Mr. Wonderful's World

Thoughts on the future in Iraq

2007-01-31T19:34:00.000-05:00

As we wait to see whether the Congress can get out of its rhetorical way and actually do something to force Bush to back away from his escalation policy in Iraq, I am struck by many different thoughts and impressions of the mess we have made.

The civil war in Iraq continues to gain force. New views of the multi-layered political religious, ethnic, clan bases of the strife come into view even from here via our poor media feeds. Now I am understanding how insufficient the terms Shia, Sunni and others so frequently used to sum up the situation in our media and government are. Each of these groups that I might otherwise think to be fairly unitary are actually composed of internally conflicted religious and clan based divisions now apparently at war even against their nominal brothers in arms.

Over the last weekend we had the reports of the large battle with the "Soldiers of Heaven", a splinter group of Shia who were reported to be preparing to assault other Shia in nearby Najaf. According to a BBC sketch, this group held some end of time beliefs involving the reappearance of some religious figure from over a thousand years ago(smells a bit like some of the craziness among Christian loonies over interpretations of the last book in the New Testament, Revelations). The exact rationale for the assualt by these Soldiers of Heaven on their brother Shia is unclear to me.

Nevertheless, I sense a jungle of religious conflicts that we can hardly perceive. Perhaps we if inflame and arm some of the many sects of Christianity so commonplace in the US and then put them into a social environment with much chaos and little countervaling threat of force from a government, we could envision some small part of what might be true in Iraq.

The recent surge in violent rhetoric out of the White House directed at Iran has brought my gaze up to the regional perspective. Somehow I have a hard time imagining the Sunni powers in the region, like Saudi Arabia, standing by while a Shia dominated puppet government in the Green Zone works with US troops to suppress the Sunni minority in Iraq's western provinces and in greater Baghdad. This of course is one of the intents of the new Bush policy. Couple this up with the natural conflict between the Sunni conservative countries (Saudi Arabia in the lead) and Shia Iran multiplied by the ethnic frictions between Arab and Persian......

You can see where this line of thinking is headed. Pile on top of these incendiary potentials the temptation of the Bushites to try to distract the US from Iraq by rousing up the thuggish spector of nuclear tipped President Ahmadinejad in Teheran. What a mess.

It is hard for me to imagine how all of this will be resolved. It is only clear that we have created an enormous mess in Iraq, now spreading about the region. Nothing good will come of this and most assuredly many more people will die and the law of unintended consequences will be demonstrated on a grandiose scale.

Book Note

2007-02-26T20:37:00.000-05:00

Before The Dawn: recovering the lost history of our ancestors by Nicholas Wade (The Penguin Press: New York, 2006)

Earlier this year I read Charles Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and was rewarded with another reminder of how thin my understanding of our hemisphere's history is and how much new knowledge is being added by multiple disciplines. Here was a whole new world to be explored.

Nicholas Wade's book is another must read for those of us educated before the impact of the decoding of DNA had begun. He attempts to summarize what we have learned based on contemporary genetics combining it with the vast base of earlier research from paleoanthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and other fields.

Wade opens the book with a great little story about how genetics has determined a probably date for when human beings first began wearing clothing. Based on the fact that body lice are descended from head lice and show a special adaptation specifically providing body lice with the means to hang on to the fibers of our clothing, genetics is able to date our adoption of clothing to be about 72,000 years ago "give or take a few thousand years".

While discussing the evidence for the paths of human migration away from the African homeland, Wade mentions that the biggest region for the paucity of physical data is that because we were in glacial period, seal level was some 300 feet lower than today. Thus, since early humans would have followed the coast line to be close to a ready source of food, their early habitations are now well below water.

I won't attempt to summarize the book. Rather I urge you to retrieve it from your local library.

Noam to the Best Seller List

2006-09-23T14:55:00.000-04:00

photo by Raimin Talaie/Bloomberg News

Just in case you missed this little drama, here is an article from the New York Times. Once again we are also reminded about how boring Alan Dershowitz is.

September 23, 2006
U.S. Best Seller, Thanks to Rave by Latin Leftist
By MOTOKO RICH

All the authors currently clamoring for a seat on Oprah Winfrey’s couch might do well to send copies of their books to the latest publishing tastemaker: Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.

Ever since Mr. Chávez held up a copy of a 301-page book by Noam Chomsky, the linguist and left-wing political commentator, during a speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, sales of the book have climbed best-seller lists at Amazon.com and BN.com, the online site for the book retailer Barnes & Noble, and booksellers around the country have noted a spike in sales.

The paperback edition of “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” a detailed critique of American foreign policy that Mr. Chomsky published two years ago, hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list yesterday, and the hardcover edition, published in 2003, climbed as high as No. 6. At both Borders Group and Barnes & Noble, sales of the title jumped tenfold in the last two days.

“It doesn’t normally happen that you get someone of the stature of Mr. Chávez holding up a book at a speech at the U.N.,” said Jay Hyde, a manager at Borders Group in Ann Arbor, Mich.

In his speech, in which Mr. Chávez excoriated President George W. Bush as the “devil,” he held up a copy of “Hegemony” and urged his audience “very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it.”

Calling it an “excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century,” Mr. Chávez added, “I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.”

Julia Versau, 50, a real estate writer in Valparaiso, Ind., said she saw Mr. Chávez holding up the book during a newscast on CNN. Although she had read Mr. Chomsky’s work on propaganda at least a decade ago, she said, Mr. Chávez’s speech reminded her to try the book.

“I saw the title and I went darn, I haven’t read that one,” Ms. Versau said in a telephone interview. “If he’s reading that I better go check it out.” She said that she had previously found Mr. Chomsky’s work “a little dense,” but said that “our democracy could use more people telling the truth and more people taking the time to read and get themselves educated.”

Mr. Chomsky, who has retired from teaching full time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did not return calls or an e-mail message yesterday seeking comment. In an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, he said he would be happy to meet Mr. Chávez.

Demand for the book seemed to be spread across the country. In Florida, Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, an independent bookseller with locations in Miami Beach, Coral Gables and Bal Harbour, said he had already ordered 50 more copies of “Hegemony,” while he usually keeps only about 3 per store. In Denver, Andrea Phillips, a manager at the Colfax Avenue branch of the bookseller the Tattered Cover, said “Hegemony” had sold three times as many copies this week as it normally would in a month.

On the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, Rainbow Books, a workers’ collective that specializes in leftist topics and carries many of Mr. Chomsky’s works, the last copy of “Hegemony” was sold on Thursday.

Allen Ruff, a manager at Rainbow Books, said “Hegemony” had not sold particularly well when it was first published three years ago, because many regulars were already familiar with Mr. Chomsky’s other works. But Mr. Ruff said the recent news media attention has meant that “people are now discovering him for the first time,” and the store has ordered a dozen more copies.

Mr. Chomsky’s publisher, Metropolitan Books, a unit of Henry Holt & Company, is printing an additional 25,000 copies of “Hegemony,” of which it said there are currently 250,000 in print in hardcover and paperback. A Holt spokeswoman said that print run could go higher after consultation with booksellers.

Up until now, the book, which Samantha Power, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2004, called “a raging and often meandering assault on United States foreign policy,” has been a steady seller but never hit the best-seller lists. To date it has sold about 66,000 copies in hardcover and nearly 55,000 in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks bookstores and other outlets that usually account for 60 to 70 percent of a title’s sales.

Mr. Chomsky, 77, is hardly an obscure writer. Many people have heard of the outspoken professor, who is a darling of the left, even if they have not yet read his work. “I think Chávez speaking to it renewed interest and made people say, ‘I know that author and I’m going to check it out,’ ” said Bob Wietrak, vice president of merchandising at Barnes & Noble.

But Alan M. Dershowitz, the lawyer and Harvard Law School professor, said he doubted whether many of the current buyers would ever actually read the book.

“I don’t know anybody who’s ever read a Chomsky book,” said Mr. Dershowitz, who said he first met Mr. Chomsky in 1948 at a Hebrew-speaking Zionist camp in the Pocono Mountains where Mr. Dershowitz was a camper and Mr. Chomsky was a counselor.

“You buy them, you put them in your pockets, you put them out on your coffee table,” said Mr. Dershowitz, a longtime critic of Mr. Chomsky. The people who are buying “Hegemony” now, he added, “I promise you they are not going to get to the end of the book.”

He continued: “He does not write page turners, he writes page stoppers. There are a lot of bent pages in Noam Chomsky’s books, and they are usually at about Page 16.”

Regardless, most authors would be happy for a plug like Mr. Chávez’s. “All world leaders should be enlisted in book publicity,” said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster.

As a matter of fact, it is a growing trend. At a press conference in the East Room of the White House yesterday, Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, dodged a few questions by joking that Simon & Schuster, which is publishing his memoirs on Sept. 25, had barred him from commenting until his book is out. President Bush played along: “In other words, ‘Buy the book’ is what he’s saying,” Mr. Bush said.

Internet Dreamings

2006-06-06T11:28:00.000-04:00

When the Web first came onto my screen in the '90s, it seemed like a place with a future substantially without historical precedence in its apparent immunity from government and corporate interferences. It was frequently referred to as the "new wild West" with cyber-cowboys and thugs. The technology appeared inherently democratic if not fundamentally anarchic. It was clear that commerce would appear, but the hope flourished that participation and access would be open and relatively cheap.

Recent years have brought on government efforts to control the Web. Most prominent is the so-called Great Firewall of China. Though even a quick glance at reporting (see, for example The Open Net Initiative) on government control over the Web reveals a slew at work. No surprise, big corporations have been supporting the reported 40,000 people at work in China keeping the government safe from its citizens. So, we have learned that the technology of the Web is hardly robust enough to withstand the efforts of repressive governments.

And, further, we have the emergence this year of efforts by the big corporations in the telecom field to pass laws that will enable them to control content on their pipelines. This could easily lead to a N-tiered system of speed and access driven by these pipeline companies. Verizon, AT&T, and so on.

Time to get busy fending off these twin challenges to the most important change in human communications since Gutenberg.

Beyond Words

2006-05-19T10:05:00.000-04:00

Our national politics has left me beyond words for months now. An executive branch so mired in its own arrogance and lies that to begin to speak of it would require something like the cataloging of the ships in the Illiad. A legislative branch floats $100 tax rebates in response to energy problems decades in the making. A whole region of the country that appears still a wasteland almost nine months after a major natural disaster with no effective government action in sight.

But today I was bouyed by the presence of our President in action defending the country's borders.

More White House Health Care Rhetoric

2006-04-03T19:58:00.000-04:00

Today's (April 6th) New York Times Op-Ed piece, "The Health of a Nation" by Mr. Alan Hubbard, assistant to the president for economic policy and director of the National Economic Council, made a number of claims concerning healthcare that seem to require supporting data if we are not to interpret them as coming from someone living in a different reality than the rest of us:

"Health care is expensive because the vast majority of Americans consume it as if it were free. Health insurance policies with low deductibles insulate people from the cost of the medical care they use so much so that they often do not even ask for prices. And people don't recognize the high premium costs of this low-deductible insurance because premiums are paid by employers."

These three sentences leave me feeling the hot breath of rhetoric and wondering how he might support these assertions with some fact-based research?

First, we have the claim that health care is expensive simply because of the behavior of us consumers. Where is the role of insurances companies sucking up a widely reported 15-20% of the cash for the administrative costs, or drug companies allowed to waste unconscionable amounts of money on marketing because they can pass this along through a patent-protected rip off system, or countless technological advances providing better treatments and longer life, or toher structural drivers to health care?" Then, in the same sentence, there is the assertion that we "... consume healthcare as if it were free". There is no way for him to know this except based on some social science research. Where is it?

Ditto for the second assertion.

And, as for the third, that "people don't recognize the high premium costs...", this claim can only have come from someone on the White House or university payrolls so long that like Bush The Elder he can't remember the last time he bought a gallon of milk or looked at the health deduction on his weekly paycheck. But, just in case he might be right here, it would be helpful to see a little supporting data here also.

But, then, we just have to wait for the "free market" to solve this one too. Religion always relieves us of the need to do the hard work of research and thinking.

The Golden Theory

2006-03-19T09:18:00.000-05:00

A couple of days ago I heard a little snippet on the radio from a speech given by Representative Henry Hyde, Chairperson of the international Relations Committee, at the beginning of a hearing with our Secretary of State Condleeza Rice.

The tone and content was startling. Here are the opening paragraphs. I encourage your to read the whole text (four pages, not that much really) at the link below.

Perils of the Golden Theory

Lying at the heart of America’s relationship with the world is a paradox. We have a global reach, voluntarily assuming responsibility for preserving peace and order in much of the world and for the bless-ed charge of bettering the lives of its inhabitants. And yet we are simultaneously very distant from that world, stubbornly uninstructed by its ancient cynicism and preaching a confidence in the future that defies the constraints of the present. This paradox – to massively engage the world while living on an autonomous island in the global sea – is made possible by our unprecedented power.

It is a truism that power breeds arrogance. A far greater danger, however, stems from the self-delusion that is the more certain companion. For individuals and countries alike, power inevitably distorts perceptions of the world by insulating them in a soothing cocoon that is impervious to what scientists term “disconfirming evidence.”

Our power, then, has the grave liability of rendering our theories about the world immune from failure. But by becoming deaf to easily discerned warning signs, we may ignore long-term costs that result from our actions and dismiss reverses that should lead to a reexamination of our goals and means.

To illustrate my point, let me focus one school of thought that has gained increasing prominence in our national debate, namely the assertion that our interests are best advanced by assigning a central place in our foreign policy to the worldwide promotion of democracy. This I term the Golden Theory.

Here is the link to the full text: http://wwwc.house.gov/international_relations/109/hyde021606.pdf

The Military-Industrial Complex Revisited

2006-01-29T08:28:00.000-05:00

Living in a society that has for my entire life surrounded me with war, rhetoric and symbols of war, threats of war, real war, and on and on, I regularly think about how we might change this course.

Recently I was reminded of President Eisenhower's Farewell Address of January 19, 1961. So, I went back to read it. It is a strikingly prescient speech from a President who frequently seemed so milquetoasty and just perhaps a bit slow, though as I write this I remember that he was a President who had extensive in person contact with war.

Here are the paragraphs most focused on our war state:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known of any of my predecessors in peacetime, or, indeed, by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States cooperations -- corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The complete speech (its actually quite short) is here

February 4, 2006: Today I discovered that back on December 10, 2004 I wrote about rediscovering the same Eisenhower speech to much the same point.

The CIA's Nascent Gulag and Habeas Corpus

2005-11-02T18:20:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post published an extensive article ("CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11" by Dana Priest) today about secret CIA prisons in various undisclosed foreign locations. These exist to keep an unknown number of people held under unknown conditions for indeterminate periods of time for unknown reasons. This government's explanation is the "war of terror", just the most recent of an endless parade of governments' rationale for such treatment.

During a press conference today, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley made the following statement:

Q: If I could just press you on that, how do those self-correcting mechanisms that affirm our values and our laws, how do they work if the sites are secret to begin with?

MR. HADLEY: Well, the fact that they are secret, assuming there are such sites, does not mean that simply because something is -- and some people say that the test of your principles are what you do when no one is looking. And the President has insisted that whether it is in the public, or is in the private, the same principles will apply, and the same principles will be respected. And to the extent people do not meet up, measure up to those principles, there will be accountability and responsibility.

(from www.whitehouse.gov)

This statement comes from the very same government that has never acknowledged the lies that brought us into the present Iraq war. The same government that awarded three architects of this war Medals of Freedom. The same government that could not find a responsible party with a rank higher than sergeant when the entire world caught sight of the Abu Ghraib abuses. But, we should be assured that everything is right "when no one is looking".

But, in the end, it is not just this government that must not be allowed to hold people secretly. The great English Common Law principal of habeas corpus evolved because of age-old misbehavior by governments. All governments must be prevented from holding people secretly for unknown reasons under unknown conditions for indeterminate periods of time. And, we should not allow governments to use security threats as an excuse.

Czar GWB, NSA, and Hollywood

2006-01-23T16:25:00.000-05:00

While I have stayed away from making comments about the new American Czar GWB's latest moves into the new imperium cum 1984, a chance bit of TV reinforced the seriousness of his maneuvers. It is easy to get lost in the legal babble and the point-counter point of our political culture. It is easy to loose track of what this is really all about - a comprehensive government oversight of every aspect of our lives. Ten years ago, we actually wrote letters and spoke to people face-to-face. Today, for many Americans, the web is the environment in which all communications moves. Now even the telephone is being Skyped away to the land of internet protocols.

So, back to this chance bit of TV:

Sunday night we watched "Enemy of the State", a 1998 thriller starring Will Smith, Gene Hackman and Jon Voight. This pre-9/11 movie stars the NSA with all of its surveillance tools fully deployed to track down and kill Will Smith. Though this is a very enjoyable thriller, the most frightening part of watching the movie is knowing that Czar GWB could actually literally be looking and listening just as the NSA devil-incarnate Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight) does.

Now if you are still not persuaded that the government can really track us with its spy machinery take a look a this photo of my house in Cambridge:

Those little white forms on the deck are vinyl chairs and tables, just to add some scale.

Or, here is a tennis game at Hoyt Field a few hundred yards from my house:

If we can access these images through Google from publicly available sources, it is very easy to imagine that the NSA can see faces from space and certainly listen in on any and all conversations and emails. This Czar GWB stuff is serious.

For those who enjoy coincidences, during the movie, it is revealed that the chief bad guy, Thomas Reynolds (played by Jon Voight), was born on "9/11/1941".

Ice Age

2005-12-30T07:21:00.000-05:00

When I looked down into the Grand Canyon for the first time, I paused only for a moment at its immensity and moved right onto a more self-centered thought, “How tiny human history is in all of this, and even further, how much less significant my own life must be by extension.” It is clear that human beings will not outlast Nature.

An article in the January 7, 2002 New Yorker magazine, Ice Memory by Elizabeth Kolbert suggests that Nature will win out in even the shorter run than my earlier musings.

Greenland is about the size of France and 80% covered by ice. The ice sheet or glacier is over ten thousand feet thick. “A hundred and thirty-eight feet down, there is snow dating from the American Civil War; some twenty-five hundred feet down, snow from the days of Plato, and, five thousand three hundred and fifty feet down, from the time when prehistoric painters were decorating the caves at Lascaux. At the very bottom, there is snow that fell on Greenland before the last ice age, which began more than a hundred thousand years ago.”

Starting in 1959 and continuing to this day teams from various countries have drilled down through this ice and extracted cores on four or more occasions. At first no one was very interested in the cores, but a clever Danish scientist developed a technique that allowed for an accurate reading of the atmospheric temperature at the time each layer was deposited. This involves the ratio of two oxygen isotopes in rain water that is temperature dependent.

So, what do these ice cores reveal about the earth’s climate?

“Its hard to look much further back in the record, however, without feeling a little queasy. About twenty thousand years ago, the Earth was still in the grip of the last ice age. During this period, called the Wisconsin by American scientists, ice sheets covered nearly a third of the world’s landmass, reaching as far south a New York City.

The transition out of the Wisconsin is preserved in great detail in the Greenland ice. What the record shows is that it was a period of intense instability. The temperature did not rise slowly , or even steadily; instead, the climate flipped several times from temperate conditions back into those of an ice age, and then back again. Around fifteen thousand years ago, Greenland abruptly warmed by sixteen degrees in fifty years or less. In one particularly traumatic episode some twelve thousand years ago, the mean temperature in Greenland shot up by fifteen degrees in a single decade.”

So, over the last hundred thousand years of climate history captured in the ice there have been dozens of episodes of wild swings in temperature. Taking a longer view, the earth has oscillated through warm periods of ten thousand years followed by ninety thousand years of cold during the last half million years. The warm period we now live in is now ten thousand years old; a cold period should follow.

Although we humans are persisting in all sorts of un-neighborly activities, in the end we may not have enough time to do ourselves in before Nature catches us.

War News Radio at Swarthmore

2005-12-23T12:11:00.000-05:00

The New Yorker article linked in the title above, BAGHDAD TO SWARTHMORE, alerted me to this work by college students at Swarthmore to penetrate the fog of war. What a wonderful idea to use our technology to simply call people up in Iraq and talk with them.

Listen to it on line at: http://www.warnewsradio.org.

Congressional Collusion in NSA Spying

2005-12-23T08:19:00.000-05:00

Today's New York Times includes a story, "Congressional Leaders: Among Those Told of Program, Few Objected" that is further fuel to concerns about our government running amuck in a fury of spying and secrecy. Even among nominal members of the opposition privileged to be among the fewer than ten members of either house of Congress who were informed about the domestic spying by the NSA, none did more than express "grave concern" about these activities. Ms. Nancy Pelosi, one of the privileged said that she could not release her written statement of concern until the White House declassified it. We are now into a deepening circle of secrecy where even mild expressions, and I assume they are mild because there is no evidence that Ms. Pelosi, or any one else in the Congress takes the fundamentals of constitutional protections for privacy and minority rights seriously, are subject to be classified as "secret" by the Executive branch.

All of this leads me darkening thoughts that others have expressed elsewhere and far earlier, that the real danger to our country from Al Qaeda and other terrorists is the self inflicted danger of an ever more Orwellian government driven by flows of money from big business and big religion.

Why Worry about the Patriot Act and NSA Spying?

2005-12-20T12:45:00.000-05:00

At times it seems easier not to be too paranoid about the doings of government. Sure, they shouldn't be snooping in our library records without our knowledge, if at all. Sure, they shouldn't be snooping in on telephone conversations or tracking our email correspondence. But, I am just a regular Joe, so surely they won't be interested in me.

Well, better get back to basics. A frontpage article in today's New York Times again demonstrates that governments just can't help themselves when it has the power to intimidate or squash critics. The Times' article, "F.B.I. Watched Activist Groups, New Files Show", reports that groups protesting logging activities in Colorado, Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and others were subject to F.B.I. surveillance.

As might be expected, the F.B.I. trotted out one of their "spokesman" to explain, "the F.B.I. does not target individuals or organizations for investigation based on their political beliefs. Everything we do is carefully promulgated by federal law, Justice Department guidelines and the F.B.I.'s own rules."

How many times have we heard those lines?

Meanwhile, in the same newspaper, there is further evidence that our government has not quite the bandwidth for doing the basics of governing the country. Next to the F.B.I. story is another, "Canvas Cities Are Rising Amid Hurricane Rubble".

Air Force Evangelism Is Officially Sanctioned

2005-10-13T21:01:00.000-04:00

Starting sometime last spring, news began to appear that chaplains at the Air Force Academy were evangelizing amongst the cadets; one chaplain who dared to complain found herself under order for transfer to a post in Japan. At the time, it all appeared to be just a more visible outburst of the evangelism that is pandemic in the US.

Wednesday's New York Times carried a story revealing that in fact the Air Force had a code of ethics for its chaplains that gave permission for them to "evangelize military members who are 'not affiliated' with any religion."

Some separation of church and state!

Worrying about TV cameras watching you?

2005-10-09T18:55:00.000-04:00

From our Singapore outpost: Jonathan sent along an image of our house in Cambridge that he gathered from "earth.google.com". Just when you might be having an Orwell spell because of all of the surveillance cameras we see around us, Google introduces images taken from satellites, available for free in the civilian market.

Just imagine what can be seen by the real spy cameras:

Guess it is time to get shades for those skylights!!

Those white three white spots to the back are our deck chairs. The blue blob to the right is the tarp covering our fire wood.

More "The Rich Keep Getting Richer"

2005-10-05T08:27:00.000-04:00

[click on graphic to see full size, back button to return]

Back on May 6, 2005, I noted in that day's blog entry "Class Warfare - the rich continue to win" that the rich in America are "beyond merely filthy rich". Today's New York Times Business section brought more evidence from the IRS.

In the article At the Very Top, a Surge in Income in '03, David Cay Johnston writes that the top 0.1% of the population increased their income by 9.5% between 2002 and 2003 while the bottom 20% increased incomes by 0.7%. The top 0.1% garnered 25.2% of all income gains which is slightly more than the gain of the entire bottom 80% of the population.

When this data is viewed against the inflation rate for the period of 2002 to 2003 of 2.3%, the bottom 80% gained little or lost in real income during this period.

Our tax policies acted as accelerator to this widening chasm of income inequality.

"The top 10th of 1 percent paid almost 23.6 percent of their reported income in income taxes in 2003, down from just under 27 percent in 2002. That is a decline of 3.4 percentage points. For taxpayers in the bottom 80 percent, the effective tax rates fall by three-tenths of a percentage point or less."

Hurricane Pam - no one knew that the levies would fail?

2005-09-05T11:34:00.000-04:00

The disturbing failures of local, state, and federal governments to perform their basic functions during last week's hurricane is further accentuated by even the most casual search on the web. Despite the Bush regime's early claims of surprise about the dangers, most prominently our well-informed President's comment, "... no one knew that the levies would fail...", it is completely clear that everyone, including FEMA personnel knew that this hurricane would cause a catastrophe.

In July 2004, FEMA and local agencies in Louisiana conducted a simulation exercise for "hurricane PAM". The details differed from Katrina, but the results foretold the current disaster. This also produced a computer-based simulation of the flooding. Here is a link to the graphics [http://www.nd.edu/~adcirc/pam.htm].

In June 2002, The New Orleans newspaper THE TIMES-PICAYUNE published an extensive series, Washing Away, on the dangers of hurricanes to New Orleans and southern Louisiana, . Here is a link to this series. [http://www.nola.com/hurricane/?/washingaway/].

What does this suggest about our preparedness for a container ship to arrive in Boston harbor with a little dirty bomb hidden away?

Two Tales from GM

2005-08-25T06:17:00.000-04:00

The article in the August 8, 2005 New York Times reporting on a General Motors light truck that is manufactured in a GM plant in China and dominates that country's minivan market has stayed with me. Perhaps, it was yesterday's announcement of new efficiency regulations by the Bush regime that brings me to the keyboard this morning. The story, G.M. Thrives in China With Small, Thrifty Vans by Keith Bradsher reports on the history of the development of this minivan over the past ten years. "Their development was led by an American, Philip F. Murtaugh, a native of Ohio and a maverick executive who was willing to zig while the rest of G.M. was zagging. Mr. Murtaugh was able to create in China the kind of innovative environment that G.M. has struggled for decades to achieve in its American operations."

This van gets 43 miles per gallon in city driving! GM actually can build efficient vehicles. How did this happen? It turns out that the Chinese government has vehicle efficiency regulations and simply requires this level of efficiency. So, if even GM can do this in China, imagine what they could do here if we had a government that was serious about improving our use of petroleum.

So that is the first tale.

The second tale is to imagine the fate of Mr. Murtaugh who pulled of this amazing feat of GM ingenuity. You might be entertaining thoughts that he would be brought back to Detroit to show the car city boys how to do it here. No such luck.

"A soft-spoken man in a company known for autocratic leaders, Mr. Murtaugh ran the China operations for more than nine years from his base in Shanghai, repeatedly making some of the best calls in the industry. Now he finds himself unemployed and living in a small community in rural Kentucky.

His resignation in March, at the age of 49, came shortly after senior company executives reorganized management to give more power to Detroit executives to oversee design, engineering and various manufacturing disciplines all over the world, including operations in China."

I have been telling people for years that GM is a dinosaur, still standing perhaps, but a dinosaur waiting for the next deep recession to move it from its present status as a junk-bond-rated behemoth to the bankruptcy courts. This second tale of GM management brilliance is further evidence to bolster my case.

By the way, "Mr. Murtaugh said that he was playing a little golf now, but found himself with many idle hours.

"I'm looking for work," he said, and then joked, "do you have a deck that needs painting?""