Just Redistricting. I was startled to see rightwing commentator Dick Morris say in the New York Post today that by gerrymandering the Texas legislature Tom "DeLay managed to do something that is very, very wrong and highly injurious to our democracy — to fix the elections for the House of Representatives, in effect to take the ballot out of our hands."
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Morris gained fame as an advisor to ostensibly Democratic President Bill Clinton, but has, since leaving that service, been an outspoken opponent of most Democratic principles. This is part of what I observed years ago, that Bill Clinton was 'a new kind of Democrat' — a Republican.
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Thus was I surprised that Morris actually regards as sinful the malicious drawing of legislative districts by the party in power at any given time, to bunch populations by party as to reduce the possibility of truly competitive elections upsetting their applecart. That is, instead of districts including random numbers of Democrats and Republicans, district lines now encircle concentrations of one party or the other as to provide safe seats for members of the majority party and reduce the influence of the other party.
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Typically, reapportionment puts as many people likely to vote for the minority party (say, Democrats) into a single district as possible, and scatters the remnants thinly among other districts where there is a majority for their own party (Republicans). That way, instead of there being five districts with roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, there is one district that is 95% Democratic — one seat — and four that are 60% Republican.
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Morris says that this partisan redistricting has resulted in a stark reduction in the number of incumbents who can be ousted in any election cycle:

In the elections following the 1980 census, 42 House members were defeated. In those after the 1990 election, 39 lost their seats. But after the 2000 census, only 16 members were defeated — half by other incumbents drawn into the same districts as a result of the shrinkage of the state population. * * * This massive disservice to democracy makes a mockery of calls for increased voter turnout. What is the point when the lines have been drawn in such a way as to fix the results?

My goodness! A rightwinger who actually believes in democracy! Maybe our civilization isn't doomed after all.
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In response to Dick Morris's column, I sent the following emailed letter to the editor of the New York Post:

It is an oddity of our system that state legislatures draw the boundaries for Congressional districts. That oddity is not in the Constitution itself, so Congress can take that power away from the states and draw Congressional districts itself. Or it can leave the process with state legislatures but set the rules. The simplest and fairest way to draw such lines is to start in one corner (say, the northwest) of a state and, by computer, draw districts as compact as possible, that is, as close to square as can be. And Congress does not have to wait until the next census but can mandate that boundaries be redrawn all over the Nation by, say, March 2006 (well in advance of November elections), using the data from the 2000 census.
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Once Congressional boundaries are redrawn by a rule of strict compactness, without regard to any other consideration whatsoever save that no building would be divided by a boundary line, the public would almost certainly demand that the same rule be applied to state legislative districts. Then we would have a fix — as soon as a few months from now, given the speed with which computers work — to the problem that Dick Morris rightly points out, that gerrymandering has robbed us of the accountability that elections are supposed to give us over our representatives.

If states need some computing help, I'm sure the Feds have time available on supercomputers that they could give over to state legislatures. But if Mapquest can find darned near every street in the country, I don't think any state legislature would have trouble drawing legislative district lines with an ordinary personal computer.
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(Responsive to "The Real Sin of Tom DeLay", column by Dick Morris in the New York Post, September 30, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,933.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:14 PM

 
Protecting Themselves. The Pentagon is refusing to reimburse soldiers in Iraq who buy their own body armor. Stunning.
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The military sends men into battle without either adequate armor on vehicles or body armor, refuses for years to rush them this protection from Government resources, and then defies Congress, which passed a law almost a year ago requiring the Pentagon to reimburse soldiers who feel they cannot wait for the DoD to supply them with body armor, so buy their own. The Pentagon opposed the law! and has dragged its feet about implementing it.
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That's just amazing.
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A poll at the AOL site where that story appeared today shows that 72% of readers did not know that our soldiers in Iraq are buying their own equipment, at their own expense, because the Pentagon sends them into battle without adequate gear.
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I know that the military is stupid. I know that Republicans are callous about the deaths of poor people, who are the bulk of soldiers in our all-volunteer military. But for them to be this brazen about it is truly startling.
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There is a lot of bitterness among military families, especially survivors of killed soldiers (witness Cindy Sheehan). Once the general population fully appreciates that the military not only lies to get us into war but then doesn't even protect the American kids they throw into harm's way thousands of miles from our shores, or even reimburse them for providing their own protection, the antiwar movement is sure to grow.
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Patriotism goes only so far, and loyalty must be two-sided. If the Pentagon shows no loyalty to its soldiers, or their families, or the Nation in its expectations that our kids will be protected as much as is humanly possible, disaffection not just with the Iraq war but with war as an instrument of foreign policy more generally is sure to grow. Good.
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How can policymakers hope to continue to project U.S. power thru invasions or threats of invasion if Americans come to understand that the old men at the top of the heap don't care how many of our young people they kill in the process?
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Some good might thus emerge from growing bitterness over the Pentagon's refusal to protect our own soldiers. Maybe some kid traumatized by the death of a friend or group of friends snatched from their civilian life and weekend-warrior games in the National Guard to kill Arabs for Israel will come home so indignant and so brutalized that he takes out his own gun and kills Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, or Bush. I'd love to see that. Why should those vile old beasts get to kill hundreds of thousands of people and lay waste to an entire country, but pay no price?
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There are dangers in teaching citizens to kill, and it may be that what goes around will come around to the militarists at home. I suspect that if Rumsfeld or Bush were shot dead by an embittered soldier, the Pentagon would suddenly find a way to supply all the troops with all their needs.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,928.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:26 PM

 
Out, but Not Cold. Tom DeLay, the disgusting, disgraceful, ethically-challenged Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, has stepped down "temporarily" because he has just been indicted in his home state, Texas, for corruption.
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On April 12, 2005, I said in this blog:

I will be amazed if a year from now Tom DeLay is still House Majority Leader.

That was 5 1/2 months ago. I had hoped DeLay would be out, permanently, shortly after that blog entry, but 5 1/2 months would be soon enuf if it turns out to be permanent rather than temporary.
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DeLay asserts his innocence, which of course must mean he isn't guilty of a thing. After all, no one guilty has ever denied guilt. 95% of the people in the prisons of this country are innocent. If you doubt it, just ask them. I hope Tom DeLay joins them, soon and for a long time.
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Alas, DeLay's permanent ouster would be a boon for the Republican Party, not just for the Nation, because he is enormously unpopular. That would be fair if the Republicans themselves ousted him because they are insistent on ethical behavior on the part of every Republican. That is, however, not remotely the case.
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Quite the contrary, the Republicans actually pushed thru, in November 2004, a measure that would remove the requirement that DeLay step down if he was indicted. Public indignation caused them to reverse that in January 2005. So the Republican Party tried to protect DeLay from the foreseeable, natural consequences of his corrupt behavior — because the national Republican Party is Slime Central.
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One can never know how a jury will vote, so we'll just have to wait to see if DeLay beats the rap or joins all those other innocents in prison. As we might have said when I was a teen, "I'll give you three guesses [as to what I hope for]. First two don't count."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,927.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:06 PM

 
Shame's New Name: "Michael DeWayne Brown". The former director of FEMA who was compelled to resign for his utter incompetence in dealing with the hurricane Katrina disaster testified before Congress today, and Republicans and Democrats found a rare point of agreement: the guy is slime.
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He dared to blame state and local officials, and plead helplessness to override them or even pre-position people and supplies where they might be moved into the disaster zone immediately after the storm left the region. He disowned FEMA's fundamental mission: to take care of people after a disaster. He mocked Congress, explosively objecting:

"So I guess you want me to be the superhero, to step in there and take everyone out of New Orleans," Brown said.

"What I wanted you to do is do your job and coordinate," [Connecticut Republican Representative Christopher] Shays retorted.

Casting around for someone else to blame, Brown tried to appeal to the partisan instincts of the Members of Congress present by fixing his sights on Democrats:

Brown acknowledged making mistakes during the storm and subsequent flooding that devastated the Gulf Coast. But he accused New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, both Democrats, of fostering chaos and failing to order a mandatory evacuation more than a day before Katrina hit.

"My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional," Brown told a special panel set up by House Republican leaders to investigate the catastrophe. Most Democrats, seeking an independent investigation, stayed away to protest what they called an unfair probe of the Republican administration by GOP lawmakers.

"I very strongly personally regret that I was unable to persuade Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin [both Demmies] to sit down, get over their differences and work together," Brown said. "I just couldn't pull that off." * * *

Blanco vehemently denied that she waited until the eve of the storm to order an evacuation of New Orleans. She said her order came on the morning of Aug. 27 – two days before the storm – resulting in 1.3 million people evacuating the city.

(See this blog's entries of September 12th and 1st, below, for mentions of other instances of Republican scapegoating of Democrats.)
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But perhaps most shocking is this quote from Slimeboy.

"And while my heart goes out to people on fixed incomes, it is primarily a state and local responsibility. And in my opinion, it's the responsibility of faith-based organizations, of churches and charities and others to help those people."

So, here you have the Republican Right's worldview: disaster victims are not entitled to help, as of right. They must beg for charity! If people feel like helping them, that's fine. If they don't, that's also fine. We are not our brother's keeper.
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The shocking, vile, and truly wicked mindset of the Bush Administration is (1) Government cannot and should not handle hurricane rescue operations; rather, private charity must provide for people; but, at the very same time, (2) private charity interferes with Government (see this blog's entry of September 12th, below)! so Government is doubly not responsible.
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Bush's home state of Texas and adjoining Louisiana, both Red States, now see the natural consequences of putting heartless, Radical Rightwing Republicans in charge of the national government. If these storm-devastated Southerners like the way they've been treated in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, they should vote Republican in the 2006 midterm Congressional elections and for President in 2008. If, however, they don't like one whit the way the Radical Right has treated them, they owe themselves the duty to vote Liberal Democratic from now on. Demmies would have saved them, of whole heart and with all deliberate speed.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,922.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:24 PM

 
Sadism for Kids: The National Geographic Channel. I have been repeatedly stunned by the cruelty, viciousness, and outrite sadism that fills the National Geographic Society's cable service. Parents need to know that the people who control that channel fill it with images that could be deeply disturbing to children, and BLOCK IT to prevent their kids from being psychologically damaged by hideous images of animals being ripped to shreds, eaten alive, and otherwise brutalized by National Geographic's version of "Mother Nature", and by stories about people being killed, individually and in groups, by animals, natural disasters, and other people.
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Nature can be harsh, we know, but an endless, almost unrelievedly negative litany of nature's harshness is not what parents expect their children to see when they tune into the National Geographic Channel ("NGC"). Here's a sample of the schedule, this lazy, carefree Sunday afternoon, when kids are out of school and free to watch hours of TV:

1:00-2:00pm  Nature's Nightmares (a major NGC series): "Elephants: The Dark Side". Violent elephants that sometimes kill mahouts and other people. Sample anecdotes: a mahout is impaled on an elephant's tusk and tossed about, surviving only by luck. Farmers are attacked and killed "every week". A mahout is pulled apart, like Solomon's threat to chop a baby in half. A wild Indian elephant has killed 30 people. A circus elephant in Hawaii is shown mauling his trainer, then being shot repeatedly by police, until it dies. Child-friendly stuff, huh?
3:00-4:00pm  "Expeditions to the Edge: Trapped Diver." "Divers face tragic consequences when they plunge into the icy waters of New Zealand's cave system."
4:00-5:00pm  Seconds from Disaster (another NGC series): "Disco Bombing", about the terrorist attack on a Balinese discotheque that killed 188 people. Fun viewing! Watch intently kids. Enjoy!
6:00-7:00pm  "Spontaneous Human Combustion": "Paranormal investigators, forensic biologists, physicists and fire experts try to explain why a body would suddenly burst into flames." Hey, Junior. You'd better watch out, or you'll burst into flames and die in agony!
7:00-8:00pm  "Bermuda Triangle:" "Ships and aircrafts are said to vanish without a trace in the Bermuda Triangle." Hey, kids, let's take a trip!
8:00-9:00pm Explorer (another major NGC series): "Collapse." My cable service's listings give nothing but the bare title here, so I'm not sure as to exactly what is "collapsing" here. Let's check the NGC website. Oh, here it is: "Delve into the world of structural engineering to examine some of the world's most terrible structural disasters." Oh, Buffy honey, watch the buildings fall down and kill people!
9:00-10:00pm  Seconds from Disaster (another episode in this major NGC series): "The Bomb in Oklahoma City." 'Nuff said?
10:00pm-11:00pm Explorer (another episode in this major NGC series): "Inside Shock & Awe", "a probing, behind-the-scenes look at the all-out air offensive that launched Operation Iraqi Freedom."

And on, and on, and on. Hour after hour, day after day, the monsters at National Geographic delite in death, destruction, and cruelty, both animal and human: infotainment for Nazis.
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All parents should block the National Geographic Channel from viewing by anyone under 18, and indeed should probably recommend that even older kids/young adults avoid the constant stream of sadism that, for reasons I do not understand, an ostensibly legitimate educational organization supposedly devoted to the "diffusion of geographical knowledge" spews out over cable and its website.
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The current leaders of the National Geographic Society are apparently twisted, sadistic beasts who should be removed from leadership positions in that hijacked organization. People who find the monstrous offerings of a channel they thought was good for kids, and that they didn't have to monitor, should express their indignation directly to the National Geographic Society.
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You can email comments on the National Geographic Channel to comments@natgeochannel.com, but they will probably be ignored. More likely to get attention are hardcopy letters to top management:

President and CEO, John M. Fahey, Jr.
and
Chairman of the Board, Gilbert M. Grosvenor
National Geographic Society
1145 17th Street N.W.
Washington, D.C.  20036-4688

If you subscribe to National Geographic Magazine, you are more likely to get management's attention by telling them that if the offerings of the National Geographic Channel do not change by year's end, you will NOT renew your own subscription and NOT give any subscriptions as gifts.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,914.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:21 PM

 
Maybe Winter's Not So Bad After All. The "Frost Belt" has been losing population (and political power) steadily to the "Sun Belt" for decades. Perhaps recent hurricane evacuations and devastations will slow that trend, if not reverse it.
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The Nation may see a stark reduction in the size of a major city due, basically, to warm weather. New Orleans has an unhealthy history and precarious location, having been the site of many yellow-fever epidemics and floods. The New Orleans Public Library states:

More than 41,000 people died from the scourge of yellow fever in New Orleans between the years 1817 (the first year that reliable statistics are available; surely there were deaths in earlier times) and 1905 (the Crescent City's last epidemic).

Popular Science magazine picks up the story there:

"So people decided to drain the swamps," says Al Naomi, senior project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans. With the levees in place and the swamps pumped dry, the city could now spread into areas that were once uninhabitable. "But when you take the water out of the swampy soils," he continues, "they start sinking."

Today, parts of New Orleans lie up to 20 feet below sea level, and the city is sinking at a rate of about nine millimeters a year.

The levees, you see, kept the Mississippi from replenishing the land with regular floods that used to deposit soil onto the marshes. That natural replenishment can no longer occur, so New Orleans keeps sinking ever farther below sea level. Meanwhile, the oceans are apparently rising at a rate of about 1.8mm a year — a trivial amount, but consequential over time for areas that are already sinking and subject to regular inundation by hurricane rains and storm surges.
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Plainly, the areas of New Orleans presently or soon to be below sea level should not be rebuilt. Instead, marshes should be restored there and the river allowed to resume deposition of soil in the natural process that people disrupted, which disruption has produced the recent calamity.
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Still, the people formerly resident in New Orleans have to be housed somewhere, and many are expected never to return to their old neighborhood, nor even to that city more generally. That's all to the good. Let those who have jobs return. Let those who were unemployable in New Orleans be scattered to where there is work, or rehabilitation, for them.
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Re-employment is a largely private responsibility. Retraining, psychological counseling, workforce development (instilling good work habits, getting people the substance-abuse treatment programs and job training they need, etc.) is a largely govenmental responsibility.
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Tens of millions of Americans have contributed to private programs of aid to victims of hurricane Katrina, and some of the money still being raised will as well go to people displaced by Rita. Among the donors are gay people.
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I was in a Greenwich Village gay men's bar last nite and saw flyers posted on the walls to draw attention to the fact that management was collecting money for hurricane victims via a canister on the bar and would match whatever was deposited in the canister. I don't know that that is at all wise.
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Today a friend sent me the URL of the Rainbow World Fund, an "LGBT" charity that is also collecting money for Katrina victims.

We are a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and supportive heterosexual humanitarian service agency. Rainbow World Fund’s mission is to promote LGBT philanthropy in the area of world humanitarian relief. RWF provides a united voice, a large visible presence, and a structure to deliver LGBT charitable assistance to the larger world community.

Since when are gay people so rich as to be able to give money to straights? Our own organizations, community centers, drug-treatment programs, etc., are grossly underfunded, and there are few to no services to help maladjusted gay men accept their nature and overcome gender confusion and temptations to drown their sorrows in booze or avoid dealing with their problems by staying zonked out on drugs.
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So why are gay men giving money to rednecks in Mississippi? Will their enemies be grateful for the assistance, or be offended that "faggots", "dykes", and "drag queens" are trying to make them change their attitudes by sending them money, in effect trying to buy off the disapproval that characterizes the Red States? Maybe these rightwingers will be too proud to accept such a 'bribe'.
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Let the Red States fend for themselves and rely upon the rightwing Republicans they put in charge of the Nation. Let them find out if "their own people" care for them — or only for their votes.
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I won't send a cent to Mississippi, Alabama, or Texas. Blue States should not rescue Red States from their own stupidity. If the Republican Right does not tend expeditiously to their own constituency, let the people ignored and neglected by their supposed champions realize that the Republican rich don't give a damn about poor white trash any more than they care about Southern blacks. Then let them change their voting patterns, starting with next year's midterm congressional elections.
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If, however, they can't get justice from "their own people" in the rightwing South, maybe they will have the good sense to leave the South and find that the weather of the North may be cold, but the caring politics of the North matter a lot more.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,914.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:58 PM

 
Today's Fugitive Slave Act. Almost lost in the news today due to the media's inability to focus on more than one thing at a time was the interception by our brave Coast Guard of Cuban refugees who left their island prison for the "freedom" that Dubya keeps blathering about. They had apparently left Cuba just after hurricane Rita passed thru the Straits of Florida, and got to within a mile of Florida's golden shore when they were surrounded by officers of the law intent on keeping freedom for ourselves alone. The Cubans will, in accordance with U.S. law, be returned to Fidel's Cuba. So much for the Bush Administration's devotion to freedom. South Florida TV station WPLG's website says:

Most Cuban refugees who fail in their attempt to get to the United States and are sent back to Cuba are treated extremely harshly by the Cuban government, according to Local 10's poltical reporter Michael Putney. He said they will lose their homes and even their food vouchers will be taken away from them.

But that doesn't disturb Dubya, champion of freedom worldwide.
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In 1850, the U.S. Government passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which provided that slaves who escaped to free states would be arrested and returned to 'their rightful owner'. Any law officer who refused to do so was prosecutable and made personally liable to the slaveowner for the value of the slave s/he allowed to escape.
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In 1966, the U.S. Government passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, which provided that Cubans who escape from Communism and manage to reach U.S. shores would be permitted to remain in the U.S. But:

Under 1994-1995 immigration accords, the United States agreed to return Cubans picked up at sea unless there was a strong chance they faced persecution — ending a policy under which they, too, were generally allowed into the country.

This was an act of the Clinton Administration, which disgraced itself — and us — in returning Elián González, whose mother died in getting him to freedom. The Bush Administration, bizarrely, agrees 100% with Bill Clinton on this: Cubans should remain under Communism, and the U.S. should actively assist Fidel in imprisoning Cubans on his Stalinist island.
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Thus, Cubans who do not reach landfall in the U.S. are arrested and returned to their rightful owner, Fidel Castro.
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The pretense behind this grotesque policy is that Cuban would-be refugees are fleeing not Communist oppression but poverty. The fact that their enforced poverty is created by Communism is apparently to be regarded as irrelevant.
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Congress eventually became ashamed of the Fugitive Slave Act and abolished it in 1864, but only after Southern scum had been excluded from Congress by their treasonous attempted secession. The Bush Administration is apparently not the slightest ashamed of the Cuban immigration accords but is enforcing them, enthusiastically intercepting would-be refugees and sending them back to Communism.
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Why are Republicans so fervently pro-Communist? They are subsidizing Communism in China by shipping hundreds of billions of dollars to the Butchers of Beijing thru trade deficits, and acting as prison guards for the Castro regime. I guess our own slavers, champions of wage slavery and debt slavery for Americans, are in perfect rapport with the masters of Communist slavery. They all stick together.
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Who champions freedom?
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The next time you hear George Bush talk about "freedom", don't believe a word.
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(Updating the September 18th entry of this blog, boxer Leavander Johnson died last nite. How many more must die before we abolish boxing?)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,913.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:11 PM

 
Know Your Enemy. Peter Brookes, a Senior Fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation who writes often for the New York Post, wrote a bizarre column that appeared in the Post August 29th. In it, he plainly warns of a consistent course of hostile behavior by the government of Communist China designed to cripple the United States's computer networks:

Last year, the Department of Defense suffered a record 79,000 computer network attacks, including some that actually reduced the military's operational capabilities. In the past, top-flight military units such as the Army's 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and the 4th Infantry Division have been "hacked."

According to Pentagon sources, most attacks on America's "digital" Achilles' Heel are originating from the People's Republic of China (PRC), making Chinese information warfare (IW) operations an issue we'd better pay close attention to.

"Most" of 79,000 attacks have been launched by Communist China? That means that Communist China attacked our computer networks a bedrock minimum of 39,501 times in one year, but we have done nothing about it. Quite the contrary, we are doing "business as usual" with our enemy!
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Brookes elaborates on China's malicious and warlike behavior against us:

China's military has incorporated cyberwarfare tactics into military exercises and created schools that specialize in IW. It's also hiring top computer-science graduates to develop its cyberwarfare capabilities and, literally, create an "army of hackers." * * *

Supporting these assertions, in 1999, two Chinese colonels published a book called "Unrestricted Warfare" that advocated "not fighting" the U.S. directly, but "understanding and employing the principle of asymmetry correctly to allow us [the Chinese] always to find and exploit an enemy's soft spots." * * *

Potential Chinese cyberattacks aren't limited to military targets. "Chinese military strategists envisage attacks on all American vulnerabilities, including civilian communications systems or on the vital nervous systems of our economic institutions such as the New York Stock Exchange's computer system," according to a July 2002 USCC [Congressional commission] report.

Those viruses you, your company, U.S. news networks have been attacked by? Some are almost certainly "Made in China".
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Brookes doesn't mention that China played a major part in creating Pakistan's nuclear weapons program; a Pakistani scientist has provided assistance to other countries, including North Korea, Libya, and possibly Iran; so China has, directly or indirectly, contributed to nuclear proliferation that endangers us as well.
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Grotesquely, after carefully laying out how Communist China is not only preparing for war against us but may actually be waging war against us already, Brookes, like the U.S. Government, ends up telling us not to worry. It's alrite to do business with the enemy, to ship hundreds of billions of dollars to Communist China and effectively finance their war against us!

China isn't necessarily America's next enemy, but its IW efforts/activities provide a cautionary tale to U.S. policymakers. Fortunately, both the government and the private sector have devoted significant resources to cybersecurity, including against terrorists and criminals.

Don't worry. Be happy. And continue to buy Chinese! We wouldn't want the People's 'Liberation' Army to run out of funds for its "army of hackers", now would we?
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"China isn't necessarily America's next enemy"? Quite so. It is our current enemy.
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Why hasn't President Wuss warned China, "We know what you're doing, and you must stop it immediately and permanently. If we detect any attempt by China to attack or hack or invade or snoop in any American computer, we will cut off all trade of every kind for a week for each and every such incident. You put enuf such incidents together, and we will have a permanent ban on all trade with China. Not only that, but once trade is completely cut off, we will start making as much trouble for China as we can. We will attack your computer networks. We will stir up trouble in Tibet and among non-Chinese minorities throughout China, but especially in fringe areas such as Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang. We'll base nuclear missiles in Taiwan. Remember the Soviet Union? How would you like the Chinese Empire to be broken up the way the Soviet Empire was? We can do it. Don't push us. You think "Two Chinas" is one too many? Maybe we think 10 Chinas isn't too many."
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That's what I'd say. But, alas, I'm not President.
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(Responsive to "The Art of (Cyber) War", August 29, 2005 column by Peter Brookes in the New York Post)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,907.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:25 PM

 
The Gulf Is Not the Only Thing That Matters. I sent the following short emailed letter to the editor of the New York Post today in response to a suggestion by a rightwinger that ordinary people all over the country should give up improvements to their own area so that the Federal Government won't have to raise taxes on the rich. In effect, she wants ordinary people to sacrifice while the rich wallow in wealth.

ABBY Wisse Schachter thinks bicycle paths and better sidewalks are a waste of money, and that states and municipalities should return to the Federal Government money for "pork" projects so it could (but won't necessarily) be redirected to Gulf Coast reconstruction. She is wrong on both counts.
+
At a time of extremely high gas prices, pollution, and congestion, and dangerous dependence on oil imports, alternatives to the automobile are very much needed, but both bicylists and pedestrians have to feel safe in order for more people to use foot power over horsepower.
+
Second, New York pays into the Federal Government far more than it takes out. The "Federal" money she speaks of doesn't come from Washington. It comes from New Yorkers and other Blue Staters and always, in good times and bad, goes off to Red States enough as it is. Blue Staters are entitled to their fair share of Federal expenditures.
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The cure for the funding problem for Gulf reconstruction is obvious: raise taxes on the rich, at least in the form of a one-year surcharge for Gulf Coast reconstruction. The rich have all the money in the world. A little one-year bump in taxes won't hurt them one little bit.

This is, we forget under Republicans, the richest country in the history of the world. Under Democrats, we are rolling in dough. Under Republicans, we suddenly become 'too poor' to do anything — because Republicans cut taxes on the rich!
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But we're not 'too poor' to do anything. We can rebuild the Gulf Coast and take care of all the needs of all segments of society in all parts of the country, expand the frontiers of science, promote democracy abroad, fite just wars, and do everything else our historical mission calls for us to do without breaking a sweat. All we need to do is tax the rich. That wouldn't hurt them a bit, even if they should be "reduced" to having only 99 times as much money at the end of the year as the typical person instead of 120 times as much (or more). There's no reason whatsoever for ordinary people to sacrifice. We're already paying enuf.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,900.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:10 AM

 
Our Own Gladiatorial Sins. AOL reports today that a boxer from my state may join the list of fiters killed for the audience's pleasure in the modern version of ancient Rome's gladiatorial combat, "pugilism".

Veteran boxer Leavander Johnson [of Atlantic City] underwent brain surgery and was in critical condition Saturday night after collapsing in his dressing room following his IBF lightweight title loss against challenger Jesus Chavez.

The bout, in Sin City (Las Vegas, Nevada), is just the latest in a series of endless crimes against decency committed in the name of "sport" — but basically just for money to be made from gambling. The grave injury that resulted should impel society once and for all to abolish boxing.
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The referee was apparently slow to stop the fite, despite loud calls from people in the audience to end it. In a civilized society, a referee who willfully lets things go too far would be subject to prosecution or, at the least, civil lawsuit, as a story from Britain shows:

Professor ["Hugh Bayne from Sunderland University [who] has examined the case law surrounding boxing"] believes a [1998] case in which an injured rugby player successfully sued a referee could have an impact on boxing. The player broke his neck in a collapsed scrum and took the referee to court, even though it was an opposing player who actually caused the injury. The court decided the referee had a duty to protect the player's safety "in a situation where he would have known that intervention was necessary."

British doctors have considered simply refusing to show up at boxing matches, which would effectively outlaw boxing unless British law were changed, since present law requires a doctor be present for any match to proceed. If U.S. boxing commissions have similar laws, we don't need to go the route of formal legislative abolition to get rid of this odious barbarism. Rather, doctors could just refuse to participate, refuse any longer to sanction a "sport" whose object is to cause such serious injury that a person is rendered unconscious.

A fighter's goal is a knockout. That's a concussion. That's an injury suffered by the brain when it is caused to slap up against the bone of the skull. The brain is traumatized; in shock it cannot function. Done with enough force, injury to a fighter's brain goes beyond bruising. The very best fighters deliver blows that cause the brain to slap the skullbone so hard as to rip the brain's tissue and its blood vessels. In which case the brain becomes a bleeding tomato.

The 1995 column from The Sporting News from which the quote above is taken observes that "assaults are legal in the U.S. if they occur in a boxing ring where, after all, homicide is the standard of perfection." The writer, David Kindred, goes on:

Only the latest fighter to die, Jimmy Garcia, a Mexican fighter of small renown, won't be the last. His death recently will be forgotten as "one of those things that happen" when, the truth is, he put his life at risk for the entertainment of barbarians.

Kindred says he once wrote "blather" about boxing being:

a symbol of man's courage and perseverance in rising above his life's barren beginnings.

Once upon a time, I wrote such blather. But, to quote Roberto Duran, no mas. No more. No sale here. Take your barbaric yappings somewhere else. The terrible truth is that anyone who steps into a boxing ring is a symbol of helplessness compounded by hopelessness. They are men with no way out of their lives except to give them up to a sport that wants nothing more than to kill them. * * *

The usual argument against the abolition of boxing is that they'll do it illegally. Well, OK, go ahead. Let them take their fights onto cruise ships in international waters. Let them fight in underground rooms hidden from our sight. We can not legislate away the bloodlust of human beings. Just don't bring boxing into our living rooms on television. Don't pretend it has a place in civilized life. It is beneath contempt.

This sport is no sport.

It is murder for hire.

Quite so. If doctors' withdrawing from this conspiracy of brutality will effectively abolish boxing without the need of a legislative remedy — which would be part of that endless enlargement of government that conservatives complain about — fine. Let the AMA revise the canons of ethics doctors must abide by to forbid enabling boxing.
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But even if the abolition of boxing should require formal legislative action, so be it. It's time for our civilization to forbid this dehumanizing, vicious activity, just as we have abolished bear-baiting and cockfiting. Sweden abolished boxing in 1970, and it is illegal in many other countries. Few people realize it, but boxing was not always legal in the United States but was widely banned until after 1920. You'd think we'd become more civilized, not less, over time.
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Instead, even more violent forms of combat "sports" have risen in recent years, from kickboxing to extreme fiting. All of them must be destroyed, lest we descend ever further down into the muck of barbarism.
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I have often wondered if the tales we hear about ancient Roman gladiatorial combats in which men were compelled to fite to the death, not in a single, unique contest never to be repeated but in day after day of bloody spectacle, ever really happened or were just anti-pagan slander by the early Christian church. It seems so out of keeping with a society from which we derive so much of the best in our own culture, a direct descendant of Roman civilization.
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Perhaps some criminals guilty of capital crimes were killed publicly in Rome, as many societies have held public executions, and pitting one murderer against another to kill them was one way Rome executed criminals. But to force poor people to kill each other for the entertainment of the mob? I wonder about that.
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Do we have reliable accounts of such things occurring as recorded by dispassionate outsiders? I don't want to hear Christian accounts of pagan misdeeds, nor Persian accounts of the misbehavior of their Roman rivals, whom they had good reason to paint as barbarians and savages who needed to be destroyed. I want accounts from India, China, or some other very distant country's ambassadors or merchants.
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History is written by the winners, and the loser's side of the story is often obliterated. Slanderous nonsense becomes historical "fact" if the victor wants to legitimize its conflicts by painting the loser as savage.
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Of course, it can work the other way around, too, whereby the victor portrays itself as noble and pure, and glosses over its own crimes.
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There was a most-bizarre twist on this in the case of Unit 731, Japan's biological warfare program in China during World War II that killed unnumbered thousands of Chinese and prisoners of war. I recently saw a documentary about it on some reputable cable channel.
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Unit 731 deliberately unleashed bubonic plague, smallpox, anthrax, and other biological weapons against innocent Chinese by, among other things, spreading spores and infected fleas from airplanes upon rural areas and even towns, nearby and in parts of China that Japan had not yet conquered.
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It then dispatched teams of investigators (within occupied areas) to see how many Chinese died, how long death took, etc. It provided no medical treatment to them, but simply checked to see how effective these measures were. Those that worked well, were intended to be used against all of Japan's enemies, including the U.S., which was targeted for biological attack via balloons carried thousands of miles by the jet stream.
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Unit 731 also tied people to posts arranged at different distances and angles from a central point where a bomb was exploded, to see how much damage was done in the various positions; dropped temperatures lower and lower until people died, so they could know for sure how much cold people could survive; and conversely, raised the temperature higher and higher until people died of the heat.
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"Scientists" did "autopsies" before people died, by cutting into their flesh without first giving them anesthesia. The first time they did it, the screams bothered them. After a while, the screams didn't bother them at all.
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These Japanese 'men of science' kept careful records and over time amassed valuable scientific data. And all it cost was the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents.
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So valuable was that data that the United States Government, upon finding out about the program and arresting the guilty, actually gave amnesty to these monstrous war criminals in exchange for their turning over, and decoding, their records! Thus, the victor actually took over the spoils of war crimes and actively connived in protecting war criminals far worse than Germany's notorious Josef Mengele ever was, in the process becoming a very active accessory after the fact to horrendous outrages.
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Permitting boxing doesn't rise to that level of monstrousness, but it is nonetheless a crime against humanity that contributes to a culture of violence from which this country suffers badly. Our political leaders and doctors co-conspire in that crime. That must stop.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,900 (even).)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:43 PM

 
The Rich Can Pay for Katrina. I sent, by feedback form today at the website of Harry Reid, Democratic leader in the U.S. Senate, the following brief message.

I DON'T understand why you and other Democrats have not proposed a one-year income-tax surcharge ON THE RICH ONLY (that is, people with income over, say, $150,000 per year) to pay for Katrina relief and rebuilding. This would solve the worry about budget-busting and force Republicans either to stop taking us deeper and deeper into debt or show the world that they care more about the rich than about the victims of hurricane Katrina. Either way, Democrats win big. Please introduce legislation to impose such a surcharge IMMEDIATELY!

I had earlier sent a similar message to Ted Kennedy, but he hasn't done anything either. If you agree that this is the way to fund relief efforts for hurricane Katrina's victims, you too should write to relevant public officials to urge they enact a surcharge on the rich to rescue the desolate.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,898.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:19 PM

 
Outsourcing: Developing Disaster. (Caution: this is a long discussion, so if you are not interested in the topic, even if it might affect your own personal future, don't bother to read on.) Last nite, Bill Moyers' PBS documentary series Wide Angle examined offshore outsourcing, focusing on India. Tho the bulk of the program dealt with the impact upon India of the transfer of wealth from the U.S. (and Australia, and perhaps other Western countries) to India thru BPO ("business process outsourcing": call centers for computer tech support and credit-card billing; computer animation; software design; and many other types of work), at the end of the show Moyers raised other issues, as to the impact on the U.S., in an interview with Clyde Prestowitz, described as "founder and president of the Economic Strategies Institute in Washington [whose] most recent book is Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East".
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Prestowitz was blasé about the loss of millions of American jobs to India, China, and other countries, and the "downward pressure" on American wages and benefits he admitted such (unfair) competition produces. He was equally blasé about Americans being displaced from their own best universities by students from India and China. I was furious and thought to myself, "Let's slit his throat and outsource his organs to decent people."
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It then occurred to me that the comparison between outsourcing jobs and harvesting organs is closer than one might initially think. We can take skin grafts from people without killing them. We can even take one cornea without totally blinding an involuntary donor, and one kidney without killing the donor. We can even take one or even two lobes of the liver. But we can't take both kidneys, all lobes of the liver, or the heart without killing the donor. (Communist China has been accused of stepping up executions of criminals and opponents of the state in order to harvest their organs for foreign buyers without worrying about the survivability of donors.)
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How much evisceration of our economy can we survive? It's a serious question.
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Prestowitz concedes, in a version of the interview that appears on the PBS website that there may be as many as 14 million jobs already exported from the U.S. to places like India and China, "but these estimates are all over the lot." He goes on, "I think the most important thing is not really how many jobs are outsourced. This operates at the margin and the real question here is what is the impact on overall income levels." Okay, what is that impact?

the way this works is that some jobs are outsourced. That creates the threat of outsourcing, which means that the next time you come around for a salary review and a salary increase, you know that it's possible that your job could be outsourced, and therefore your demand for a raise might be mooted.

So, this operates at the margin in such a way that whether the number of actual, concrete number of jobs outsourced is high or low, the potential of outsourcing puts a downward pressure on income levels and disciplines you the worker and disciplines, you know, the entire workforce.

Moyers challenges him as to "the entire workforce" being adversely impacted, since CEO's and other high managers are getting ever richer while workers farther down in the hierarchy are hurting:

the government's new figures about income said that people at the top are still doing very well and in fact, income is slightly up across the country. But for the 80 million people who live paycheck to paycheck, [income] is down almost 9 percent since 1999. Do you think outsourcing is a factor in that?

CLYDE PRESTOWITZ: Globalization is definitely becoming a factor in, kind of, stagnation of wages and salary levels. And what we've been seeing in the last several years is rising returns to capital, but kind of constant or stagnating returns to labor. One effect of these 3 billion people coming into the global labor force is that it creates a surplus of labor and it creates deflationary pressures in labor markets.

But again he is blasé.

So, the real absolutely essential thing here is that if we're going to maintain high and rising standards of living in the United States, we have got to be doing things that others can't do. We've got to be doing things much better, much more productively than other people do them. We've got to be training, educating. But we also have to be clever about how we structure our trade policies, structure our international investment policies, so that in the things that we're good at doing we maintain our competitive edge.

He doesn't admit that all this is impossible with free trade. He uses aircraft manufacturing as an example of U.S. domination, completely ignoring the fact that Europe's Airbus is now the world's largest aircraft manufacturer and has made heavy predations upon our largest manufacturer, Boeing. He even concedes that Boeing is shifting production abroad, to Japan, because the Japanese government is ardently pursuing creation of a major aerospace industry. Europeans and Japanese are well paid, but are still powerful competitors. Prestowitz concedes that Indians and Chinese can do things as well as, or (he says) "even better" than we can, and they'll work for almost nothing. There is, then, nothing to stop India or China from competing in any and every field, starting with licensing arrangements from U.S. manufacturers who want to improve the return to shareholders and the salaries of management by shifting operations to Asia.
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No industry is safe. Indians are soon, Wide Angle tells us, even going to be writing legal briefs for U.S. cases, displacing American lawyers, one of the highest-educated groups in the Nation. So education is no guarantee of job security.
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Called by Moyers on arguing for lower wages for Americans, Prestowitz denies it, but the conclusion is utterly inescapable that he's all for it. He and everyone else who advocates free trade with the starving of the Third World yet deny that they are of necessity arguing for reduction of American wages are liars, pure and simple.
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Prestowitz claims we can simply "buy out" all displaced workers in industries shipped abroad: "all present [fill in name of displaced industry's workers] would be paid their normal wage until retirement and would have their pensions and so forth taken care of." He does not say who is going to do that. The businesses moving abroad? If they had to do that, the move wouldn't pay, would it? Moyers calls him on it:

These call centers, I mean, there're a lot of people who work at jobs at call centers.

CLYDE PRESTOWITZ: Sure, sure, but there are a lot of people ...

BILL MOYERS: We can't pay them for the rest of their lives or a pension, can we?

CLYDE PRESTOWITZ: No.

Prestowitz then confesses he was just talking about cotton farmers, who now receive a subsidy so could instead be "bought out". But what about all the American workers who will lose their jobs if offshoring continues? He concedes we could not possibly buy them all out. So what happens to them? That's apparently not his problem.
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There are a couple of major issues last nite's Wide Angle program did not adequately address. What about economic security? If large swaths of the U.S. economy become absolutely dependent upon foreign sources of labor, foreign pressures and disruptions could destroy our economy.
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Outsourcing means that services flow in from abroad, when all things are normal. But things are not always normal. Compare dialysis. Prestowitz and his ilk are in effect saying we don't need our own kidneys; we can simply use dialysis machines. But what if the tubes from the dialysis machine are severed, or we wander too far from the nearest machine? We die.
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Compare dependence upon workers in India or, especially, China, and remember the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, when indignation over Western support for Israel in the "Yom Kippur War" led to a stark reduction in oil shipments and a stark increase in price for oil-related energy.
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India has aspirations to superpowerdom, as has China. India has a permanent animosity toward Pakistan, and war could break out at any time. If the U.S. did not seem supportive enuf of India, the Indian government could sever U.S. corporations from the Indian labor that keeps major operations functioning. Communist China would like to "reunite" Taiwan with the Mainland, and may run out of patience. What happens if China invades Taiwan, and the U.S. responds with aid to Taiwan? Wouldn't all trade in goods and services between the two countries be abruptly shut down for the duration of the crisis?
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What would willful acts of hostile governments do to the U.S. economy in a world in which the U.S. economy depends on workers abroad? Bill Moyers didn't ask Prestowitz about that.
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For all the harm outsourcing is doing and will, unstopped, do to us in the future, what countervailing benefits are there to, for instance, India? The description of that Wide Angle episode in TV listings said that some Indians in BPO operations work an 80-hour week! I missed the first part of the show, so didn't see that mentioned. It would seem, however, that American corporations are essentially co-conspiring in inflicting slave-labor standards on India. That's immoral.
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Moreover, the "trickle-down" benefits (one Indian manager actually used that expression) are not widely spread. The case is given of a call center in Gurgaon, a part of the (New) Delhi metropolitan area. The typical wage there is shown on an interactive map as US$600 a year; the wage of someone in an outsourcing IT industry is $11,700. Is that for an 80-hour week? Put that aside.
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The program says that there is essentially no public transportation in Gurgaon and that the call-center's management has had to create a fleet of its own vehicles to transport its workers as far away as a two-hour drive. But that hasn't benefited the people of Gurgaon generally. They still have no transit. Caterers serving the IT industry are doing well, albeit with very long hours for workers, as are people in malls that the newly prosperous BPO employees patronize, as are also construction workers building new housing for the new middle class. But that leaves the bulk of Indians untouched in their wretchedness.
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Moyers asks, in so many words, if outsourcing threatens to produce a leveling of wages at the lowest point: "are these people racing us to the bottom, as so many others say -- so many critics say -- or are they racing us to the top?" That refers to the outsourcing of jobs in the most advanced areas of biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc. Prestowitz concedes that both are happening: wages are dropping, high-tech industries abroad are rising. But that doesn't worry him. Why not?
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He pretends that merely adopting some strategic economic vision and devaluing the dollar will magically save our economy because we will be able to replace any lost jobs with entire new categories of jobs — even if every single new technology we come up with is instantly learned by Indians and Chinese studying at our universities!
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So, what about all that "educating" that Prestowitz says we need to do? Aside from the question of whether it will do a damned bit of good at protecting jobs, there is the question of access even to our own best universities. Prestowitz says plainly:

We talk about ourselves as having the best universities in the world. And that may be true. Our elite universities probably are the best in the world, but . . . if you look at the students in those elite universities, more than half of the students at MIT or Caltech who are studying engineering or science are foreign students. They're Indians and Chinese. They're not Americans.

So Americans can't even get into their own universities but are shut out by foreigners. How on Earth can we compete if our best education is given to foreigners who return to their own country to use our technology in their industries? He doesn't explain that.
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Instead, he blames our educational system via false comparisons:

if you test progressively, you find that American students in primary school are scoring better than American students in middle school who are scoring better than American students in high school. So the longer they stay in school, the worse the American students do in international testing.

What he does not say is that in most of the rest of the world, there is no devotion to universal education thru high school. Primary education is seen as important, but not everyone is seen as college material, or even high-school material, and so, many are dumped from the educational system, either altogether or by being shunted off to vocational programs. Our vocational programs are, for the most part, integral parts of public schools, and the people who in other countries long ago left school altogether or went into vocational programs whose students aren't given standardized tests on academic subjects, do get tested on academic subjects here. So in comparing a universal student population here to an elite, whittled-down student body abroad, you're really comparing apples and oranges.
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Even where you have little attrition in overseas student bodies, few foreign countries have the masses of immigrant children that we have, and such immigrants as they do permit tend to come from the middle and upper classes, not the least-educated classes in their own countries. Places like Finland, South Korea, and Japan, to which we are invidiously compared, have essentially no immigrants and no language problems for their students to cope with that might be reflected in test scores. But Americans don't have the good sense to discount false comparisons to countries nothing like us. No, we keep insisting that our kids are being badly educated, even tho year after year after decade we keep turning out brilliantly inventive young people who have created and sustain the world's most creative culture.
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But how can we compete with hordes of foreigners displacing us from our own universities? Run the numbers. Between them, India and China have 2.3 billion people, and their populations are increasing astrononomically:

According to the most recent (medium variant) UN population projection India's population will increase by an additional 401 million between 1995 and 2025 - China will grow by "only" 260 million[.]

In short, there are presently over 7 times as many kids in India and China as in the U.S. Not all of India and China's kids receive secondary education, but let's talk, for this purpose, as if they did, since we can't easily establish how many do. If only the top 1% of students were considered for admission to elite American universities, the U.S. could put forward only 1/8 of the applications to those elite schools. Is it any wonder that the American universities have a student body that is mostly foreign? What does that foretell for Americans trying to compete in the highest areas of technology? And what can we do about it?
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Plainly Americans must, at the least, tell the administrators of their own universities that they have got to stop slitting out national throat by giving foreigners better access to our schools than we get. If government will not cut them off if they admit more than x% foreigners, then other sources of funding, from corporations to alumni to charitable foundations must cut them off until they give Americans better access.
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If you are a graduate of an elite American university that is now educating too many foreigners in preference to Americans, tell the university's president and alumni association that that has got to stop, and until it does stop, you are cutting off all contributions you might otherwise have made.
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If the future of the American worker, even the highest-tech worker, depends on education, the very first thing for us to do is to empower our own people to compete intellectually by preserving access, or indeed improving access, to our own best schools.
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Free trade is a noose slowly but perceptibly tightening around our national neck. Education is a hardened-steel collar we can place between our neck and that noose, so that even if we can't completely undo the malice of the free traders, we might at least preserve our lives, for a time, by retaining the possibility of competing.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,897.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:42 PM

 
Winds of Shame. The Republican spin machine is in high gear, pouring out gas at wind speeds greater than Katrina ever achieved. It seems the Republican Right actually thinks it can spin its way out of being held to account for its insanely inadequate, incompetent, and uncaring response to the Katrina disaster. I sure hope they're wrong.
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The New York Post, daily champion of the most retrograde forces of the Republican Right, today published an op-ed piece by one James Jay Carafano, a Heritage Foundation scoundrel, that tries desperately — and fatuously — to remove blame from the poor, innocent Republicans and shift it 'where it belongs': to the American people. To bring this home, let me flip two paragraphs in his piece so they read in 'logical' order:

[Ninth paragraph] The notion that the dire needs of the city [of New Orleans] could be addressed quickly under impossible conditions is simply ludicrous. It would be irresponsible to gauge the national response solely by the speed with which resources are brought to bear in the first days. How soon assistance arrives is dictated by reality. [Mind you, today, two full weeks after Katrina struck, NBC's Today Show interviewed a black man in New Orleans whose very first knock at the door by rescuers occurred this morning!]

[Eighth paragraph] And every aircraft, vehicle, and team sent in requires support, just like the victims — no trivial challenge. In fact, one common problem is that there are good-natured efforts to send so much help, whether it is asked for or not, that it chokes the capacity of the emergency managers to coordinate or care for all the responders. Ironically, this puts more lives at risk and actually slows aid delivery.

See what you've done, you evil American do-gooders! You've clogged the system with your damned charity, and government can't do its work!
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But I thought the Republicans wanted us to take personal responsibility for social problems and solve them thru private effort, all that "thousand points of lite" stuff. Not when the Republicans are trying to push the blame off onto someone else — anyone else — they don't!
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Trying to excuse the failure to pre-position troops so they could rush aid in as soon as the hurricane passed, Carafano asks, disingenuously, "with scant time as hundreds-of-thousands are clogging the roads out [note, again, that it is private citizens doing the harm], how do you send masses of vehicles in with troops or supplies?" Hey, buddy, New Orleans has three approaches: land, sea, and air. We have all seen footage of D-Day, when a massive amphibious assault landed huge numbers of men and materiel on beaches thousands of miles from our shores. We've all seen film of thick clouds of parachutists and supplies being dropped by military airborne divisions. We've seen helicopter rescues galore, all over the country, and one of the enduring images from films like Apocalypse Now was of dozens of helicopters pouring over a hill. Today, we not only have amphibious boat-trucks but also great big hovercraft capable of carrying large loads of men and goods over water, over land, over marshes and sand with no problem. So don't try to give us that crap, that the military just couldn't get in fast. That's bull, and you know it.
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On one thing (only), Carafano admits the obvious:

This is the kind of crisis the nation must be prepared to tackle — a disaster that exceeds the means of state and local governments. [That didn't stop the Republicans from trying to blame the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans and Democratic Governor of Louisiana, did it?] It is a fair test for the new Department of Homeland Security and the military, and for our efforts since 9/11.

We should learn from this tragedy the quality of the leadership, resources and programs we need to meet catastrophic disasters — either natural or manmade. We should, however, temper expectations with realism.

And, realistically, we cannot expect Republicans to do anything right.
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Carafano joins the huge chorus of Republican spinmasters who have deluged the public with the phrase "blame game" as mercilessly as Katrina deluged the Gulf Coast with water:

Beyond playing the blame game, we need to rethink whether we're truly doing all the right things.

He goes on to damn Federal grants to localities:

Grants that dole out wads of money with scant regard to national priorities won't do. Today, all the fire stations in New Orleans lie under water, as does much of the equipment bought with federal dollars.

Giving tax money to local first-responders is bad! Money should remain in the private pockets of the rich! And, I assume, grants to repair and strengthen New Orleans' levees wouldn't have done a thing.
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The greatest tragedy of Katrina is that the wrong people died. The death toll so far is over 400, and still climbing. If only the Nation's 400 top Republican Rightwingers had been killed instead, and more were dying daily at the rate we're discovering bodies of their victims along the Gulf Coast, the Nation would benefit from being litened of a terrible burden: the burden of being controlled by monsters.
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(Responsive to "The Limits of Relief", op-ed column by James Jay Carafano in the New York Post, September 12, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,896.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:47 AM

 
'Trouble' Returns to Northern Ireland. BBC World News reports today that Protestant militants have been rioting and firing upon police vehicles for two days because they feel isolated from society, a society that is working for reconciliation on all sides. Last nite, 32 police officers were injured, and a bus was hijacked and burned — after the passengers were robbed! That passes for protest among the Protestants of Northern Ireland. These people are called "loyalists" (loyal to Britain). How "loyal" are people who take up arms against their government over something so trivial as a parade route being changed? What kind of bargain for Britain is occupation of Northern Ireland?
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Oh, I've heard Brits argue that Britain would like to withdraw but feels morally obligated to stay because a bloodbath would ensue if British force was removed. Protestants would jump to make war against Catholics, and Catholics would then fight back in a brutal civil war. I don't believe it for an instant. Britain has never gladly withdrawn from its colonies but always did so only under intense, even military, pressure. And the UN could certainly replace British force with international peacekeepers to assist Ireland in making the transition from division to union.
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There are always some people who refuse to accept (mere) equality because that would mean they lose their traditional privilege. Tuf. The British government must crack down on criminals who shoot at police, burn vehicles, and riot hour after hour not to protest injustice but to protest prospective justice. Real justice for Ireland requires that Britain withdraw from its last major colony, and evacuate to the British mainland those "loyalists" that will not live in peace and equality with their neighbors in an island-wide Republic of Ireland.
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Synagogs Yes, Housing No. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has, curiously, entailed tearing down housing so Palestinians cannot live as well as Israelis did, but leaving synagogs standing! Of course, they're not really synagogs anymore, since all the religious paraphernalia (scrolls and such) have been removed, but Israelis plainly want to watch Palestinians tear down Jewish "holy places", presumably not just to save themselves indignation at Jews tearing down synagogs but also to maintain Israeli hatred of Arabs.
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Two can play such games. Arabs should convert all the synagogs left standing into mosques and churches instead, obliterating every Jewish symbol with Moslem or Christian symbols and showing thereby that the newer, and better, religions of the wide world have replaced the nasty old cult of the few.
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9/11, Four Years After. Four years ago today I was awake unusually early (because I had been pretty much immobile for the bulk of the prior 36 hours due to a serious injury occasioned by a fall from a ladder), waiting for Live with Regis and [alas] Kelly to come onto Channel 7, ABC's New York City station. Suddenly, regular programming was interrupted by a Special Report about a plane having struck and lodged in one of the World Trade Center's towers. I was a little irritated that the coverage of what then appeared to be a simple accident of strictly local Downtown Manhattan importance went over into Regis's time. None of us yet knew it was no accident, nor that, as I watched, still waiting impatiently for Regis, another plane would smash into the other tower and reveal an astonishing terrorist attack.
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I watched the scarcely believable events unfolding before the cameras of the world's media capital — one reason New York was targeted — more with astonishment than with horror, as the towers, first one, then the other, collapsed into themselves in a rush of smoke and dust.
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After the second plane crash, I think it was, I called my mother to ask if she was watching TV. I don't recall if she was, but she did then for sure, and we stayed on the line as the buildings fell. During our conversation in uneventful moments, she found out about my accident, and she and my older sister insisted I had to go to the hospital. Bad day to find a hospital in this area. We found that the closest hospital, UMDNJ in the University Heights section of my city, Newark, was absolutely unavailable to anything but WTC wounded being brought in by ambulance and Medevac helicopters, but found a smaller, Catholic hospital in the Ironbound, a few miles closer to New York.
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I have mentioned here, on an earlier occasion, that as we drove around a bend of South Orange Avenue, we saw the huge mass of brown smoke above the skyline of Manhattan in the distance, then a helicopter landing on the roof of UMDNJ. While waiting for evaluation at the emergency room of Saint James, we watched further developments on the TV in the waiting room, and the admissions nurse said he was sure that no matter how bad my knee might be, he was sure I was glad to be in Saint James rather than at the World Trade Center.
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I did not lose to the disaster anyone I knew well, but life even as far north as Greenwich Village was adversely affected for months afterward. For me personally, then, the main remaining significance of 9/11 is that it allows me to remember when my right knee was permanently damaged: two days before the worst human attack upon the United States in our history.
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Now we see in the Gulf of Mexico how relatively powerless, little people are as against a great force of nature. But 9/11 was bad enuf.
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Alas, whereas we may have learned something from the Katrina disaster — you don't let people build or even add to a city beneath sea level — we seem not to have learned a thing from 9/11, but continue to talk about ourselves as 'innocent victims' who 'did nothing to provoke this attack'. I wish that were true. It's not.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is .)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:26 PM

 
Stealing from the Starving. The United States Government is accepting foreign aid for victims of hurricane Katrina. Disgusting.
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Just after the extent of the damage started to be understood, I happened to be listening to talk radio in British Columbia (Canada) via the Internet because a spokesman for a BC organization that advocates that his province join the U.S. as a state had alerted me that he'd be appearing that day, and I heard a Canadian wonder aloud if any foreign country would help the U.S. recover from this disaster. He publicly expressed doubt, and made plain that he appreciated the fact that the U.S. helps many other countries with their disasters, and resented the world's standing by to let the U.S. handle its own disasters — and he isn't even an American! (But it's precisely because so many people in Canada identify with us that AnnexationBC.com and others advocate they join the U.S.)
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I thought at the time, "We don't need help from anybody" and foreign aid should be reserved to the people across the Third World who desperately do need help. But, lo and behold, offers of assistance have in fact poured in, to the surprise of many and disgust of at least one: me.
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Some offers were manifestly phony, like Fidel Castro's proffer of "1,100 doctors and 26 tons of medicine and equipment." He knew there was essentially no chance the U.S. would accept any such offer. He also knew that actually letting 1,100 doctors go to the U.S. could prove hugely embarrassing, since the chance that none would defect was essentially nonexistent. Dozens or even hundreds might refuse to return to Cuba.
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But other offers were sincere, and were in the form of money, which the Bush Administration eagerly grabbed. You know how they love money!
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We are the richest country in the history of the world, yet the Bush Administration ("Slime R Us") is actually taking money from some of the poorest countries on Earth, money that should be going to people, especially children, in the Third World who are dying from starvation and preventable disease but do not have a rich Uncle Sam close at hand to take care of them. According to The Boston Globe today:

The State Department has announced it has accepted nearly a billion dollars in pledges of foreign aid in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, including hundreds of millions in cash to be donated directly to the federal government as well as planeloads of ready-to-eat meals, tents and baby formula.

The assistance is beginning to pour in from countries large and small, a week after President Bush said on ABC's "Good Morning America" that he had not asked for foreign assistance and didn't think the United States needed it. * * *

The United Nations also was expected to boost Katrina aid, with its humanitarian chief saying the world body's current assistance level would be increased as more international aid arrives. * * *

More than 95 countries have come forward with offers, and about 50 have been accepted. In addition to pledges from the oil-rich Middle East, donors include some of the world's poorest countries, including Afghanistan, Djibouti and Sri Lanka.

Disgusting. Supremely disgusting. At least 24,000 children die each day in the Third World, yet Third World countries are sending aid to the richest nation in the history of the world? That's insane! Any decent U.S. Administration would say "Thank you very much, but we are a very rich country and can take care of our needs ourselves. Please take whatever you were going to give to us and instead devote it to the starving of the world, who really do need it." But the Bush Administration isn't decent. And it doesn't even have any pride! What kind of loser would demean the United States by accepting foreign aid?! It's humiliating.
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We can see here, again, that George Bush is not really President of the United States. He says the U.S. doesn't need foreign aid; the State Department accepts it anyway. Who's in charge?
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For any country to rush foreign aid to the richest country in the history of the world instead of to starving children in the Third World is obscene. For 95 countries to do so, and for such offers to be accepted from 50, exceeds obscene. I have no words powerful enuf to express the vileness of that crime. Has the world gone mad?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,895.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:51 AM