign-trained graduate students and post-docs? Many would argue that it's because they can't find Americans who are equally as qualified because we're not pumping out the students with the necessary training and abilities. While there's undoubtedly truth to this I also see that the foreigners in question are more apt to work long hours, not take their vacations, and otherwise be unaware of their benefits/rights when it comes to employment in this country. Those that are aware are often are too afraid to ask questions out of fear of losing their position or their visa renewal and the complications that come with that, and there are a lot of professors out there who unconcernedly take advantage of this, sometimes deliberately and other times by deliberate ignorance.

At a local ivy-league university post-docs are paid for 11 vice 12 months, with the expectation that that 1 month without pay (that doesn't really occur, the 11 months of pay is pro-rated over 12 months) is for vacation. Would you like to guess how many post-docs actually get a month off? Do you think there's anyone tracking this? This struck me especially as when I was in the Navy every year you earned 30 days of time off, though the Navy seems to be more enlightened than this particular university inasmuch as we were given 30 days of paid time off. As a supervisor as I was expected to track how much time off my people took and ensure that they in fact did take time off before they lost the time they may have accrued (anything above, if I remember correctly, 65 days could be lost.) If any of your subordinates actually lost time, or went for more than two years without having some time off, you could easily find yourself
in a difficult situation with your own superiors. How many universities have such oversight?

How many post-docs or graduates work at the whim of their mentor/principal investigator on projects that stretch on for years without going anywhere, but especially not resulting in a paper of any significance that would in turn allow the student/post-doc themselves to go somewhere to get their careers on track? How many institutions have an oversight committee for this?

One more thing, which Schatten stands accused of is phantom-authorship on a scientific paper. How many scientists out there find their names on papers that they've essentially not done a thing for? In Schatten's case he seems to have managed to at least get the paper published in Science, no small thing on its own, but did he deserve co-authorship for a paper he didn't contribute a smidgen of work to, especially when his services were otherwise very clearly rewarded? Many senior scientists find their names appearing miraculously on papers that they haven't contributed to in any substantive way, and while they may not be directly making money for this in the way that Schatten did their remuneration arrives in other ways. This amazes me and it's common, so in a strict sense were Schatten to be taken to the dunking chair for this one he'd have a LOT of company. How is such fraud allowed to happen, and how in the world can anyone justify doing it?

I suppose those who otherwise may be inclined to think they're somehow above their fellow citizens intellectually can easily find themselves in situations that are beyond the ethical pale, but since they see themselves as different it seems that how the rules apply to them should also be different. As I said, the egregious cases like Schatten's make for a lot of head shaking, but the fact is that the scientific community is largely unchecked and unregulated when it comes to how it treats its people and how it obtains its money (there are more restrictions on the money and how it's used, though how it's brought in clearly seems to often enough fall into a gray zone), and it shouldn't come as a surprise that abuses will occur, and indeed be institutionalized. It's not just the scientific community, these problems are some of the prime reasons that graduate students have tried to put together a union, which has been strongly opposed by most universities.

Cleaning house of people like Schatten is easy enough, just give them enough bad press and cut their funding and they're gone - but that's not going to solve a ethical problems that need to be more closely looked at and corrected for, and which are far more pervasive then I think many would care to admit.

2006-02-03T17:14:00.000-05:00

We're Getting Close

Sogand at 35 Weeks

We're in the home stretch at this point. Sogand is due in about four weeks. Today we had what is now turning into our weekly doctor's appointment before Sogand arrives and the doctor wanted to do an ultrasound because there were a few things she wanted to be sure of that weren't so clear on the physical examination. While the purpose was entirely clinical it's hard to steer away from getting those extra pictures, and indeed we did, this being one of about 12. You can see Sogand's full lips and her small nose (she, according to my lovely wife, has my wife's lips and my nose, which makes my wife very happy), and you can get a sense of her hand coming up in front of her face. She's head down in mommy, situating herself for her eventual arrival in the world.

It's so weird, she's a person now more so than at any time in the past when we had a chance to see her (oh, just to say so, but we had it confirmed that Sogand is indeed a girl), with some of the images clearly showing a face, she's starting to exercise her diaphragm in preparation for when she'll be breathing apart from mom, and her heart is a strong 144 beats per minute. This whole thing is so amazing, being able to see her like this is incredible and sobering, and I'm looking forward to the next phase of this adventure beginning, which it shall, very soon.

2006-02-01T21:16:00.000-05:00

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Of course that I have something published there this week has nothing at all to do with this unsolicited advertisement ...

2006-02-01T20:59:00.000-05:00

The Middle Eastern Hugo Chavez: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Chavez and Ahmadinejad together during a visit by Chavez to Tehran in 2004

An article by Michael Slackman in Monday’s NY Times, A New Face in Iran Resurrects an Old Defiance, caused me to appreciate how Ahmadinejad and Chavez have more in common than not, and in that context also caused me to appreciate what I think is the true danger Ahmadinejad represents. It's not that he's a conservative, and strictly speaking it's not accurate to label him that way, but rather that he represents a not-so-old way of thinking that is finding traction again in Iran, and given the way things are going and unless the reformists can do something to change their present position, it may well be that he could represent the future for Iran.

Chavez's came to power through the support of the Venezuelan poor and disenfranchised. He's also delivering for them, and this comes in the form of money or the things that money can buy, and a petro-rich country like Venezuela currently has a lot of both. On a similar but slight different note, Hamas is voted into office, in spite of the fact that putting them there threatens aid money from the west, primarily because the people had had it with the corruption
and lack of change that came with the Fatah party and were willing to risk what came with Hamas - again, a populist appeal to the masses and the masses put in charge the person or group most likely to deliver. And now we have Ahmadinejad, a man of the people by all accounts, uncorrupt, religious, and apparently quite sincere, and the people seem to like him.

A couple of days ago in Put the Blame Where the Blame Belongs, I took exception with Hossein
Derekhshan's Op-Ed piece in the NY Times. Now more than ever I see his piece as an attempt by a member of the Iranian intelligentsia, who I'm sure speaks for many with reformist tendencies in and out of Iran, to escape the fact that Ahmadinejad is in power because the reformists and their supporters screwed up, specifically by losing touch with the world outside of Tehran, and truth be told even with a large part of the population in Tehran itself. Ahmadinejad is supported by those people who have gotten the least from their government, who have little to be happy about with the reformists, and who 27 years ago were expecting the most from overthrowing the Shah, but instead have seen little change. These people are fed up with the corruption that is so much a part of their lives, and with not being able to understand why an oil-rich nation like Iran has had little positive to add to their lives; Ahmadinejad, quite literally, is the answer to their prayers.

What was worst about Derekshan's piece was his indulging an unfortunate Middle Eastern tendency to blame the U.S. for whatever's going wrong in that part of the world - of course the CIA is everywhere, our Zionist proclivities stain our policies and actions, and the U.S. is the only superpower around so it's therefore logically reasonable to therefore think it's responsible for everything that goes wrong. It's certainly easier to blame George Bush, or the U.S. government for the problems with the last Iranian election, but it diverts from the fact that what got Ahmadinejad into power is not unlike what put Chavez or Hamas in power, i.e. appealing to the poor and neglected. What's worse in Ahmadinejad's case is that he's a religious zealot in a theocracy, and moreover he's dancing to the tune of a dead Ayatollah, in this case Khomeini, who brought us the Iranian revolution of '79 and whose message, parroted faithfully today by Ahmadinejad, played well with the people when he was still alive.

Ahmadinejad's danger is that he's playing to a base of supporters who long for the deliverance that was promised by Khomeini, but which never materialized. Ahmadinejad wants to deliver on the promise of the revolution, and if he truly gets his hands on the reigns of power, and it would seem he's moving in that direction, not only the reformists but the conservatives will rue that day. A a zealot like Ahmadinejad will pull the rug out from under the established system in Iran, bringing in God only knows what but something that will appeal to the masses, though not the intelligentsia or the money and power loving conservatives, and will clearly put Iran at odds with the west, which seems to be happening more and more everyday.

2006-01-29T09:58:00.000-05:00

Put the Blame Where the Blame Belongs

Iranian President Ahmadinejad expressing support and loyalty to the Iranian "supreme" leader Kahmanei
Source: Wikipedia, photographer un-attributed

Yesterday the following article by Hossein Derekhshan, Democracy's Double Standard appeared in the Op-Ed section of the NY Times. Derekhshan essentially wants to lay part of the blame for the election of Ahmadinejad on George Bush, an interesting notion to say the least, and one more attuned, it seems to me, to trying to divert blame for the Ahmadinejad election from where it should be squarely laid, on the shoulders of Iranian reformists. It's funny in a way, as Derekhshan's piece reminds me of other things I've read where Iranian writers blame the U.S. for many of their historical ails, blowing U.S. involvement out of proportion and conveniently ignoring Iranian complicity in their own problems.

For as much as I'd love to blame Ahmadinejad's election on Bush, Derekhshan overlooks a truism which, if memory serves me well, was famously expressed here in the U.S. by the former leader of the House of Representatives, congressman Tip O'Neil, to wit: "All politics is local"; I'd hazard to guess that this is equally as true in Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, or anywhere else in Iran. Did Bush have some sort of influence on the Iranian election? Who knows, really? Maybe, I'll even generously concede possibly a few percentage points worth, though I mean really, Iranians, in Iran no less, being told what to do by any American president, but much less THIS American president - right, that's realistic.

Without likely knowing it, Derekhshan hits the problem with the last Iranian presidential election right on the head with the following observation in his article:

" ... the philosophy-loving moderate, Mohammad Khatami, was replaced as president by a radical militant, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — a former military
commander who presides over one of the most extreme governments post-revolutionary Iran has yet had."

It does seem that the philosophy-loving moderate was a bit too much in the clouds for most of his 8 years in power, whereas the radical militant, et al., a man whose survival depended on knowing his constituency and what was going on in the street, was telling the people more of what they wanted to hear.

I think the Iranian reformists need to look more closely at how poorly they provided for their constituents, how out of touch they were with those people they were counting to get votes from, and how little they had managed to do in the time they were in power, which was 8 years and therefore no small stretch of time (a lifetime in politics), leaving many average Iranians without a job, healthcare, or much hope into the future in a country where petro-dollars flow, flow and flow, but no one quite seems to know where they go, go, go ... Ahmadinejad ran as a man of the people, and given his past track record and his history of being "clean" in a society and political system where corruption is rampant, this made him very appealing to many, especially when he made a point of appealing very directly to a voting populace of the majority of the disaffected in Iranian society. In the final choice the Iranian people rejected the moderate candidate supported by the reformists because the reformist out-going president Khatami, while possibly a good philosopher president, was a failed president for the people. This left the Iranian people to chose between Ahmadinejad and an old Iranian favorite, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a man cloaked in corruption, duplicity, self-serving machinations of every flavor, and a long list of failed peoples' hopes, and we're supposed to be surprised that a radical militant who promised people jobs and food on the table won? Better yet, we're to blame George Bush for this?

The Palestinian elections were, as near as I can tell, fully democratic and the people had had it with the Fatah Party, rightfully so. It was the voice of the people talking, in as democratic a fashion as I can think of. The Bush administration cannot have a complaint with the process, merely, and to a large degree rightfully so, with the result. Now it's a matter of whether or not the Palestinians can actually make this work for themselves, with a transformation of Hamas that befits a recognition of the meaning of politics and minimizing the harm to the Palestinian people, as the EU and the U.S. both threaten to cut off aid while Hamas vows to stick to its oft and clearly stated goal of eliminating Israel.

In Iran democracy is more at the leisure of the supreme leader and the governing council, and in any true sense of the word "democratic" the process is only as democratic as the cronies at the top feel they need to make it to minimally keep the people happy, and no one doubts that they very definitely control the strings. To look askance at "democracy" in Iran is legitimate enough, and of course in doing so any meaning may be extracted from that, to include thinking that a boycott is what's being suggested. The Bush administration didn't endorse a boycott in Iran, it questioned, legitimately, a process that claims to be a democratic one but isn't. The Iranian people had their own reasons to not vote, ones they may regret now and hopefully will correct for in the coming three years, but George Bush had little to do with planting those reasons there.

So yes, it must feel nice to blame Bush, and God knows there's a lot to blame the man for, but the current government in Iran is not something I'd tie to him. We'll see how the Iranian people really feel in three years, which unfortunately is another lifetime, but maybe then the old guard in the upper reaches of the government will get a message from the Iranian people that they'll find hard to ignore, and we can be just as sure that whoever's the president here in the U.S. at that time will have as little to do with the choices made by a people who know full well how to make their own choices, for their own good reasons.

2006-01-22T19:56:00.000-05:00

Well, Gee, Let's Invade Iran, Too!

Taken from GlobalSecurity.org

Ok, let me preface this up front with a disclosure: I'm married to an Iranian woman I adore, and by virtue of this I have family in Iran, so as you might imagine I'm highly prejudiced on this subject. That said, I'm also sick and fed up with people in DC talking tough so they can look like they have a pair of cujones, especially when their being "tough" means having to send out someone else's spouse or child to actually execute the toughness.

What got me on this subject was the following article in the Times, Lawmakers Push for More Action on Iranian Nuclear Standoff. From this we get the following:

As the Bush administration and its European allies pursue a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear standoff, some top lawmakers from both parties pressed for a more vigorous approach today, including the option of military action.

"There's only one thing worse than the United States exercising the military option," Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said, "and that is Iran having nuclear weapons."

We have Hillary Clinton telling us that the Bush administration is downplaying the Iranian threat - that amazes me, I mean the president of the U.S. has labeled Iran a member of the axis of evil and you can't get a penny into or out of that country without having to go through the U.S. Treasury Dept. So it would appear that what she means is that we should be doing more than throwing silly and counterproductive restrictions and club memberships at Iran. What might that something be? I guess invading or otherwise taking some non-specific military action would be the way to go.

Is there anything out there more dangerous than Iran having nuclear weapons? Well, yes, a true rogue nation like North Korean, which makes its money these days by counterfeiting American currency, drug running, selling rockets to various countries, and who would likely feel that selling nuclear warheads would be a neat get-rich-quick scheme in keeping with its other money making endeavors. Of course North Korea already claims to have nuclear warheads, but nary a democrat or republican seems to be howling to do anything militarily in that country, most likely because they know it would piss off the Chinese and the South Koreans, and the North Koreans would surely not be pushovers, with or without nukes to play with.

Of course Iran has a problem, it doesn't have friends quite like the North Koreans do, though China and Russia do seem to be more in its corner than not. But the Iranians share something with the North Koreans, they wouldn't be pushovers when it came to our doing anything in their country as they're every bit as fanatic as the Koreans are when it comes to the homeland. Anyone who has studied the Iran-Iraq War will know that the Iranians managed to prevent losing to an enemy who had better intelligence (thanks to the U.S.) and arms because they were willing to suffer incredible loses on the battlefield, and there's no reason to believe that this particular proclivity of the Iranians has changed. Doing anything militarily in Iran, short of bombing the place and that would not do a whole heck of a lot except sow hatred for us, would come at the cost of a huge number of American and combatant Iranians (which wouldn't necessarily be those in uniform) and noncombatants, and you don't have to think too very hard to figure how this would play with all the non-rightwing Iranians we've allegedly been trying to curry favor with and help. The Iranians would not roll over like the Iraqis did. Few Iraqis had any true love for Sadaam so they, on the whole, didn't mind losing him. While many Iranians aren't exactly in love with their present government they have no where near the hatred for it that the Iraqis had for theirs, and they are a proud people who would fight any invader with a passion - the Iranians represent an ancient culture and they're used to being alone and facing the world alone, and there's no question in any reasonable person's mind that the Iranian people will most assuredly stand up to any U.S. military action.

Military action in Iran will not work, and it will exacerbate exponentially all of the problems we've managed to bring upon ourselves with Iraq. We've already stretched our military too far and the idea of taking a tired Army and Marine Corps and sending them after the Iranians is the utmost of insanity, not to mention an extraordinary waste of human life.

Diplomacy has to be aggressively exerted, instead we have politicians in DC giving the Iranian government excuses for doing everything they can to come up with nuclear warheads, either by making them themselves or buying them from some willing seller (maybe the same North Koreans who sell them rockets.) Heck, look how well this has worked for the Koreans - they have nukes, or at least so they say, and we haven't invaded. Really, how much more plain a less can you find?

The diplomatic pressure that needs to be exerted should be selective, not like the sanctions imposed on Iraq in toto which resulted in making the lives of innocent Iraqis miserable. The Iranian people in charge should be targeted very specifically and made to feel that they're being ostracized by the world at large, but we need to do whatever we can to not disenfranchise the Iranian people as a whole. Whatever we do must be in league with other nations, and at least so far we're on the right foot with being in the company of England, France, and Germany. Doing whatever is necessary to get China and Russia in line with this is crucial, and from there I believe the Iranian people will begin to get the message - or not, who really knows, but sending troops in or bombers with big bombs to hit ill-defined/located targets will not get the right message across. Sending the U.S. military into Iran is NOT the answer, will solve nothing, and will create more problems than are solved - if you think the Iraqis throw a great insurgency, just wait to see what would happen if we put boots to the ground on Iranian soil.

2006-01-15T18:06:00.000-05:00

Sending Them On Their Way

I was on a break between classes and I ran into the following article in the NY Times: More
Companies Ending Promises for Retirement. The article was about the trend for businesses these days to move away from defined-benefits retirement or pensions plans, the traditional type of pension that many of us older types think of when we hear the word "pension", into 401(k) plans. What sparked the sudden interest in this trend was the recent announcement by IBM that it was freezing its current defined benefits pension plan and converting over to a 401(k). IBM used to be the standard bearer for a guaranteed job in the U.S., and for taking care of its employees up and through retirement, and now in both cases it's entered a bottom line world, with no job guarantees and you're on your own when it comes to getting ready for retirement.

U.S. News & World Report has an interesting article on baby boomers coming of age with the 401(k), Boomers are about to find out whether their 401(k)'s are such a sweet deal. The article had a few interesting points to make (if you're interested in your retirement you really should take the time to read this article):

"But older baby boomers, the first generation to have climbed the corporate ladder in the 401(k) ear, are just now turning 60. This means that boomers have only begun the long and anxious transition from work life to retirement. And since many boomers are expected to live well into their 80s, it's too early to say whether 401(k)'s have encouraged a sufficient level of saving to fund a full - and fulfilling - retirement.

"So far the news is decidedly mixed. While the vast majority of workers eligible for 401(k)'s contribute to these tax-deferred plans, a third of workers 60 and older aren't using them. Even among older boomers who are participating, nearly 20 percent don't take full advantage of their company matches."

So we can still look at the 401(k) as something of an experiment, we don't have the experience with it at this point to know if it's going to meet the needs of those soon to retire. But this is the way we're moving all retirement plans in the future, so the question in my mind was doesn't learning about this deserve as much attention for a kid in high school as my chemistry course? Let's face it, if the kid's going to be prepared for his or her eventual retirement they had better start saving for it now, as ridiculous as that may seem, because they can pretty much rest assured that they're going to be on their own in another fifty years when it comes to money to live on. However you cut it, students today are going to need to have some sort of handle on what's going on with regard to how to handle their money and prepare for the future, and on the whole I just don't see that happening.

After reading the article on IBM I took some time away from chemistry in my next class and asked my students, "How do you guys expect to prepare for retirement?" As you may guess given that this was a population high school juniors, with one or two seniors thrown in, i.e. 16 and 17 year olds, the response was interesting. One kid wanted to put his money in a savings account, someone else figured that he'd work for a company where he'd retire like his dad, another was at least somewhat on the right track when he said he'd invest in stocks and bonds, though on the whole most had no response at all, in fact I got this puzzled look which sort of shouted, "Retirement? Dude, I'm only 17 years old!" Yes, true, they're only 17 years old, and the unfortunate truth today is that they need to start preparing NOW if they're to be ready when they need to be.

So here's the thing, we're in a school where the motto is, "We make our students college ready" and it more and more hits me that on some level I'm sure they're going to be college ready, at least for those who actually go onto college, but they're clearly so not ready for so much else about life that will be facing them soon. Of course telling everyone that we're preparing kids for college is very politic, i.e. it feels good for a lot of parents and maybe some of the kids, but the reality is that a significant percentage of these kids aren't realistic college material. Moreover, while our school will proudly boast that 90% or better of our students will go to college, the reality is that if our school meets the general national trend only about 50% will stay the course through graduation. Of course few if any schools will tell you how many of their graduated students will actually graduate from college inasmuch as their job was only to prepare them, i.e. get them accepted into college; what happens when they get there is someone else's statistic to worry about, though that bad statistic will in part be written off to how poorly prepared the dropouts were by their high school.

We're ostensibly preparing high school students for college, which is less expensive than preparing them for an equally important aspect of their post-high school lives, i.e. getting them ready to deal with life in a global-centric world and, lo and behold, for their retirement. Both goals should be a part of the curriculum, but truly preparing kids for life in the real world is clearly not as important (at least where I'm at), maybe because there's no immediate metric for measuring it (if it's accountable per NCLB why bother, right?) and far too many parents don't think that such prep is necessary because their little gem is going onto college with the 90% of the rest of his or her graduating class, and will go to an Ivy league school they actually graduate from, and will somehow be taken care of through the high-powered job they finagle after graduating from Harvard Business School, or maybe it's the medical school, or ... well, something like that. But then maybe it's not just cost-effectiveness and parental self-deception, indeed, how many of us are really in a position to teach personal fiscal responsibility and preparedness? We're a society with an extraordinary debt load and one that loves to live on its credit card, which is paid off by and large in expensive installments, but then that may be due to the fact most of today's teachers never got any real fiscal education either.

It's a harsh world out there, and it's becoming increasingly uncertain and user-unfriendly. Job stability is not something to be counted on as it once was, and expecting that somehow you'll be taken care of in retirement, while it was likely never true for the overwhelming majority, whatever truth to it there may have been is greatly diminished now. And what it comes down to is that it definitely seems that we're not preparing kids for what's out there and how to deal with it, but then I have to wonder if we ever really did.

2006-01-08T15:59:00.000-05:00

Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococus Aureus

Taken from Mayo Clinic Proceedings, showing an external and internal S. aureus infection.

This is the second time I'm hitting on this subject, the last time was in Why Are We So Bent Over Bird Flu? where I wondered why it is we're so excited about bird flu, which even now has killed less than a couple of hundred folks world wide, yet so sanguine, apparently, about MRSA, the acronym for the title to this blog. In the Nov 3 issue of The Economist, specifically in MRSA : The struggle against superbugs we're informed about MSRA and that it kills about 90,000 Americans a year. This week you can read in U.S. News & World Report another article, Bugs behaving Badly: Antibiotics are aging, and bacteria are learning to fight them off about very much the same thing, in fact the 90,000 fatalities number is also given. U.S. News takes it a step further by telling us that it's more than Staph. a. that we need to be concerned about, indeed we can add to the list clostridium difficile, acinetobacter baumannii, and neisseria gonorrhoeae. These were all bacteria that were very treatable with general antibiotics in the past and are now resistant and, obviously, life threatening; the list is only going to grow. So in short, with S. aureus if it doesn't kill you it can do a serious number on your body and the list of deadly bacterial companions continues to grow (additional information specifically regarding MRSA can be obtained from Kent County Health Dept. Fact Sheet.)

With Stap. A. we have a bug that not only can kill you, and does so to the tune of 90,000 folks a year, but can disfigure as well, and there's no national program to address this issue, no major ruckus by our politicians to fund a program to educate the public and to provide incentives to drug companies to make it worth their time and money to actually focus on new antibiotics that could get ahead of drug resistant strains of common bacteria. Just as a reminder, S. aureus is quite common, having a preference for hanging out in mucous membranes so it's fairly commonly found in the nose, and even on our skin.

There are a few things that can be done to help ameliorate if not solve this problem:

1. As far as things to be done are concerned, what should top the list is the government providing monetary incentives to drug companies to come up with new antibiotics. It's not as if we can't come up with them, i.e. the bugs aren't getting beyond antibiotics in general, but rather that there's little money to be made in antibiotics and in turn few drug companies put much effort into them. So throwing some incentives at drug companies for new antibiotics and new strategies to fight these bugs would indeed be a public health service worthy of just about as much money as we're throwing at bird flu, or about a week's worth of occupation in Iraq. When the government looks to spends hundreds of millions on bird flu vaccines they're throwing money at drug companies to induce them to produce an equally low-profit item, doing so for MSRA and antibiotic resistance in general would be a definite public service.

2. Doctors need to stop over-prescribing antibiotics. I appreciate that a parent with a child that's screaming its head off from a viral infection wants something to fix the problem, but we all know (ok, we don't all know ...) that antibiotics don't work on viral infections and otherwise help to build up antibiotic resistance in the bugs that inhabit our body. Doctors more and more don't have the time to tell their patients this so it's easier to prescribe an antibiotic and be done with it, but this definitely fuels the problem and it needs to stop. A patient screaming for percodan shouldn't get them, why should someone screaming for antibiotics? Well, the fact is the doctor doesn't go to jail for over-prescribing antibiotics ...

3. Doctors and hospitals need to be clean freaks. In Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands the incidence of MRSA infections are much lower than in other countries, and the main difference seems to be cleanliness protocols. Doctors need to wash their hands before, after, and in between every patient, but really, who wants to be bothered with that with so little time?
Hospitals need to be scrupulously clean, but with HMOs looking for those cost saving measures where do you find the staff to keep things clean? Well we have to figure out how to up the priority on this as the number of people dying from resistant bugs bred in hospital environments such that it's hard to picture any possible justified cost-savings in not doing so, though cost-cutting mentalities are all too often stovepiped such that they don't see the potential harm done by being too niggardly when it comes to cleaning supplies.

4. Antibiotics are used in huge numbers in the livestock industry for a couple of reasons. First, and the one the industry will most often give as a reason, is to reduce infections in the livestock population. Now of course this flies in the face of the prophylactic use of antibiotics with humans where it's been found that the only thing it does is eventually build up a resistant strain of the bugs you're trying to avoid. Second, and the main reason antibiotics in animal feed is so attractive, is that for reasons I'm not clear on, I'm not sure anyone is, livestock bulk up on antibiotics up to 10%, so of course that cow in the feedlot is now worth 10% more if it has some antibiotic munchies in its corn feed. So we're fattening our cattle and helping to create antibiotic resistant strains of bugs that the cattle live with, and somehow that's supposed to be good us ... oh boy.

5. People in general, to include people who certainly should know better, need to understand and appreciate the difference between viral and bacterial infections. Of course I understand much this may be to expect for a country where so many have a hard time with evolution much less understanding the difference between viruses and bacteria, but we really need to try. The U.S. News article cited above has some a good article attached to it entitled Want to help? Just say "Whoa" which provides some good information on how not to abuse antibiotics and a number of good links, to include: 1. an animation from the U.S. FDA center for veterinary medicine explaining how bacteria becomes resistant (Animation of Antimicrobial Resistance), 2. some info from the CDC's Get Smart campaign, Spotlight: Snort. Sniffle. Sneeze. No Antibiotics, Please!, and finally we have 3. Tuft University's APUA: Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics which provides information for consumers & patients, healthcare providers, and researchers, as well as information on antibiotics in the ecology and the international problem with antibiotics.

Lastly, it always helps if you raise a stink with your local national representatives, by letter if possible (they tend to take letters a bit more seriously than simply emails, and they take calls even more seriously), to let them know that you think this is an issue you think the federal government should be doing more about. I'm not a believer in the government, any government having all the answers. But right now throwing some hundreds of millions of dollars at bird flu when we already have a catastrophe (really, how else would you describe 90,000 people dying from something every year?) running rampant through this country, is a ridiculous focus of resources (I won't even get into the war in Iraq) and does more to endanger Americans in the long term than just about anything else you can point a finger at.

2006-01-04T21:28:00.000-05:00

The Psychopaths Next Door

Part of my morning ritual everyday is to visit the two comics pages online and Foxtrot is one of them (the other is Doonesbury.) I've enjoyed Foxtrot for a number of years, though to be honest there are times when I wonder why as it doesn't really hit the issues like Doonesbury does, but then maybe that's why.

My last blog entry, Grizzly Man and Psychopaths, got me thinking about psychopaths and what it is that separates someone who anyone would look at and say, "God, that person's a psychopath", and the average person who for a multitude of possible reasons does things that are psychopathic in nature. Yesterday morning's cartoon rekindled this thinking, not only because it turned up here in Foxtrot, but I have heard kids at school talk about the videogame "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City", which Bill Amend is making fun of here in his comic strip. Here's a description of Grand Theft Auto (GTA):

The new GTA game is set in a fictional take on Miami, Florida, known as Vice City. The year is 1986, and Tommy Vercetti has just been released from prison after doing a 15-year stretch for the mob. The mob--more specifically, the Forelli family--appreciates Tommy's refusal to squeal in exchange for a lesser sentence, so they send him down to Vice City to establish some new operations. Tommy's first order of business in Vice City is to score a large amount of cocaine to work with. But Tommy's first drug deal goes sour, leaving him with no money, no cocaine, and no idea who wronged him. The mob is, of course, angry over the whole situation, and now Tommy has to make up for the loss before the gangsters come down from Liberty City to clean up the mess. As Tommy, you'll start the investigation, figure out who ripped you off, take care of business, and set up shop in Vice City in a big, big way. Oh, and you'll also drive taxis, get involved in a turf war between the Cubans and the Haitians, befriend a Scottish rock group named Love Fist, become a pizza delivery boy, smash up the local mall, demolish a building to lower real estate prices, hook up with a biker gang, run an adult film studio, take down a bank, and much, much more.

If you're concerned that this may be a bit over-the-top for your average teenager, be assured that GTA has its lighter side, too:

While Grand Theft Auto has always been a violent, mature-themed series, it has always balanced the violent crime with an equal amount of tongue-in-cheek humor and style. Vice City is no exception, presenting an exaggerated view of the 1980s that makes use of a number of the kitschy pop-culture stereotypes found in film and television from the decade. The drug-laced tale recalls such films as Scarface and television shows like Miami Vice. The humor comes mostly from the radio, which really drives home the sort of form-over-function mentality that most people associate with the '80s.

Now I have to ask myself, why is it that a game like this, and many others like it, is so popular with the average teenage boy? Now of course no one can really make the case that these games are turning kids into drug lords (well, at least not that I'm aware of anyway), but how is it that
something like this is so appealing to boys? They get to act like criminals, wantonly kill and maim, and indulge "form-over-function" mentalities - this is entertainment? I'm inclined to think that the reason this appeals is that it wouldn't take very much for a person to engage in this sort of thing in the real world were the circumstance right to induce such a thing, in other words it hits buttons in boys, and by and large it's boys who are playing these sorts of games, that are a basic part of their programming. So is there a thin line between our otherwise normally civilized selves and some psychopath self? I think that's true, but then maybe it's not so much a psychopath lurking in us as it is a high capacity for cruelty. The average human has a fair higher capacity for cruelty than they're otherwise inclined to think is the case, and maybe with a psychopath they're simply indulging cruelty without remorse - the rest of us, over time, will likely experience some measure of remorse, but they don't have that problem.

Well whatever the nature of psychopaths may be, there's us, the normal Jane and Joe, that we should be mindful of. Arnold Toynbee wrote a piece back in 1970 that you can find at Human Savagery Cracks Thin Veneer. He sums up what I've been thinking on this subject rather nicely:

There is a persistent vein of violence and cruelty in human nature. Man has often striven to rid himself of what he recognizes as being a hideous moral blemish, unworthy of human nature's better side. Sometimes man has fancied that he has succeed in civilizing himself.

Yes, indeed. We need to be sure that we don't kid ourselves about ourselves, like Timothy Treadwell in "Grizzly Man" kidded himself about the grizzlies and their relationship with him - we are cruel creatures, much of our actions throughout the world support this, even as do the videogames that our children play and enjoy.

2006-01-01T09:02:00.000-05:00

Grizzly Man and Psychopaths

Above is Timothy Treadwell, a man who was an alcoholic and had he stayed the path of alcoholism he would have surely died from it. He gave up his addiction to ethyl alcohol, a.k.a. ethanol, a.k.a. liquor, and substituted it for another, which in his case was "protecting" grizzly bears. Interestingly enough he was killed by his addiction after all, though few would have ever
thought it would have been at the claws and fangs of a hungry grizzly - life's ironies are not always subtle. Werner Herzog brings us Timothy Treadwell in his movie Grizzly Man.

As for the movie itself, I didn't care for it, though I have to admit that I was caught in it - I knew the main character got killed in the end so it wasn't a matter of wanting to know so much what happened, but rather to get some clue why it happened. Herzog pieces together his movie from a vast collection of footage that Treadwell shot while he was out "protecting" grizzlies in Alaska. Inserted into this are interviews with various people who knew Treadwell, Treadwell's family, the coroner who received the bodies of Treadwell and his girlfriend, who comes across as a man who's been hanging out in the morgue on his own for far too much time, and a director of a local museum who was a native American (I would guess that this makes him an Eskimo) who hit what Treadwell was doing like a nail on the head - Treadwell was disrespecting the established and necessary boundaries between man and the grizzlies, and in effect was disrespecting the animals themselves. Treadwell was anthropomorphizing the animals to some degree, and on some level was using them to fit some pattern of life and the universe that worked for him, in spite of the fact that it ignored reality; of course that's what addiction is all about.

Treadwell, as you may have guessed, irritated me - he'd proclaim being a samurai when he had to be if it was necessary to have to directly face up to the grizzlies, which for some reason put up with him for as many years as they did, or to those who allegedly threatened the bears. The fact is that there was never anything in the movie to indicate that Treadwell was protecting anything, much less any grizzlies. In one scene Treadwell cowers behind bushes, tearfully lamenting about how a bear he knows and, as with most things in his vidoes, loves, is being subjected to rocks thrown at it by photographers trying to keep it away from them. If he couldn't protect his wards of the wild from rocks, it begs one to wonder how much good he'd be against someone with a rifle, or even a sling shot for that matter.

Herzog's documentaries can be a bit tedious and overblown, though on the whole this was a bit more constrained than others I've seen. Herzog also makes what I thought was an interesting observation about Treadwell who in one scene in the movie laments the death of a baby fox by coyotes. Herzog believes that Treadwell wants everything to be idyllic, to fit some oddly conceived, albeit comforting to him, flow of existence. In Treadwell's world there's little appreciation for what Herzog sees the world and the universe to be, which are places where chaos, death, and murder are a natural part of the order of things. Herzog seems to subscribe to Camus' " ... benign indifference of the universe". And here is where we segue into the psychopath part of this post ...

My friend She Falters to Rise (SFTR for short) wrote a thought provoking post about psychopaths a few days ago, you can read it for yourself at She Falters To Rise: Blank Stare, and I encourage you to do so. The psychopath in question here was someone who doused someone they knew with lighter fluid and then threw a match at them resulting in the expected outcome. We need to get into a few definitions:

Psychopath: A person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse.

Antisocial personality disorder: A personality disorder characterized by chronic antisocial behavior and violation of the law and the rights of others.

I would guess that if you were to douse someone with lighter fluid and stand there and watch what happened without giving it much thought, other than possibly how interesting it was to see or how much satisfaction you got from the whole experience, you're a psychopath. But where does the line get drawn on this delineation? Ted Bundy was a psychopath, but what about Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz Angel of Death, or Adolf Eichmann, the head of Jewish Affairs for Hitler? Or the many thousands of Germans who helped to eliminate some 10 million people? What about the folks who torture other people? How do we draw a line between something horrific like lighter fluid dousing and Hutu's running through the Rwanda with machetes slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus, not because they were a threat, no, they simply didn't like them, and frankly given how much slaughtering was done (nearly 1 million people were killed) the only possible conclusion one can come to is that these machete-wielding citizens were enjoying themselves?

I'm sure clinically there must be some fine differentiation between those defined as psychopaths and people like Mengele and a long list of others who commit crimes against humanity. My belief, though, is that what differentiates someone who likes to play with lighter fluid in deadly ways from someone who one day is a loving father and husband and the next is out committing genocide, is not very much. I think we live with many psychopaths, regardless of wherever we may be. If order breaks down, if the repercussions for psychopathic acts are eliminated, then psychopathic behavior becomes more common. I think the distinction between the ones we all can point to and say are psychopaths and those who we'd never guess could act like one is, that the latter are more sensitive to the repercussions, there's simply more self-awareness and outward awareness of consequences, but the desire is to act is there, simply waiting to be unleashed. The psychopaths amongst are in kept in check by society, so by definition they're not really psychopaths, but then history makes clear that it doesn't take a great deal for them to come out and indulge their lust. Why this is so makes me wonder, and maybe I'll do more reading into this at some point. But I don't kid myself into thinking that there aren't people whose paths I cross on a daily basis who, if given the chance, would love to hurt, maim, and kill, and the only time we may see an inkling of this is when they indulge some outrageous act of road rage, or when the society they live in, for whatever reason, removes the shackles of and negative consequences for their indulging their desires.

Like Treadwell, who wanted to believe all his animal buddies were actually some sort of Disney characters, we kid ourselves when we think that all people who live in civilized societies are actually civilized. What restrains a human's darker tendencies can easily be lifted given the right situation or societal calamity, but we often think that it can't happen here, or that it's only in special circumstances that this sort of thing actually happens. On the whole society strives to make sure that a human's darkest impulses are blunted, but they're still there, waiting for the right situation. How those impulses get there, whether it's due to something genetic or is simply inextricably tied to something about humans in general, I have no clue, but it's there, and in some of us they're stronger than in others. You can be sure you've met someone, likely many someones in different places, who given the chance would look upon you as something to exercise an impulse upon, and we can only hope that they're never given the chance.

2005-12-28T10:49:00.000-05:00

I've Been Tagged

My friend Grrl Scientist tagged me with the following meme a few days ago. I whimped out on passing it on because I really haven't been in regular contact with anyone lately and, therefore, would feel I was imposing on anyone I subsequently tagged. So, with that thought in mind, I gave some thought to the people I would really like to tag were I to have the opportunity to tag anyone who ever lived, even if they weren't blogging on the world wide web, or for that matter had a clue what that is. So here we go:

Seven Things To Do Before I Die

1. Learn how to play a musical instrument.
2. Visit Iran.
3. Learn how to dance without feeling silly while doing it.
4. Read all the books in my “To Read” section in my bookcase (the way this is going I think subconsciously this must be how I figure I’ll cheat death.)
5. Write something I’m really proud of.
6. Learn how to fly.
7. Learn how to speak Farsi.

Seven Things I Cannot Do

1. Speak Farsi.
2. Fly.
3. Play a musical instrument.
4. Dance without feeling silly.
5. Sing worth a damn.
6. Write as well as I’d like to.
7. Remember jokes.

Seven Things That Attract Me to Blogging

1. The opportunity to connect with other people.
2. The opportunity to share information.
3. It’s a good place to express myself.
4. It makes me feel a part of some sort of odd, ill-defined community.
5. It’s relatively easy to do.
6. It’s an opportunity to write.
7. It functions as something of a diary of my life and the concerns and issues
that have run through it.

Seven Things I Say Most Often:

1. “What a ding dong!”
2. “Learn how to drive!”
3. “I haven’t a clue.”
4. “What a phutz!”
5. “Now that’s interesting.”
6. “I’m not sure, but …”
7. “I gotta get that …” (this doesn’t result in follow through as much, at times
anyway, as I’d like for it to.)

Seven Authors that That I Often Read:

1. James Lee Burke
2. Walter Mosley
3. Michael Ignatieff
4. Mark Salzman
5. Elmore Leonard
6. Robert Parker
7. Tony Hillerman

Seven Movies That I Would Watch Over and Over Again (if I could):

1. Ikiru
2. The Twilight Samari
3. The Unforgiven
4. Strictly Ballroom
5. Tombstone
6. Lord of the Rings (the entire trilogy)
7. Miller's Crossing

Seven People I Want To Join In Too:

1. Jared Diamond
2. Elmore Leonard
3. Leo Szilard*
4. Clarence Darrow*
5. Abraham Lincoln*
6. Ada Lovelace*
7. Jesus Christ, and any significant prophet of the last 4,000 or so years.*

*With consideration given to the fact that these people would have no clue what the internet or the world wide web was about - though I'm inclined to think they'd have caught on pretty darn quick.

2005-12-27T17:48:00.000-05:00

Whoooooa ... No More Limbo!

Christ's Descent into Limbo by Duccio di Boninsegna 1255-1318

Having been raised a Catholic, but long, long past even remotely considering myself to be Catholic now, I read with some interest Vatican Considers Consigning Limbo to Oblivion. Like wow, a blast from the past. Indeed, a blast from the past that was the linchpin to my shucking the notion of being a Catholic, and eventually my not taking serious any commitment to any other religion fettered with the sort of silliness that the Catholic Church imposed on its members. Mind you, it's not as if the notion of limbo, some in-between world found sandwiched with heaven on top and hell on the bottom, was ever Church dogma, rather it's some weird vestige of the medieval church that was alive and well, and taught in Catholic schools, until very recently. The Church, in a manner of speaking, just sort of went along with the whole idea.

I encountered limbo somewhere in grade school, and if I'm not istaken it was somewhere around the 4th grade in a religious class. Let's set the stage: My parents weren't exactly well off, but it was pretty clear that if I wasn't put into a structured environment I'd likely make a mess of my education. I started out in a local public school but it didn't take long before my natural inclinations for trouble and being bored in general took over and I became what teachers refer to either as a "disruptive element" or that "pain-in-the-ass" kid. My mother wasn't partial to this sort of behavior out of me, Lord knows she didn't put up with it at home, and having been raised a Catholic, and attending what the Catholic church called "religious instruction", which meant I went on afternoon a week to what was specifically Catholic religious instruction, I was in good standing to make the transfer over to the Catholic school uniform-wearing group. Moreover my reading ability was a bit higher than that of my peers and Catholic schools in those days were a bit selective (I haven't a clue if they're this way now or not), and this helped to make me a good candidate for entrance into the local Catholic school a few months into the start of the school year (this all happened a few months into the third year in school.) My mother took advantage of the chance, feeling that it was an investment that was clearly called for if I was to get an education in the normal span of time and in the general correct trajectory of how educations were expected to flow. And yes, she had a reason to do this in the way she did - having unexpectedly walked in on me dancing on a desk in the back of what was otherwise a classroom dedicated to study, my mother saw the light, or at least she did after she tanned my young bottom.

So off to Catholic school I go and it took a year but I finally hit the "limbo" situation, and this was a head squeezer of a religious concept. I was never one to just accept much on the basis of faith (well, if my wife asks this of me that's fine, but when it comes to where we relegate the souls of unborn children ... well, I get ahead of myself here ...), and when I was hit with this limbo thing my head imploded, or some such thing. From the article we learn the following about limbo:

"But limbo, that netherworld of unbaptized babies, worthy pagans and even a few Muslims ... Unlike purgatory, a sort of waiting room to heaven for those with some venial faults, the theory of limbo consigned children outside of heaven on account of original sin alone. As a concept, limbo has long been out of favor anyway, as theologically questionable and unnecessarily harsh. It is hard to imagine depriving innocents of heaven."

Indeed, it was the last sentence that got me, I mean newborn babies are sent to limbo and not heaven because ... why? Well, they're not baptized, and you can't baptize someone that isn't alive and only baptized souls made it into heaven, ergo babies floated off to limbo. Ok, that was the theological whatever behind this, even if it wasn't officially supported by the Church it did serve wonderfully to do one thing: Guilt parents. I mean it was YOUR kid, right? It died and you may not have had anything to do with that, but oh well, the kid's floating his or her days of eternity in limbo because you didn't get it baptized in time. Apparently back in 1984 the current Pope, who as a cardinal at the time, had this to say about limbo:

"Personally, I would let it drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis."

A hypothesis? Wow ... generations of Catholics have been guilted and allowed to think their kids have been relegated to some lesser state than heaven because of a fouled up "hypothesis". How does the church test theological hypotheses anyway? Does the Church have theological theories? Again I digress ...

What's worse is that this limbo thing wasn't the worst possibility for babies. Since the Catholic Church maintains that we're all tainted with original sin, and even new born babes bear this dark mark on their souls, then the fact was:

The theology is complicated, but the bottom line is that Augustine, believing in man's original sin, persuaded a church council in 418 to reject any notion of an "intermediary place" between heaven and hell. He held that baptism was necessary for salvation, and that unbaptized babies would actually go to hell, though in his later writings he conceded that it would entail the mildest of conditions.

So given a choice, if your kid was going to wind up somewhere without benefit of baptism, what would you choose, limbo or a mild flavor of hell? And who knew that hell came in levels of intensity, sort of like buffalo wings? Why I never became a theologian I don't know ...

Well, wanting to lift the burden of parents having to ponder their innocent but deceased new born as living in hell, in 1905 we're told the following by the then Pope:

"... Pope Pius X stated plainly: "Children who die without baptism go into limbo, where they do not enjoy God, but they do not suffer either."

Now that was comforting, right? Your kid isn't living in hell, but he or she is dwelling somewhere called limbo where, essentially, no one's around to love them and sure as heck God doesn't care about them. Now that's a God I want to be worshipping ...

Leave it to St. Thomas Aquinas to put a nice spin on this:

In the Middle Ages, theologians, notably St. Thomas Aquinas, postulated a slightly cheerier idea: limbo, from the Latin "limbus," meaning a hem or a boundary. Here innocents would live forever in what Thomas called "natural
happiness," if not in heaven.

Ok, so they don't have God's love, but they're otherwise happy, that's not so bad, right?

Well, my sarcasm has been exercised and I'm once again reminded of why I have such a hard time with organized religion of any flavor, but especially one that considers us damned from the point of birth and is so sure it's the only source of salvation, and if you don't get that salvation or otherwise toe the line you're damned for all eternity. Gee, I wonder if I'm going to go to the mild, medium, hot, or extra-spicy version of hell ... I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

2005-12-26T12:51:00.000-05:00

Munich

My wife and I were in Boston with friends on Saturday and we all decided to go see Munich . The movie had just been released the day before and a few of us were interested in seeing it, so the group of us, six in all, headed downtown to the theater. For me it was an interesting group to see the movie with, with 5 Iranians (all of whom have been living here for three or more years) and myself as the lone American.

The movie was an interesting one. This was not "War of the Worlds" or "ET", movies that on the whole are strictly focused on entertaining the audience. The movie depicts what occurred after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the '72 Olympic games in Munich. The exact details are not clear as to what Israel did, and the movie is not intended as an historical depiction of what occurred, but what we can get from this is that apparently Israel did send men out to kill as many of the Munich terrorists and those that supported them as possible. This movie is intended to make you think, and I believe it was successful with all of us. One friend felt the movie was Israeli propaganda, and another felt that Spielberg should have been more evenly balanced in his representation of both the Israeli and Palestinian positions. My feelings about
the movie were very different.

First, I don't think this was propaganda, in fact I believe that Spielberg is pointing a finger towards Israeli with this movie and asking, "Is this really the sort of thing you should be doing? Does this buttress your claim to being the 'righteous' people?" And on some level he points the same finger towards the United States, asking if how we're executing this war on terror, with it's eye for an eye Old Testament fervor, is the right way of going about trying to eliminate the problem. I think Spielberg is asking difficult questions of those who on the whole are seen as being in the right, or at least whose actions are rarely seen in the same light as those of the Palestinians for example. So, with the exception of one scene in the movie (where the agents go out of their way to avoid killing a young girl who's the daughter of their target), in my view of things this movie doesn't serve as a propaganda venue for Israel. There's no Palestinian side to show as Spielberg is criticizing Israel and indirectly the U.S., and the story of the Palestinians, for example, is somewhat besides the point - we know enough of what's going on to appreciate why the Palestinians feel aggrieved, and Spielberg to some degree even addresses the issue in the movie, but the intention is to put the spotlight on Israel and how it justifies what it did in this situation.

I think Spielberg makes a number of excellent points: 1. That violence begets violence. 2. That violence begins to de-humanize those who execute it. Of course it's entirely possible to get people to do this sort of thing who aren't entirely human to begin with, who won't suffer as some of the men in this movie do (the Daniel Craig character is an example of this), and there may be more of these men and women out there than many of us would care to think about - how many such men and women were in Germany during the Nazi era? How many Japanese were this way in Nanking? How many American soldiers roaming the American west killing Indians, or American southerners killing blacks? How many Turks killing Armenians? And the list goes on, and on, and on. 3. How can a country or a group of people take the title "righteous" when on the whole their actions are little better than those taken by those they seek to kill? 4. What purpose is served if the men you kill are replaced by killers who are worse? 5. How much "collateral damage", in the form of innocent bystanders, is acceptable?

With point number 3, how can you be righteous and do this sort of thing (for those not familiar with the Jewish claim to being the "righteous people" it may appear that the focus on righteousness may seem misplaced, but it very much fits here), one of the characters in the movie asks why aren't we arresting these men for what they did and hauling them back to Israel, like was done with Eichmann and Mengele? For those not familiar with these men, Mengele was the Auschwitz Angel of Death so named because of the horrible human experiments he performed on Auschwitz concentration camp prisoners, invariably Jews, and Eichmann was the head of the Nazi Department of Jewish Affairs and thereby directly responsible for the deportment and eventual killing of some 3 million Jews. There's not a Palestinian or Arab that has come close to doing the harm to Jews that Mengele and Eichmann inflicted, yet these two are dragged back to Israel from South America to stand trial. Of course there was a cathartic aspect to this, and on some level a need to put to the flesh these two exemplars of man's inhumanity to man, but how much more moral currency would the Israelis have gathered for themselves by capturing the terrorists and bringing them to Israel to stand trial, vice killing in the shadows, with the world nodding knowingly that it was the Israelis doing this but without proof that it was so, with these men considered to be heroes in Israel but without official recognition, or sanction for that matter, from their government.

This movie will cause you to think if you're the thinking type. But I'm more and more convinced that far too many of us aren't, or that many who are use convenient excuses to justify expedient or viscerally satisfying actions ("They'll know that they can't kick Jews around without the cost of their blood.", "We'll bomb those bastards out of the hills of Bora Bora"), which don't go very far to eliminate the problem, and can often result in bigger problems than were originally intended to be corrected.

2005-12-25T11:18:00.000-05:00

The NSA Is Reading Your Email

You better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I'm telling you why
The NSA is reading your email

It's making a list,
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out Who's naughty and nice.
The NSA is reading your email

It sees you when you're sleeping
It knows when you're awake
It knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!

O! You better watch out!
You better not cry.
Better not pout, I'm telling you why.
The NSA is reading your email.
The NSA is reading your email.

Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday!

2005-12-24T07:57:00.000-05:00

Gee, There Goes All Your Personal Information ...

In my personal experience if you don't establish specific limits on something which you expect others to adhere to you'll rarely ever get what you specifically say you're striving to get. The easiest example that comes to mind is with my students and any given project that I may assign them. If I don't lay out specific parameters for what I want, what I get will vary from right on, to anything that falls into the cracks between what I did say and what I didn't. Students are extraordinary at finding those things that leave them with the option to say, "But you didn't say that in your instructions." Now you may assume that whatever you don't want was a given in some way, but you learn quickly to never make that point in a discussion with someone who's bent the expectations, nothing should be assumed or thought of as a given as the human animal will bend any situation to fit his or her comfort level. To be fair sometimes I haven't been entirely clear and a student's interpretation isn't deliberately self-serving, and that's fine, that's MY bad and I live to learn. I'm just amazed at the number of students who will bend and twist like Houdini in a strait jacket to get over when the instructions were indeed pretty darn clear.

Now in my experience in the Navy the situations you dealt with were a bit more complex, but there were common threads to what I see with students. If you tell someone or a group of someone's to do something you have to be very specific about what they should and shouldn't do. Here the problem isn't a matter of simply avoiding the path to least work, but rather there are situations where you don't want someone going too far. So you have to do two things: 1. make your instructions as clear and comprehensive as you can, and 2. given that you're human and can't possibly anticipate every possibility, check on what you have your people doing, and have those working for you regularly check as well. An extraordinary example of this line of thinking failing is Abu Ghraib. There you had military personal given great latitude in what they could or couldn't do, and no one apparently was overseeing what they were up to, at least not on a regular basis and those who were checking up on things appear to have been willing to look the other way when questionable, though not necessarily flat out illegal, situations arose.

Now what astounds me here it that I've learned these lessons in my life experiences, but we have a president who's a Harvard Business School MBA, not to mention a Yalie, and you'd think that they somewhere in that blue-blooded education that G.W. would have picked this up, I mean they have to at least teach this stuff at these places to make up for any lack of practical
experience. But no, it appears that G.W. was absent for those lessons - well, given his grades, maybe not. I mean how else do we explain his, "We don't torture" proclamation, which certainly sounds right, with the efforts by himself and his people to undermine any legislation which codifies that we don't, and otherwise would hold accountable anyone that did? Today we learn, for myself via Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report, that the NSA, like a huge electronic vacuum cleaner, is sucking up all manner of digital communication to sift through, in spite of the fact that G.W. proclaimed that we were only tracking a few hundred people and their electronic communications. Of course a lot of the information the NSA is actually capturing would normally require, at a mimimum, a court sanctioned directive to allow it to happen, but in G.W.s mind this falls out as somehow being approved under some far-sweeping post-9/11 congressional authorization which, unbeknownst to the rest of us, was giving away the farm of our personal privacy - but of course this is G.W.'s interpretation of said legislation and it doesn't seem that it's universally seen that way by everyone, thank God.

Maybe our privacy should be transparent when it comes to fighting terrorists, but it seems to me that this should involve a good number of checks and balances to ensure that there's no flat out violation of our privacy, and somehow G.W. doesn't see this. If someone isn't overseeing the NSA and what it's up to we have a situation akin to that with me and my students, i.e. a good number of them will try to get away with anything I don't specifically hold them accountable for. Do you want the NSA sifting through your personal communication without court or congressional oversight? G.W. doesn't have a problem with this, and he apparently doesn't think you should either. Frankly I think that's taking the power of the presidency a number of steps too far. When the man in office thinks it's ok to give away your privacy it begins to seem to me that we have a guy who somehow thinks he's the king. Congress and the courts were specifically set up to keep the president in check, they serve to oversee the process and, just as importantly, to make sure the process itself is legal. This isn't because the people we elect to the office are bad or wish to abuse their power (though a few were of this flavor, unfortunately), but because presidents and the people who work for them are human and sometimes don't fully appreciate the repercussions of what they're asking to do and congress and the courts are there to help instill a reality check. But G.W. and, just as importantly, Cheney, only seem to believe in their versions of reality, and they're no more interested in having it evaluated and kept in check than the rest of us would tend to be inclined to open up our telephones and computers to the NSA for some info vacuuming.

So let us keep in mind that under the present administration's way of doing business big brother is alive and well, and very likely sucking up your email and phone conversations, but don't worry, they're only interested in a few hundred of us and really aren't paying attention to what the rest of us are saying, thinking, or sharing with the world at large. Trust the president, for surely that's what he expects.

2005-12-23T09:01:00.000-05:00

Vacation

It's hard to believe, but finally there's some extended time off just to collect thoughts, mull them over, get some work done that's been piling up, and maybe figure out what I'll do a few days ahead of myself vice day-to-day. Before this job I swear there was a part of me that thought teachers had it sort of easy with all that time off, though on the whole I always thought that what they did allowed them to earn that time. Now I appreciate that the time is a matter of survival, if you're a teacher and you don't get that time you'll be nearly dead by the time spring rolls around.

Part of what I miss is not regularly writing for this blog. I'm not sure what's a healthy dose of "regular", but I do know that I'm far from being where I'd like to be with writing and, for however much of it's actually going on, communicating with readers. I do get to visit other blogs, but as to be expected the regularity there has been diminished, though when I find 5 or 10 mins at work it's pretty easy to do some quick scanning. Hopefully I'll get to develop some of the thoughts that I've been wrestling with these past few weeks.

Anyway, whatever, we're going to chill out here at home. Originally we were planning to travel down to NYC and NJ to visit family, but we both came to realize that this just wouldn't work as we were too tired and there was too much we wanted to try to get done here. So some major chilling is in order, along with just enjoying Christmas in general, and I'd like to wish any visitors the best of Christmas/holidays, and a terrific new year!

2005-12-11T18:49:00.000-05:00

Simple Pleasures Can Lead to Deep Thinking

From www.itsablackthang.com, picture by Frank Morrison

Ok, just so you don't skedaddle right off, the simple pleasure in question isn't scatological (well, depending on what station you're listening to, I suppose - I'd likely describe Bill O'Reilly that way), but this was sort of cute and it seemed to apply in a general way, so ...

My lovely and wonderful wife, Feri, gave me a Sirius satellite radio for Christmas and was kind enough of heart and spirit to let me have it now, vice having to wait two weeks. My drive to work is 32 miles, which means I don't get consistent radio reception and even on good days, for reasons I've yet to figure out, I don't get NPR consistently or without much annoying static from the heart of downtown Providence. I didn't want to keep buying Teaching Company CDs, which are fine all-in-all, but then you do tend to tune them out in the car after awhile leaving you with background noise that every now and then gives you something to listen to as you make your way up or down I-95. Music CDs became cumbersome and my collection, as large at it may be, just wasn't enough, and I was missing listening to the news without the inanities most of the local radio stations (and this is no way reflection of just RI, this applies EVERYWHERE I've ever been to varying degrees) pummel you with as you make your way across the FM dial - alas, my car radio doesn't tune in AM very well at all, so I'm pretty much left with whatever is on the FM dial.

The radio comes with a "do-it-yourself" installation kit for the antennae and all else. It was the
antennae that had me worried, but needlessly as I somehow managed to get the thing installed in way that looked neither ham-fisted or desperate; I was rather pleased with myself. Then it wasn't all that hard to get the thing activated and then receiving radio signals WITHOUT static - oh joy, oh joy! NPR comes in loud and clear and I have over 120 channels of whatever to listen to if it choose, though a large percentage of that will likely never be touched by me - though I do admit a perverse curiosity with regard to the Martha Steward channel, but I think my willpower will keep me out of trouble there. At this point I'm figuring the near $13 per month I'll spend on satellite radio will be well spent relative to the paucity and inconsistency of the alternatives, and the associated expense of some of those alternatives.

This morning Feri and I went on a jaunt to one of the local parks where we ate a breakfast bought at one of our favorite breakfast places, Seven Stars Bakery, and then went for a walk to get some exercise on what was overall a lovely day weatherwise. What was really neat, given that our drive was 30 mins one way, was that we both got to listen to and enjoy NPR. The show that was on at this time was something called "On the Media", henceforth OTM.

I don't recall listening to OTM before, frankly I haven't had enough consistent access to NPR and I don't tend to listen to the radio at home, but as I would expect it was interesting to the degree that most NPR broadcasts tend to be interesting, at least for someone such as myself. The program is dedicated to media issues of various flavors. In this show we learned about the
ethical dilemmas of reporters covering Katrina, or any extraordinary disaster; the correction of some of the reporting that has occurred out of New Orleans that over time has been found to be exaggerated or totally unsubstantiated; and the piece that really caught my attention was regarding the recent report card that the U.S. government, though here represented by the Bush Administration, received for following through on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. The person being interviewed (unfortunately I don't recall his name) was commenting on how the media seemed to be shirking its responsibility (I'm sort of paraphrasing here) with regard to what can only be considered a bad report card for preparing this country against terrorist attacks. For those who haven't been following this, basically the government has been evaluated on the measures its taken in light of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations and if the government were to be given a report card it'd get more F's than A's on the progress its made to protect this country.

Where this guy feels the media has fallen on this issue is in its initial coverage, which was often overwhelmed by much lesser news fodder of the day which on the whole was more appealing to the average citizen - yes, it seems that the average citizen is more concerned with the remote possibility of bird flu than the very real possibility that people who've tried for the past ten years and been almost successful once (the first World Trade Center bombing) and startlingly successful a second time, won't be back again. On top of this he made an excellent point about something that seems to be what journalism is supposed to be all about, which is the follow up coverage that should come with this. Take the report and all the areas in which the government has failed, and write at least one story a week about why there was a failure of follow through on the part of the administration and what's being done about it, or not as the case may be. But no one seems to be chewing that particular line of attack, and it seems to me that this would indeed be a significant public service.

I think it's sort of worth considering why people aren't upset with how unprepared we apparently are for the next possible terrorist attack. I'm still trying to understand how we're managing to pump billions into Iraq and our own shores aren't that much safer for it, and indeed our adventure there in the end may result in this country being even less safe. But even if Iraq were a stunning success that's not to say that it diminishes the deadliness of an enemy that by and large isn't sitting in Iraq, and we're still left with unprotected harbors and much else that could in the end have us re-visiting some version of 9/11.

Well, it's good to be thinking again while I tool along in my car, though I have to admit that much of that thinking is likely going to result in head shakes of wonder and bafflement.

2005-12-06T21:45:00.000-05:00

The Carnival of the Vanities

This week's The Carnival of the Vanities is up and running Denali Flavors: Carnival of the Vanities #168. Some good blog reading to be found there, I highly recommend it for those with a desire to peruse and ponder.

2005-12-04T12:41:00.000-05:00

The Alternative Minimum Tax: Be Afraid, VERY Afraid.

Taken from Dallas Federal Reserve

Taken from Tax Foundation.org

This isn't the first time this subject has adorned this blog, and surely it's worth more than one turn in the barrel, especially after this morning's read of the NY Times brought to me Edmund L. Andrews piece, Hmmm. What's This Alternative Tax? Hey, Wait! Ouch! To get a general idea of where this is going, just take the lead sentence to the article:

DO House Republicans harbor some sort of deep rage against moderately affluent families with lots of children?

Mind you, the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) has been around for some time, but Andrews is referring here to changes to the tax law that overwhelmingly favor the rich and essentially stick it to the non-rich, which in this case includes not only the poor but those who on the whole are doing alright for themselves without being necessarily "rich". The current tax bill extends Bush's tax cuts for dividend income and capital gains, but does nothing to change the AMT, which is beginning to reach into the pockets of the not so rich, something it was NEVER intended to do.

The AMT's origins, as with many things, though hardly all, that come out of our legislators started with good intentions. So what's the AMT? Here again I fall back on Andrews:

The A.M.T. was created in 1969 to stop the very richest taxpayers from using tax breaks to avoid all or most of their income taxes. But it is set to engulf millions of families with fairly modest incomes, for two reasons: it isn't indexed to inflation and it has a perverse interaction with President Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. They lowered normal income taxes but not the alternative minimum tax. If the A.M.T. turns out to be higher than the ordinary income tax, a person has to pay the higher amount.

So in short, whatever the rich may have had to pay in tax under an AMT construct are balanced by sustaining the reduction in capital gains and dividend income taxes, which the rich benefit from FAR more than the average Jane and Joe do, and FAR, FAR more than the average poor person does. Jane and Joe, on the other hand, with increasing income over the 30 years since the AMT was put into effect, now find themselves within the reaches of this law and thereby find a real chance of their looking at a nice tax bill for simply being middle class. Unlike with the rich it's reasonable to expect that there'll be no where near an offset for that tax bill in whatever capital gain or dividend income the "not rich" may normally make in the course of their tax year.

It's not as if the politicians are not aware of the problem with AMT, but on the whole sucking up to Bush is more important to the Republicans than doing something about all the people in this country, in particular those who've managed to work their way into a middle class status (whatever the heck that means, exactly, and the article points out that the AMT can stretch down to people making as little as $58,000, so this could mean YOU), that they're likely to hurt financially. Indeed, the politicos in DC have been passing temporary fixes on a yearly basis for a number of years now, skirting a need to address the real problem and at the same time managing to make Bush and the neo-cons like Grover Norquest (who thinks this is a great country, especially for guys like him, and no one should have to pay taxes for the privilege of living in it - gotta love 'em) happy. The problem is that the overall revenue generated by taxes has been thrown out of whack by Bush's tax cuts and a need for some sort of income stream still exists, so we've reached a point where temp fixes of the AMT are becoming too expensive, making it that much harder to do something about the AMT without making somebody, especially rich somebodies and their patron president St. George the Clueless (cheap shot admittedly, but this guy really does get to me) unhappy .

Given that it's the middle class that largely have the luxury of blogging and the time to peruse blogs, you, dear reader, are a likely victim of a tax that was put in place some 35 years ago for rich people. Now if ever you needed to get in touch with your political representatives in congress to let them know that you're not happy about this, NOW is that time. So if you've not
been particularly politically active up to now please take the time to find your house and senate representative at the following web sites:

The House: United States House of Representatives, 109th Congress, 1st Session: Homepage

The Senate: U.S. Senate

and let them know that you'd appreciate not getting a higher tax bill for this year for a tax that was never intended for you to begin with, and then ask them what they're doing about making sure that this isn't going to happen to you.