"Bonehead" Is Too Gentle. (Long entry. Read at your leisure — but before November 7th.)
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Media have been all aflutter in the past few days about Bill O'Reilly's appearance on Letterman last Friday. I saw a minute or two of that exchange, but turned off in disgust when O'Reilly made up a statistic to try to justify the U.S. war against Iraq. David Letterman expressed concern that we've done terrible things to Iraq and asked O'Reilly if he really thinks the people of Iraq are better off now than under Saddam. O'Reilly then claimed that Saddam killed 400,000 people. That is an invention, a number snatched from the clear blue sky. A fabrication. No such statistic exists, nor could exist, because Saddam did not keep track of how many people his government killed; the opposition could not have that information; the present government has no such information; Amnesty International has no such information. No one on Earth has any such information, nor could.
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An attempt to tally Saddam's toll by The New York Times produced a toll half that invented by O'Reilly. In "How Many People Has Saddam Killed?", January 27, 2003, John F. Burns said:

Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have "disappeared" into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000. As long as Mr. Hussein remains in power, figures like these will be uncheckable, but the huge toll is palpable nonetheless.

Burns's figures are no more reliable than O'Reilly's. Burns, however, admits that the figures are unreliable, just guesses by people who are not necessarily disinterested observers but who may have an ax to grind against Saddam's regime. There are many such people.
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In channel-surfing last nite, I chanced across the last half hour or so of an astonishingly absurd British 'documentary', Saddam and the Third Reich, that tried to tie Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler! Never mind that Saddam wasn't born until April 28, 1937, so was only 8 years and 2 days old when Hitler died. Preposterous comparisons are made between Hitler and Saddam, and the program asserts that Saddam regarded Hitler as his hero. Everything the 'documentary' asserted about Saddam being isolated and suspicious, and killing people who might challenge him for power could be said about just about any dictator anywhere, and especially about Stalin. Indeed, the Burns article above says, explicitly:

Since then, Mr. Hussein's has been a tale of terror that scholars have compared to that of Stalin, whom the Iraqi leader is said to revere, even if his own brutalities have played out on a small scale. * * *

Mr. Hussein even uses Stalinist maxims, including what an Iraqi defector identified as one of the dictator's favorites: "If there is a person, then there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem."

So which was Saddam, a Nazi or a Communist? It's all nonsense, slanderous nonsense. Saddam was a bad man. He was not a Nazi. He was not a Communist, and it is not necessary to compare him to Hitler, Stalin, or any other generally vilified tyrant to object to his atrocities.
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Getting back to O'Reilly's assertion that Saddam killed 400,000 people, four points jump out: (1) the claim is unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable;(2) even if it were true, the U.S. has killed far more Iraqis than that; (3) a great many, if not an actual majority of Iraqis today feel that they were better off under Saddam; and (4) there are far worse governments in the world, about which the United States has done nothing.
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(1) Letterman called O'Reilly on his fabrications:

"A reasonable person can't believe what you're saying." [And, when O'Reilly said the U.S. isn't a bad country, doing evil things,] "You're putting words in my mouth, just the way you put artificial facts in your head."

Letterman had prepared the audience in advance, that he was likely to call O'Reilly a "bonehead", and at one point did so, to the audience's delite, telling O'Reilly immediately thereafter that he had told the audience he'd say that. O'Reilly said he'd heard that (in the 'green room'). Yes, 'Dave' (I know we've never met; forgive the informality), O'Reilly is a bonehead.
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(2) The U.S., Britain, and Iraqi interim and 'permanent' governments have been unwilling and unable to do a body count of the dead during the invasion and occupation. Saddam was unwilling to give a full count of the dead from the first Gulf War, tho I read somewhere that he did offer a round number of 100,000 dead, tho a study commissioned by the U.S. military suggested less than 25,000. Since both the U.S. Government and Saddam's had reason to minimize the death toll for their respective audiences, and there was no reliable count, we will never know. A great many Iraqis died as a result of a decade and more of sanctions. And then came Gulf War II and the unending occupation, in which, every day, dozens of Iraqis die in violence that would have been impossible under Saddam. In early January 2006, leftwing Anglo-Irish writer Alexander Cockburn (who lives in the U.S.) wrote:

President Bush's off-hand summation last month of the number of Iraqis who have so far died as a result of our invasion and occupation as "30,000, more or less" [that is, more than TEN TIMES the number of Americans who died on 9/11, which we thought was TERRIBLE, in a country 1/12 our population, and thus the equivalent in U.S. national terms of 360,000 dead Americans] was quite certainly an under-estimate. The true number is probably hitting around 180,000 by now, with a possibility, as we shall see, that it has reached as high as half a million.

But even Bush's number was too much for his handlers to allow. Almost as soon as he finished speaking, they hastened to downplay the presidential figure as "unofficial", plucked by the commander in chief from "public estimates". Such calculations have been discouraged ever since the oafish General Tommy Franks infamously announced at the time of the invasion: "We don't do body counts". * * *

Of course the [Lancet] survey [which estimated 100,000 deaths] ... was conducted fifteen months ago [then; 24 months ago now]. Assuming the rate of death has proceeded at the same pace since the study was carried out, Sprey calculates that deaths inflicted to date [January 2006] as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq could be, at best estimate, 183,000, with an upper 95 per cent confidence boundary of 511,000.

Though the figures quoted by Bush were without a shadow of a doubt a gross underestimate (he couldn't even be bothered to get the number of dead American troops right) 30,000 dead among the people we were allegedly coming to save is still an appalling notion. The possibility that we have actually helped kill as many as half a million people suggests a war crime of truly twentieth century proportions.

In some countries, denying the fact of mass murder is considered a felony offence, incurring harsh penalties. But then, it all depends on who is being murdered, and by whom.

Well, it turns out that there has indeed been an update to the Lancet study, which I only now heard about in looking for the information. I had to search for it. It didn't come to me, or to Americans generally, thru prominent mention in the news, tho the Associated Press did carry a story 18 days ago:

President Bush says he doesn't believe it, and Iraq's government called it exaggerated.

But several experts said that a study that estimated that the Iraq war has led to the deaths of nearly 655,000 Iraqis seems sound.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, Iraq, derived that estimated death toll from a door-to-door survey, conducted by doctors, of 1,849 households in Iraq. Taking the number of deaths reported by household residents, they extrapolated to a nationwide figure.

The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 percent certain that the real number is somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths.

Even the lower figure is almost eight times most other estimates.

The new study — which attributes roughly 600,000 of the deaths directly to violence and 55,000 more to other war-related causes — was released Wednesday on the Web site of The Lancet, a respected medical journal.

To make that figure fully meaningful to Americans, we need to multiply it by 12 to give the equivalent in U.S. terms, since Iraq has 1/12th our population. 392,979 (the low-border figure) x 12 = 4,715,748. The mid-range figure of 655,000 x 12 is the equivalent of 7,860,000 Americans killed here. And the upper-limit figure, 942,636, x 12 = 11,311,632. But let's just discount all these figures and arbitrarily knock off 200,000 from the lowest Lancet figure. That yields 450,000 dead Iraqis due to the U.S. invasion. That's still 50,000 — or 12.5% — more deaths in Iraq in the short time since our invasion (3 1/2 years) than Saddam is asserted to have caused in 24 years! Perhaps we need to speak not of "deaths", but of "people killed", to make the point. 450,000 people killed by our invasion. 50,000 more people killed than Bill O'Reilly claims for the 'monster' Saddam. We're not monsters, so why would we produce death tolls even remotely within the vicinity of what Saddam caused, much less higher? Or are we in fact monsters who refuse to accept our monstrousness?
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How about Iraqis dead from sanctions between our military attacks? Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, the odious Madeleine Albright, was asked if a posited half-million dead (mostly children and the elderly) from sanctions was worth the price, and did not hesitate to say Yes. One extreme figure offered by the Iraqi government was 1.8 million dead from sanctions between 1990 and 1999. So how many Iraqis have we killed? 100,000 or more in the first Gulf War; a minimum of 500,000 thru a decade of sanctions; 450,000 or more since the 2003 invasion = a grand total of, round numbers, 1,050,000. Times 12 yields the equivalent of 12.6 million Americans dead at the hands of a foreign power. Is it any wonder that Iraqis think they had it better under Saddam? They even had electricity, sewage treatment, and sanitary water under Saddam. Not under us.
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Bill O'Reilly said we needed to oust Saddam because he had killed 400,000 Iraqis. That was over the course of almost 24 years in power (1979-2003). Whatever the death toll from U.S. action might be, that is from a period only two-thirds that long (1990-2006). Who is to oust us? We are to oust us. That is our responsibility on November 7th: to end the crimes committed in our name, by ousting the criminals who have created deadly chaos in a country 7,000 miles from the nearest part of the United States and which never attacked us.
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(Little aside: In looking for how many Iraqis the U.S. has killed, I inadvertently typed "www.aks.com" (instead of "ask.com"). Oh, just what we need: an ebonics search engine!)
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(3) The Times of London printed an article 7 months ago titled 'I hate to say it, but we were better off under Saddam'. In the intervening months, things have only gotten worse. What might we have achieved for the Iraqi people by trying to moderate Saddam's behavior rather than overthrow him? Remember Nixon and Communist China? We're supposed to be very proud of having helped to moderate the behavior of the Butchers of Beijing (even tho a book published by Harvard University Press in 1999 estimated that Communists killed 65 million people in China). Why was 'constructive engagement' with the Butchers of Beijing OK but constructively engaging Saddam was unthinkable?
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(4) Among the governments on planet Earth with a far worse record of atrocities against their own people than Saddam Hussein's, count North Korea's and the Sudan's at the very top. (Tho Communist China, darling of Wal-Mart Republicans, was worse not long ago.)
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Neither country keeps good records, but outside observers estimate that over a million North Koreans have died from government-induced starvation and political repression under Kim Jong Il. That's the little man who recently exploded a nuclear weapon. George Bush has done nothing about him. We hear a little now about one part of the Sudan, Darfur, where mass starvation, deliberately produced and continued by the central government, has killed many and threatens many more. The BBC says:

The latest research published in September 2006 in the journal Science puts the numbers of deaths above and beyond those that would normally die in this inhospitable area at "no fewer than 200,000".

This is only the latest of endless crimes by the Sudan's national government against the people of the southern Sudan. The CIA World Factbook summarizes:

Military regimes favoring Islamic-oriented governments have dominated national politics since independence from the UK in 1956. Sudan was embroiled in two prolonged civil wars during most of the remainder of the 20th century. These conflicts were rooted in northern economic, political, and social domination of largely non-Muslim, non-Arab southern Sudanese. The first civil war ended in 1972, but broke out again in 1983. The second war and famine-related effects resulted in more than 4 million people displaced and, according to rebel estimates, more than 2 million deaths over a period of two decades. Peace talks gained momentum in 2002-04 with the signing of several accords; a final Naivasha peace treaty of January 2005 granted the southern rebels autonomy for six years, after which a referendum for independence is scheduled to be held. A separate conflict that broke out in the western region of Darfur in 2003 has resulted in at least 200,000 deaths and nearly 2 million displaced; as of late 2005, peacekeeping troops were struggling to stabilize the situation. Sudan also has faced large refugee influxes from neighboring countries, primarily Ethiopia and Chad, and armed conflict, poor transport infrastructure, and lack of government support have chronically obstructed the provision of humanitarian assistance to affected populations.

George Bush sees no need to do anything about the government of the Sudan. If the Sudan were treating Israel the way it is treating black Africans, might Bush do something? If Kim Jong Il had his missiles aimed at Israel, might Bush do something? Surely so. But as long as Israel's security is not at risk, the U.S. doesn't care about the rest of the world. As soon as Israel's security is at risk, however, the U.S. Government will mount an invasion 7,000 miles from our nearest shore, spend hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to maintain a years-long occupation that kills tens or hundreds of thousands of Israel's enemies, and try to persuade the American people to launch yet more wars (against Iran and Syria) to protect Israel. I don't care a thing about Israel. It's not my country. And I would never kill so much as a single Iraqi, much less hundreds of thousands, to protect Israel. Nor do I value Israeli lives one whit more than the lives of innocent civilians in North Korea or the Sudan.
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This is our government, folks. (I assume, for this purpose, that most people who read this are Americans. Outsiders, especially from Canada and Britain, should consider how the admission of their own area to our Union would alter the political balance and thus policies of the United States.) We're supposed to be responsible for what it does, and we are, if we keep electing bastards who commit horrible crimes of commission and omission in our name. November 7th we have the chance to begin to redeem our good name. Will we?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,814 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:56 PM

 
Radio Interview Saturday, October 28. In case you wonder what I sound like, you can hear an interview with me tomorrow nite at WHRW-FM, Binghamton, New York, at 11:30pm over the Internet at http://www.whrwfm.org/listenlive.php on Saturday night (4:30am Sunday in Britain). In addition to answering questions from the host, Charles Berman, I hope to address some very disturbing trends under the present Republican Administration, including the attempt to put Republican acts above judicial review, the first steps in establishment of a full-featured dictatorship.
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It's not a phone-in show, but if you have specific questions you'd like answered, email me well before the show and I'll pass along your suggestions to the host. If you plan to listen, you might go to that site in advance to check out any problems with the connection, your media player/site compatibility, etc. I just went and couldn't get it to start via AOL. Perhaps it will work better with MSIE direct, not going thru AOL.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,810 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:19 PM

 
Gay Marriage in My State? The Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled yesterday that the State must accord same-sex unions the same rights as married heterosexuals are given. They left it up to the Legislature to decide how to achieve that — within 180 days! — and whether the word "marriage" should apply or only an alternative term such as "civil union".
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I hope New Jersey doesn't play any silly games with "marriage". If it walks lilke a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a marriage. I don't see that this Blue State should avoid giving offense to "Red"-necks by eschewing the word "marriage". Massachusetts didn't avoid the word. Is Massachusetts more honest or True Blue than New Jersey? I hope not.
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Alas, I do not have anyone to marry, at present, and I'm not meeting much of anyone. But it would be nice to be able to marry, legally, in my state of birth. (I wouldn't in any case seek out a religious wedding unless it could be held in Manhattan's Saint Patrick's Cathedral or, perhaps better, Newark's Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, which tho less famous and thus less likely to grab big publicity for the cause, is bigger than Saint Pat's, taller than Notre Dame, and a Basilica (a papally designated special church) to boot, not just a cathedral).
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Gay and lesbian New Jerseyans should urge their legislators in Trenton to do the state proud by calling gay/lesbian marriage "marriage". If that offends rightwingers in the South, who cares? They don't spend any time or money here. Most rightwingers who aren't too poor to visit New Jersey would have no interest in doing so. If they want to gamble, they go to Biloxi, Mississippi, where they feel more at home. We have nothing to lose by being True to Blue.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,810 — for Israel.)




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- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:45 PM

 
Bomb Reykjavik! — and Oslo, for that Matter; Goodnite, Sweet Jane. Iceland has joined its fellow savages in Norway in whaling again. The rationalization put forward is that the fin whales that Icelandic savages have killed are no longer endangered. By that rationale, we can kill a minimum of 225,000 Icelanders, because they are not endangered either but can successfully recover, by ordinary heterosexual reproduction, from a devastating mass killing. Let's find out.
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The world has been entirely too gentle on whaling countries, like Japan, Norway, and now Iceland, that refuse to accept that killing intelligent marine mammals is simply unacceptable behavior among civilized nations. We need to get tuf. Tell Iceland, Norway, Japan, and every other savage nation inclined to kill our intelligent marine relatives, that if they kill whales (and dolphins and such), we will kill them, with the same disregard for their lives that they show for marine mammals' lives. We will blast holes in the sides of their whaling vessels, and then in the sides of any lifeboats they might launch, to guarantee that every last member of their crews dies in the frigid waters they defile.
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I do not value Icelander, Norwegian, Japanese or any other "human" life more than the life of whales or dolphins. As far as I'm concerned, they are on an absolute par, and if the one sets out to exterminate the other, I am perfectly willing to bring the weight of the U.S. military to redress the balance.
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Iceland is a worthless piece of rock in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't need any people at all to live on it. Iceland was established by Vikings, those murderous scum who killed uncounted thousands of people in centuries of murderous thievery. The civilized peoples of the Western world weren't able, militarily, to defend against or punish them then. But we sure as hell can warn their descendants that if they continue to act like their barbarian ancestors, we will kill them.
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Goodnite, Sweet Jane. On a gentler note, I am sad to say that Jane Wyatt, the mother in two classic television series, Father Knows Best and the original Star Trek (Spock's human mother), died yesterday at the age of 96. 96! She was born in my state, New Jersey, and I've always been very proud of her for portraying a supportive wife and mother who never felt it necessary to challenge for supremacy either in the household or in society.
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American pop culture has lost its mind, and descended into violent, lesbian-feminist madness that holds characters (and people) like Jane Wyatt's mater familias in extreme contempt. Today's airwaves are filled with ultra-violent, supremely powerful women who are ten times the 'men' that men are, able to beat to death any man who dares to bother them. These hyperviolent imaginary women are, superficially, meant to appeal to masochistic men. They are really intended to incite homicidal rage against women. You see, the people who write that crap have, in most cases, been severely victimized by women, and the divorce laws of California, which you'd think were written by women, so anti-male are they, but were actually written by crazy white guys with severe identity problems and unearned guilts. They have given California, and, second-hand, the entire Nation, a poisonous, adversarial relationship between men and women, in which women are monsters and men victims. This jaundiced view has infected society and produced higher levels of anti-female violence than one might expect of a rich and comfortable society. And that is exactly what Hollywood writers and producers want. They HATE women and want men to beat women to death, so create fictional superviolent females to inspire self-protectional violence in men.
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It is no accident that in this country, violence against women never decreases. In good economic times and bad, whether they be drunk, on drugs, or absolutely sober, angry men continue to beat irritating, uppity women to death. Yet, Hollywood tells women to harass men, dominate men, humiliate and psychologically castrate men. Is it even remotely possible that Hollywood producers don't know that they are inciting literally murderous intergender violence? I don't believe it. I am certain that there are thousands of male Hollywood producers and writers who are so angry about the vicious mistreatment they have suffered from California's insane divorce laws, that they want to incite men who have more guts — or less to lose — than they had, to beat vicious women to death rather than suffer the psychological castration they suffered.
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Women viewers of 'entertainments' in which women are portrayed as all-powerful, infinitely more powerful than any man or any ten men, think these portrayals are pro-female, when they are actually intended to arouse anger, fear, and defensive violence in men. Women today, from little-girl age, are being raised to think they are not just the equal but actually the enormous physical superior of men, and they can always get their way. Little do they know that they have been set up for a terrible, possibly life-threatening beating by the men they are taught to hold in contempt.
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The vision of male-female relationships that people, and especially kids, are subjected to on television is "synthetically insane" (to borrow from my friend John Lauritsen, about other matters; give credit where credit is due). To watch television in the United States today is to be assailed by astonishing levels of lethal violence, all in the name of "entertainment". Truly, American television today is entertainment for Nazis. Death-camp guards would love today's offerings on mainline TV. We have lost all decency as a civilization, and not even "conservatives" decry the endless assault of visions of violent, often sadistic, death that our country is subjected to every single day, day after day after month after month after year after year, all in the name of "entertainment". Of what conceivable use are "conservatives" if they do not rail against murder as entertainment?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,800 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:04 PM

 
"World" Series, Their Ass! Major League Baseball commences its 2006 "World Series" tonite, between the Detroit Tigers and Saint Louis Cardinals. As I rode in a car-service Lincoln Towncar from the office to the PATH station in Downtown Manhattan to go home last nite, I listened, somewhat to my surprise, to the sports-talk program the driver had playing on the radio. Ordinarily, if the driver has the radio on, I ask him to turn it off. Last nite, however, WFAN was discussing the debacle that sent New Yorkers' heady confidence about a "subway series" two months ago into the dumper. Both New York teams, Yankees right away and Mets only much later, fell by the wayside, due to the intrusion of a playoff series between the regular season and the 'World' Series. Had it not been for the playoff series, which I believe is a relatively recent invention — I certainly don't recall any such event in my youth (I am 61½ ) — the Yankees and Mets might very well have faced each other in a Subway Series. But life is unfair, and a whole season of contests can be wiped out in four games of a playoff series. It's like the TV game show Jeopardy, in which you can be thousands of dollars ahead of your competitors, having answered 70% more questions right, but if you miss one question at the end, or don't bet enuf on a winning answer, you're out. If there weren't people starving to death by the millions all across the Third World, such injustice would warrant real indignation.
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The result, this year, of our having playoffs is that two teams in the Midwest face off against each other, in what national advertisers dread: a contest almost nobody cares about, between two teams in the same region of the country. Detroit and Saint Louis are both depressed metropolises whose central cities are largely black and poor, tho some of their suburbs are lush enclaves of the moneyed class. Unlike the great cities of the East and West Coasts (New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami; Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego), or the titan of the Midwest, Chicago, Detroit and Saint Louis are not centers of in-migration from other parts of the country and never had enuf people that the out-migrants to other parts of the country would create a major audience for a sporting event. This World Series thus has almost as little interest for outsiders as had the all-Missouri World Series of 1985, played by the Saint Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Royals. Even a New York Subway Series has more interest for fans, because there are so many people who were born in or near New York and moved elsewhere, or passed thru New York at some time in life, that tens of millions of people care about the outcome — especially people who hate the Yankees.
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In any case, baseball has been played in a number of countries beyond the United States for many decades, popularized in part by GIs abroad in World War II. But it had been played in Japan since the 1870s. Major League teams in the U.S. employ a horde of foreign players, mostly from Latin America and Japan. Japanese leagues have developed major stars, some of whom have found rich rewards and successful careers in American teams. Why, then, is the "World Series" not a genuine world event, open to the champions of all the major baseball leagues on the planet?
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I asked this question of Major League Baseball in 1987, and urged MLB to grant expansion franchises to cities outside existing states, as in Mexico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, and to include the winner of Japan's interleague series in a playoff for a true World Series.
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In reply, I got this letter from Robert W. Brown, M.D., then President of The American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, dated September 2, 1987 (which I ran across among my papers a few months ago).

Thank you for including me with your observations on international expansion. Without trying to argue the pros and cons of your suggestions, I will just say that international competition is always under constant consideration. Perhaps in due time it will come. I appreciate your interest.

That was written 19 years ago. There is still no MLB team in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Caracas, Santo Domingo, or San Juan, and the winner of Japan's interleague championship still does not play in playoffs for the World Series.
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Instead, a number of national baseball leagues organized, this year, something called the "World Baseball Classic", which is to be held once every four years, not every year. They've had one tournament by that name. The United States wasn't even in the finals, which were played by Cuba (which I would preclude until its Communist government is ousted) and Japan. Japan won. In the U.S., we heard almost nothing of that tournament, and nobody cared about the outcome.
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One might think hubris and defensive nationalism are in play here. More likely it is isolationism and Think-Smallism. There were, after all, two World Series — in a row — won by the Toronto Blue Jays of Canada, and nobody seemed to feel national disgrace. That was a long time ago (1992 and 1993), and the only other MLB team that had played in Canada, the Montreal Expos, lost their franchise and were sent to become the Washington Nationals. (When Washington balked at building a new stadium, I suggested that the business community of my city, Newark, should bid for the team, but that hasn't (yet) happened.)
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The United States is in various ways a very peculiar country. Sports is one. Our baseball "American League" includes a team from Canada. Our"National Basketball Association" also includes a team from Canada. And a whole bunch of American cities play in the "National Hockey League". But the "nation" of the NHL is Canada!, and the League is headquartered in Montreal. Still, 24 of its 30 teams are located in the United States. Bizarre.
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Governments and media in the United States have been pushing soccer, a profoundly foreign game, upon Americans for at least 50 years, but we still hate it. That doesn't stop advertisers from intruding soccer images and the term "soccer mom" into commercials for every single product or service of any and every description. This past World Cup, posters were displayed in subways talking about what a good chance the U.S. had to win the Cup. The U.S. team was ousted very early on. And nobody here cared.
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Nor, however, do we push for international expansion of our games, particularly baseball, the "national pastime" —. American "football", a game in which the ball is mostly carried, not kicked, has become the true national game, if there be any. Few Americans even know which sports originated in which country, nor that the third major ball-game in the U.S., basketball, was invented by a Canadian immigrant, tho in the United States (Springfield, Massachusetts, to be more precise), at the bidding of an American athletic director.
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Volleyball is American; rugby and soccer British; tennis French; bowling German, tho formalized in its present rules in the United States; skiing Norwegian; snowboarding and skateboarding American; windsurfing/sailboarding primarily American, improving on a Briton's invention. Skydiving is identified with the United States but originated in parachuting, and the parachute was invented in France. Rollerskating started in Britain, was somewhat improved in France, but achieved its present form in the United States. Inline skating ("Rollerblading") arose in the United States. Ice skating originated so very long ago, and was practiced in so many (northern) places, that no specific place of origin can be cited, tho the Netherlands produced the first steel ice skating blades. Hockey is Canadian. Polo, Persian (modern-day Iran). Surfing originated in Hawaii but was popularized by Americans, especially after Hawaii became a State of the Union in 1959. Bungee jumping originated in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, but was popularized by Britons, who brought it to the United States, from which it spread.
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The point of all this (and much more that could be said about the foreign origins of lots of the sports we participate in as individuals for recreation or as competitors in organized teams, such as pole vaulting (horizontally: the Netherlands and Britain; vertically: Germany) that nobody does for recreation), is that when we have a large, pre-existing community of interest that can be drawn into our civilization by organized sports, why not use the dynamics of sport to bring us closer?
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It is long past time for Major League Baseball to expand into Latin America and Japan, and to create the presently misnamed 'World' Series into a genuine World Series, and do away with the poorly conceived and too-infrequent World Baseball Classic. Next year would not be too soon.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,788 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:07 AM

 
It's Personal Debt, Stupid. I sent the following message via feedback form to one of my Senators, Robert Menendez, who is in a very bitter and dirty campaign for re-election to a full term. He was a replacement for John Corzine, who ran for and became Governor last year. His opponent, Tom McKean, Jr., son of a long-ago governor, is running one of the nastiest campaigns in memory, and may actually prevail in this Blue State because Menendez refuses to talk about what really matters to New Jerseyans, as Democrats overall refuse to talk to the bread-and-butter issues that people care most about. I warned the Democratic National Committee during the last Presidential campaign that if they didn't talk about the huge issue of personal debt, they would lose. They didn't talk about personal debt. They lost. I tried today to warn them again, thru Menendez individually but urging him to talk to other Dems.

Why are you and Democrats generally not speaking to the issues that really concern people, the most important of which in terms of personal impact is PERSONAL DEBT and USURY? Democrats refuse to address the fact that 29% of Americans are falling behind economically, further and further into debt, and 49% just barely get by. Democrats will LOSE THIS ELECTION if they do not focus on what concerns people PERSONALLY. Debt is crushing the life out of people, and Democrats seem not to care! Speak to the Republicans having trapped people in debt thru bankruptcy "reform". Speak to interest rates of 27% and more, which Republicans love. Speak to the non-tax-deductibility of consumer interest. Most voters in NJ and the Nation care far more about the worry they have every single month about covering expenses than they do about the war in Iraq, accusations of corruption or sexual misconduct by members of Congress, or terrorism that is unlikely to affect them personally. DEBT affects them personally. Speak to DEBT and you will win this election, because Republicans are in favor of high interest rates and the inescapable debt for the little guy that such rates produce. If Democrats remain silent, the voter must assume you too favor oppressive personal debt for the little guy. You have very little time to change the thrust of your own campaign and of the Democrats' campaign generally. Do it now! Or Republicans will almost surely retain effective control of both Houses of Congress. Cheers.

I cannot understand why Democrats are so insistent on keeping quiet on debt, usury, and the effective abolition of bankruptcy protection for the little guy. If they don't immediately land hard on these issues, they will lose again. There is too little play in most of the country for any significant turnover in either house of Congress if the poor and middle class voters of the South do not come to understand that the rich who control the Republican Party hate them and want them to be crushed by debt. Conversely, if Democrats can make the poor and middle class of the South and Midwest understand that the worries they have every month when the bills come in are due to deliberate, malicious policies of the Republican Party, Democrats can indeed turn this election around.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:20 PM

 
Still Not One Word About Debt. The crawl across the bottom of CNN Headline News today reported that 49% of Americans are just barely able to cover expenses, and 29% admit to falling behind. That means that 78% of the Nation is either just barely getting by or falling further and further into debt as time goes by, yet the Republicans keep talking about the strong economy, and Democrats don't say one word about the grotesque pressure Americans are being subjected to, as incomes remain stagnant or actually drop, benefits dry up, more people have to provide their own health insurance, and interest at usurious rates piles up higher and higher every month. Why are Democrats so reticent to attack the destruction of the middle and lower socioeconomic classes by the Republican Plutocracy that we suffer?
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Unless the Democrats land hard on the crushing burden of personal debt, made hugely worse by usury that the Republican owners of the banks and credit-card companies inflict upon consumers, they will lose the November elections and things next year will be worse than they are this year. How can Democrats be so stupid?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,782 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:55 PM

 
MidgetMania; 300 Million. The United States has recently become more interested in, not to say fascinated by, midgets than at any time since the filming of The Wizard of Oz in 1939. Why is that? Midgets are almost entirely absent from the real world that almost all of us live in, but are very much part of 'entertainment' media, from GEICO commercials to Jackass (the movie) II.
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In the Wizard of Oz era, the Nation understood dwarfs (or "dwarves"), who were then much more commonly called "midgets", to be oddities of Nature. It might have been rude to treat them as freaks, but everyone did in fact accept that they were freaks (as the American Heritage Dictionary now defines that term, "An abnormally formed organism, especially a person or animal regarded as a curiosity or monstrosity").
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In recent decades we have become too 'sensitive' to other people's feelings to call anyone a "freak", even if they clearly are. A bearded lady, fat lady or tiny, tiny midget is now just "different", and not to be judged. That is the mentality that caused us as a society to accept Walter Hudson's weighing 1,500 pounds and not 'judging' him or demanding he lose weight. He died because we didn't want to call him a disgusting, self-centered, freakish montrosity who needed to grow the hell up.
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We don't want to 'judge' people and find them 'deformed', 'abnormal', 'defective', or anything else negative.
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But dwarfism is a terrible, terrible defect, and should be eliminated from the gene pool by sterilization of anyone who might, thru genetics, produce another dwarf. We have refused to do that, with the consequence that dwarfs have indeed produced more dwarfs, as progeny, ruining the lives of tiny babies who become only tiny people, never full-size human beings.
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We need to stop being so disgustingly, destructively indulgent of egoistic defectives, and tell them, "Hey! You are profoundly, disgustingly, offensively defective. We will NOT allow you to pass on your disgusting defect and make some other child's life a misery. We will NOT let you reproduce. If you will not use birth control with every single (hetero)sexual contact, then we will castrate or spay you. We will NOT permit you to attack the human race with your subhuman defect."
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One observer of one of the present TV programs that focuses on what we dishonestly call "Little People" — as tho they are only scaled-down normal people rather than profoundly, and sometimes life-threateningly, deformed creatures — says, online:

Don't you know that it's rude to stare? The makers of TLC's [cable station The Learning Channel's] reality series Little People, Big World do, which is the key to its appeal. On one level, it offers an up-close, unsentimental look at a family headed by a dwarf couple, spreading the positive message that little people can argue over money, coach youth soccer, and shoot tin cans off rocks like anyone else. On another level, though, it wallows in what it purportedly deplores, allowing us to feel good about ourselves while we gawk at this unusual-looking family from the privacy of our living rooms.

As the father of a teenage girl with dwarfism, I welcome media images that portray little people as normal.

That articulate, but, fundamentally, utterly dishonest person talks about "little peole" as tho the only way they are "different" is that they are smaller than normal people, tho of course he is averse to the word "normal" unless it embraces his midget dauter. He concedes that:

Dwarfs are rare: Depending on how you define the condition, there may be as few as 50,000 in the United States. Then, too, there is a certain cognitive dissonance in seeing adults who have some of the physical characteristics of children—the short stature, of course, but also disproportionately short arms and legs and slightly enlarged heads.

That, too, is dishonest. Dwarfs do not have "the physical characteristics of children". They have physical characteristics of the deformed. The father in the show Little People, Big World, walks with crutches! Is that because of a temporary injury or because he is permanently so deformed that he needs crutches to function normally?
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I suffered a very serious injury due to a fall from a ladder two days before the national trauma/tragedy of 9/11. 9/9 was my personal trauma/tragedy, and I have had 3 knee surgeries since then that forced me to use at least one crutch for more than a month at a time. But I don't need a crutch now. Has the father in LP, BW outgrown the need for crutches? If not, why on Earth would we pretend, dishonestly, that he is "normal"?
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Defectives of any type need to accept that they are defective. I can't walk rite. I am now defective. I wasn't for the first 56 years of my life, but I am now. I don't play silly games with reality. I can just barely walk down stairs face-forward. Until then, I had to go backwards, one step at a time. I can't run, I can't jog, I can barely maintain myself uprite on a downward slope without being constantly on guard against falling. I do not pretend to be physically normal, but I'm nearly 62 years old. It must be extremely difficult for someone whose dauter is a teenager, facing decades of abnormality, to accept, for her, and to urge her to accept, that she is abnormal. But she IS abnormal, and nothing he can say or pretend will alter that fact to even the slitest degree.
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Defectives must accept their defectiveness. It doesn't matter whether they are diabetics or hemophiliacs or cripples of a thousand different kinds; midgets or albinos; blind or deaf. Face facts, no matter how 'unkind' those facts may seem, and don't push off onto others the obligation to accept as "normal" people who are defective. Blindness is not normal; deafness is not normal; dwarfism is not normal. And it doesn't matter how many people pretend that any of those conditions is normal. Blind people, deaf people, deformed little midgets will always have a tuf time in life, not because other people wish it upon them but just because their horrible natural condition does that to them. If we had it within our power to make them normal, do not doubt for an instant that we would. If they, or misguided relatives or friends say that they wouldn't accept an instant fix even if it were available, let the world know, and acknowledge very publicly and very loudly, that they are out of their minds.
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300 Million — Rite. The Learning Channel reports that today is the day, when the population of the United States passes 300 million. Oh, please, we've had 300 million, legal and illegal, for at least five years. So what?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,771 — for Israel.) Oddly, yesterday's total was 1 higher than today's. There appears to have been a little correction




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:53 AM

 
Buncoland, or Frauds R U.S. The governments of the United States and its various subdivisions have apparently decided that suppressing and punishing fraud is not a legitimate government activity. Everywhere around us we see frauds victimizing millions of Americans, but government not lifting so much as a finger or issuing so much as a word of warning to the public not to be taken in.
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TBS, the Atlanta-based UHF and then cable television station that started Ted Turner on the road to riches, has embarked upon an aggressive plot to separate suckers from their money. Called Midnite Money Madness, this 'program' runs live, two hours a nite from midnite to 2am. On it, viewers are encouraged to call to answer trivia questions for modest cash prizes. Each call costs money that the 'program' collects:

$.99 per land line or cell phone entry. Cell phone entries may include standard text messaging charges.

For a $500 prize, the 'program' might collect tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen from people who may think that each person who has the right answer will get the $500 prize, when in actuality only one will — if that.
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The new CW Network, cobbled together from various UPN and WB broadcast stations, has just started to broadcast a one-hour version of the same evil scam. Their version airs from 2:00-3:00am and is called Play2Win. It is also called a "contest", and consists of a series of little puzzles, each of which carries a modest prize, such as, again, $500. For the right to contést for such an inconsequential little prize, a viewer must place a telephone call or send a text message that costs $1.50. Each. As with the TBS scam, people are encouraged to improve their chances of getting to solve the puzzle by registering more than once, up to a maximum of 10 times per half hour. They need to keep track, themselves, of how many times they call, however, because they will not be blocked from calling more than 10 times in a half hour, but any call over 10 in a half hour will not be registered for purposes of competing for the prize. It will, however, be charged to them at a rate of $1.50. Per call. $15.00 per half hour. Per caller. Isn't that sweet?
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These evil scammers, relying upon public trust in the legitimacy of game shows after the scandal of the 1950s, are stealing unknown hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a nite, rite in public view, and no government, at any level, does anything, even tho this scam crosses state lines.
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Is government collecting taxes from these scams? Is government "in on it" as an entity? Are prosecutors and communications regulators taking bribes to look the other way? Or does the law not recognize these scams as frauds upon the trusting — not to say "stupid"? Oh, hell, let's just call anyone who falls for such a scam stupid, because that's what they are. But government is not supposed to stand aside and let criminals take advantage of the stupid.
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These scammers should be grabbed by government and made the stars of a new TV show, in which anyone can place a free call to order one lash of a whip to the scammer of their choice, up to one per phone number per half hour. The game should continue, with each lash of on-air flogging — or punch with a fist, or slash with a razor blade or knife, or other appropriate physical punishment — carried out within 30 seconds of each call voting for such penalty, until the given scamstar is dead. Then another scammer should be brought out and given the same star treatment until s/he too is dead; on and on thru all the onscreen personalities, producers, station and network executives, cameramen, sound technicians, grips, advertising agency personnel, and others of every description involved in any way in each vile scam.
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Once all of the scammers from these two broadcast frauds are dead, thru this most entertaining form of public execution, we should make temporary stars of more scammers: the purveyors of MX-Man, Enzyte, and other "penis-enlarging" scams; the Nigerian 'bankers' and 'philanthropists' who want to send us millions of dollars; the Dutch and British 'online lotteries' that selected our email and want to send us millions of euros or pounds; and on, and on, until we have broken the human race of the temptation to steal via the telephone, text-messaging, and Internet, as well as by postal mail and every other form of communication.
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We could throw in the phony weight-loss and baldness-cure scammers, the work-from-home scammers, the "meet singles in your city" telephone 'clubs', and all other scammers of every description who afflict society like a cloud of locusts or swarm of mosquitoes you can't escape.
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We could even let them talk directly to the audience to try to persuade us we should spare them because they really weren't involved in a scam at all and gave value for money; or they can tell us their hard-luck story to deter us from lifting the phone to dial 1-800-SCAMSTOP. Maybe the same morons who trusted them with their $1.50/a call for a $500 prize will buy that nonsense too. But I suspect there will be enuf people indignant and savvy enuf to ensure that all such pleas for mercy fail to save the scamscum who have made living in this country an exercise in constant self-defense, because government won't protect us, and made us into a nation of cynics who can't trust anyone.
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Madame Defarge wouldn't be taken in. If she had a phone by the guillotine, I'm sure she'd pick it up to vote for heads to roll. I have two phones, a landline and a cellphone. I could call twice per half hour. What fun!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,772 — for Israel.)




Don't think I'm offering a prize to people who go to my Amazon PayPage. The only reward people contributing to my work can expect is the satisfaction of knowing they help strengthen my voice, and give me more time to speak for them.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:37 PM

 
Small, Weird, Cold World. The incident over which every single national news network fixated Wednesday involved someone I almost knew. Sort of.
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It turns out, not just bizarrely but also grotesquely, that the apartment into which Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle's airplane crashed belonged to Kathy Caronna, who gained fame/notoriety 9 years ago for almost being killed by part of a lamppost that fell on her when wind blew a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon into a streetlite. Someone I worked with at the time was a good friend of the victim of that initial bizarre incident, and is still friends with her, thru this second bizarre incident.
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I sent my former co-worker, who is still my friend, the following email;

A FRIEND sent me an item from the DAILY NEWS, that the apartment hit by the small plane Wednesday was that of Kathleen Caronna, the woman who was hit by a falling piece of lamppost at the Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1997. Didn't you say you knew her? Is she okay? What a horrible thing to have happen. Please advise. Cheers.

She replied:

Yes, it's my friend Kathy. She's fine although her bedroom was totally destroyed. She was told that the engine landed on her bed although she wasn't able to go in the bedroom. She was on her way home when it happened and if she would have been a few minutes earlier, she would have been in the apartment. As you can imagine, she is in shock. We (my sister and some friends) are taking her out for dinner and LOTS of drinks tonight. She will probably be staying with our friend Laura for a couple of nights until they can find a new place. The apartment is not liveable. It's unbelievable that after all she has been through, it would be her apartment. Crazy.

That poor woman. I responded:

AT least she can rest secure in the knowledge that millions of people sympathize with her. Cheers.

I was concerned earlier that I might have known someone who died in that accident, in that the plane that crashed was occupied by a Yankees pitcher and a flite instructor who took off from Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey. I took a couple of flying lessons at Teterboro from a beautiful man from somewhere in Atlantic Canada (PEI?). My interest in learning to fly ended when another Yankees player, Thurman Munson, died when a jet he was piloting crashed in 1979. I then decided that perhaps flying one's own plane wasn't the best of things to do.
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It seems that the flite instructor who died with his student on the Upper East Side was from California, so the beautiful man from PEI that I flew with was not killed. Thank goodness. I did have another instructor at one point, who let me take control sooner than I expected on takeoff. Fortunately, I did not drive us into power lines or anything else on takeoff. I appreciate teachers giving students latitude, but I wasn't quite ready to take off when we took off!
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I must, however, try to express, for those who have never experienced it, how wondrous it is to fly a small plane. I am almost 62 years old, and very close to the top in memory of all my experiences is a few minutes when I flew my own small plane down the middle of the Hudson River over the George Washington Bridge on a spectacularly beautiful sunny day, with Upper Manhattan to my left and the Palisades to my right. It's a feeling of elation, such as Icarus might have experienced, that you never forget. Icarus got drunk on that elation, and died (altho the science of that Greek myth is exactly wrong: bizarrely, on planet Earth one gets COLDER as one climbs higher toward the sun).
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I'm not the only person to have seen parallels between Lidle's death and Munson's. Some people still hold it against Lidle that he worked to break the strike called by major league players against owners in 1995. I am very pro-labor, but a strike by millionaire baseball players against millionaire team owners is a complete fizzle in ideological terms. The whole thing leaves me cold.
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Speaking of leaving one cold, let's talk about the grotesque fact that Buffalo, New York, and other areas around the Great Lakes, had two feet of snow earlier than ever before in all the time that weather statistics have been gathered. The Chicago Tribune reports that "At least three deaths were blamed on the storm."
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This damned global warming is killing us.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:51 PM

 
News Judgment — or Lack Thereof. I turned to CNN Headline News this afternoon to see if there was any current story I'd like to comment on here, but the half-hour summary that cable channel is supposed to carry has been pre-empted for "Breaking News", about a fire in a residential building on Manhattan's East Side apparently caused by a helicopter crashing into it. I then checked Fox News Channel, CNN (or perhaps I should say "CNN1", since CNN has apparently decided to destroy Headline News and render it into CNN2, with long-form reports taking over ever more of Headline News's schedule), MSNBC, and CNBC, all with the same result. Every single domestic cable news channel is focused on one story, on which, by the way, they have almost no information. That's insane.
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If you don't know what's happening, go to other stories while your reporters find out, then return to the story when you know what you're talking about. What has happened to news judgment in this country?
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The whole world does not come screeching to a halt because a helicopter crashes in Manhattan or a police chase is happening in California. We don't need to watch flames and smoke, or vehicles moving on a highway. That's not news. That's not information. Viewers don't need to follow such things in real time. The media do. Let the media tend to that and, in due course, tell us what happened, when you really know. In the interim, let us hear what else is happening.
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I am getting very tired of media monomania.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,754 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:08 PM

 
Operation Enduring Chaos. The war against Iraq continues to kill hundreds of Iraqis a week, which makes Israel extremely happy but decent Americans very sad. Meanwhile, Radical Zionist liars in media continue willfully to misrepresent the war against Iraq as an intrinsic and inseparable part of the "War on Terror", even tho a recent intelligence report said that the war in Iraq has increased the danger of terrorism against us by recruiting people to terrorist activity and in making anti-Americanism not just respectable but practically compulsory for hundreds of millions of people across the Moslem world.
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Just today, the New York Post, which seems to think every last one of its readers is Jewish and thus automatically Radical Zionist, willfully mixed apples and oranges in opposing a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives next month. Odd, you'd think, that a newspaper located in one of the most solidly Democratic cities of the Nation would be so rabidly Republican. Equally odd is it that a paper that panders to Jews on Israel does not alienate those same, mainly arch-liberal Jews with its other stances. New York's Jews do not vote Republican but are, in general, among the most liberal of voters, far more likely to vote a straight Democratic ticket than non-Jewish New Yorkers. How does the New York Post stay in business?
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Here's the Post's take on the possibility that Democrats, the clear party preference of the voters of the city that surrounds the Post, might win a majority of the House of Representatives:

The November elections loom — as does the possibility of Democrats taking over at least one chamber of Congress.

That's a frightening prospect, given the records of some of those poised to take over key committee chairmanships.

Frightening, that is, to Americans who want to win the War on Terror.

As we noted last month, New York's own Charlie Rangel of Harlem — in line to become chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee — is a vociferous opponent of the Iraq war. And he minced no words in speaking to The Hill, the newspaper that covers Congress: "You've got to be able to pay for the war, don't you?"

In short, Rangel will do his best to cut off funding for the war should he rise to head the committee.

See it? The editorial starts by referring to "the War on Terror", then quickly turns to talking about funding "the Iraq war". The two are the same, says the New York Post. No, they're not.
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How does the Post continue to exist in a Democratic city when it is so rabidly Rightwing Republican? Oh, there are of course some Rightwingers in New York and its suburbs, but most of the people who buy the Post do so to read the news, sports, and features, not the editorials, so either don't know about or at least pay no attention to the rabid Rightwing rants to be found there. Rush Limbaugh's talkradio show and the Fox News Channel are also headquartered in Manhattan. Makes all the Rightwing ranting about "liberal media bias" sound pretty ridiculous, doesn't it?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,747 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:50 PM

 
Kim Jong Il, 1; George W. Puss, 0. The tiny dictator of North Korea has apparently exploded a nuclear device in the northern part of his country. As I write, the great big Texan in the White House has done nothing about that gross provocation. Everything I say below is posited on the Puss Administration's not doing anything about the danger to the world that North Korea's becoming an active member of the nuclear club poses. And by nuclear "club", we need to understand "weapon" more than just "group". If Puss finds his manhood and takes decisive action to destroy the KJI regime, I retract everything negative that I now say below. (For feminists inclined to object that courage is not a male monopoly, let me say simply that feminist rhetoric almost always suggests that women would find ways other than war to resolve conflicts. If feminists wish to become as bellicose as men, and renounce that other rhetoric, let's hear the new rhetoric now, at a time when the stakes of inaction could get very high indeed. If, however, feminists insist that some solution short of war can end the threat from North Korea, let them put forward a comprehensive program now, in a hurry, before the missiles fly and millions die.)
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North Korea is the very essence of a "rogue state". KJI is the essence of evil, tho not, supposedly, of madness. Before Puss launched his unprovoked aggression against Iraq, a pushover state in every way, I publicly reproached that plan for having nothing to do with the real dangers to this country, which were much more likely to issue from North Korea than Iraq.
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In September 2002, 8 months before the Puss Administration attacked a country that had never attacked us, had no plans to attack us, and had no ability to attack us, I posted a very long expository and advocacy piece entitled "No to War Against Iraq!", which I added to over the next several months. That presentation includes this information and argumentation about North Korea.

North Korea says it is not just going to wait around to be attacked at a time of U.S. choosing. The Associated Press reports what I have said earlier in this piece, that other countries, in this case North Korea, assert the exact same right of pre-emptive war against the United States that the U.S. asserts against Iraq:

[The Associated Press reported, February 6, 2003 that] Ri Pyong Gap, a spokesman and deputy director at the North [Korean] Foreign Ministry, told The London-based Guardian newspaper that the impoverished country was entitled to launch a pre-emptive strike against the United States.

"The United States says that after Iraq, we are next," the paper quoted Ri as saying, "but we have our own countermeasures. Pre-emptive attacks are not the exclusive right of the U.S."

How did the Puss Administration respond to this declaration of warlike intent? From the same AP story:

Even as it presses toward war with Iraq, the United States has insisted it wants a peaceful solution in the standoff with North Korea.

President Bush "keeps all of his options open," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in a television interview. "But he happens to believe that this is a situation with North Korea that can be resolved diplomatically."

That worked well. Now, 3½ years later, North Korea has (apparently) tested both a nuclear device and missiles on which to carry them. The missile tests seem to have failed miserably, but so did the U.S. space program at first. We eventually did get to the moon, tho, didn't we? And North Korea might eventually get highly accurate long-range missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead — or multiple nuclear warheads — to any and every part of the United States.
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Continuing from my presentation as above:

Hmm. North Korea, a country many observers believe actually HAS nuclear weapons, and has 37,000 Americans within easy range of its million-man army, threatens pre-emptive war against the United States, but Iraq is the greatest danger we face? Something’s not right here.

What exactly does a pre-emptive strike from North Korea imply? Well, Pyongyang is known to have, already, ballistic missiles that can reach beyond Japan. [Apparently some missiles tested theretofore had actually been tracked beyond Japan, tho none of the most recent group tested went anywhere near that far. Is that because they couldn't, and just fizzled out for being defective? Or because they were destroyed by North Korean 'mission control' as not to give away their ultimate range?] How FAR beyond Japan can they reach — today? How much farther tomorrow? Hawaii? California? Iowa? If they attack by a polar route, how long will it be before North Korean missiles can strike New York or Washington?

Saddam had no nuclear weaoons, no program to develop any, no missiles on which to launch them, and no program to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles, but Puss attacked Iraq nonetheless. Bullies usually do pick on the kid who can't fite back. Which is precisely why, we are told, North Korea wants nukes: so the U.S. won't dare to attack.
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Today, North Korea has nuclear weapons and a program to develop more, and has long-range missiles and an ongoing program to develop more missiles of greater range and accuracy, but Puss does nothing.
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Why exactly would that be? Does the Puss Administration believe that North Korea's leadership is so tenderhearted that it would not kill a few hundred thousand Americans? They've killed over a million of their own people. Why would they hesitate to kill Americans?
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We have a history with North Korea, and it does not bode well. From my 2002 presentation, again:

Moreover, the North Koreans committed hideous crimes against U.S. prisoners of war, including "brainwashing" of a particularly vicious sort that left many Americans permanently traumatized.

"OVER 7,000 AMERICANS were captured during the three years of the Korean War. They wound up in 20 camps throughout North Korea with nearly 40 percent of them dying there.

Some were murdered or starved, others died from poor medical treatment or from the severe cold. Despite brutal conditions, most of the POWs survived the isolation, cold, hunger and disease." (Italics added)

War and Crime.com — American POWs in Korea

One chilling website, "Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century" — which everyone who thinks Saddam is uniquely monstrous should visit — does a comprehensive survey of deaths worldwide that includes this notation about the U.S. death toll from the Korean War:

"(US POWs: 2,701 out of 7,140 died after capture. In all, 5,639 USAns died as a result of war crimes. (Lewy))"

2,701 of 7,140 is 37.8%, which confirms the statement at "American POWs
in Korea" given above.

Indeed, the Puss Administration may well have learned many of the 'pressure' techniques it employs against "terrorists" — and which have earned it massive condemnation from the entire civilized world — from North Korea!
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I tell you what I'd do if I were President. Before another hour passed — because I'd have been ready for this for many months — I would launch a "Shock and Awe" campaign against every single physical place that Kim Jong Il might be, and against every single military facility and nuclear facility of every description in his entire country, and keep it going until the North Korean regime was completely destroyed. If they attempted to launch a ground attack upon South Korea — and the thousands of Americans stationed in that country — I would use tactical nuclear weapons, if that were needed, to halt the attack before it could get very far. But I suspect that a Shock and Awe campaign with conventional weapons would suffice. Two weeks, five weeks, 17 weeks of sustained air bombardment would destroy North Korea's offensive capability and decimate the Kim regime.
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Will President Puss do any such thing? Don't count on it.
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What will he do to protect us? Anything? Nothing? If North Korea were where Iraq is and threatened Israel, we'd have invaded years ago. But the United States is much less important to the Puss Administration than Israel is. So they will do nothing but talk a tuf game, leaving China to crack the whip.
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But if China really meant to prevent North Korea from testing, it could have done so. China is 1.3 billion people, with an army of 2.25 million and an additional million people in active militia/paramilitary service. In 1979, a mere four years after the U.S. left Vietnam in disgrace, China invaded northern Vietnam, trounced the Vietnamese, and left a month later, having severely chastened that overconfident little country, which was absolutely powerless to stop a Chinese invasion of its heavily defended northern heartland. China could surely destroy North Korea in a trice. One must, then, believe that if North Korea dared to test a nuclear device, it is almost certainly because it had received assurances, sub rosa, that China would do nothing.
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Absent Chinese mauling or U.S. attack, what is to restrain North Korea from continuing its preparations for a nuclear first strike against U.S. interests in its area? Well, there's a little country east of Korea called "Japan" that used to own Korea, and wasn't very nice to it. 61 years ago — I was already alive, it was so recently — Japan was marauding thru much of eastern Asia, killing millions, making Korean women into sex slaves, and otherwise lording it over its 'inferiors'. Japan has a very violent past, internally as well as externally, and the U.S. could give Japan the green lite to resurrect its samurai warrior culture — in "self-defense", of course. But we know what "self-defense" means to violent peoples. We have the example of Israel ever before us. "Self-defense" is a synonym for "aggression" against people one hates. And there is no love lost between Japan and (North) Korea.
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Instead of preparing the American people for a war of annihilation against the Kim Jong Il regime, the Puss Administration is instead working very hard to persuade Americans that we need to launch yet another war against Moslems in the Middle East, which has as its only real purpose to keep Israel safe. Israel's security is vastly more important to the Pussites than Alaska's, California's, or Iowa's.
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How clever, or dumb, is Kim Jong Il in launching his test — of a nuclear device and of U.S. will — one month before U.S. midterm elections?
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Will Puss do nothing, and prove to Americans that he and his party are unfit to hold total power in the United States, such that Kim ousts Puss's party from Congressional power? Or will Bushy Boy make bellicose noises and preparations for war, forcing voters to rally round the flag and give the President a strong mandate by returning Republicans to solid control of both houses of Congress?
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Will Americans go for another war when we have two already, under this President, both going badly? Or will preparations for another Korean War — the first was one of the most unpopular of all American wars, which cost the Democrats the Presidency in 1952 — prove the straw that broke the camel's back, and bury the Republicans in votes of dismay and antiwar urgency, even hysteria?
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Not one person on this big blue planet can answer any of those questions.
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The (ersatz?) Chinese expression comes to mind: "May you live in interesting times." In nuclear times, we may need to alter that to "May you live thru interesting times."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,744 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:04 AM

 
Making Excuses Before the Fact. Radical Rightists are already trying to put the best face on what they supposedly fear: rebuke by the electorate in next month's Congressional elections. John Podhoretz, Rightwing columnist for the New York Post, on October 6th complained about Democrats raising a sex scandal to defeat the Republicans, but saw a brite side:

THIS column is directed entirely to the sleazy, scuzzy, unprincipled and entirely Machiavellian Democratic political operative who helped design the careful plan resulting in the fingerprint-free leak of Mark Foley e-mails * * *

The one great irony is that if Democrats do prevail in November, everybody's going to know the election wasn't a referendum on Bush, which is what they most wanted. But you can't have everything.

So it is sleazy and scuzzy to reveal Republican hypocrisy on sexuality? It was fine for Republicans to impeach a President of the United States over his sex life, but not fine for Democrats to expose a Republican defender of children who was attracted to boys a little younger than strictly legal?
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I have already stated here my indignation over this tempest in a teapot, this country's insane attitude toward sex and "children" who aren't children at all but young adults. And I have stated repeatedly that I think Republicans are making much too much noise about their likely losing the House of Representatives, when there is so little play in the gerrymandered districts across the Nation for there ever to be much change, so they might well remain in power in both houses. But this takes the cake: now the Republicans are disowning in advance any judgment by the voters that the Bush Administration and its Rightwing Republican power base are taking us in the wrong direction and the people want a course correction.
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Elections mean whatever people believe them to mean, and if Democrats should somehow retake the House of Representatives, despite the gerrymandering of Congressional districts and the massive flood of money that Republicans have poured into re-election, Democrats must insist that their triumph is indeed a rejection of the Bush Administration and a mandate to take this country in different directions.
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One such direction must be to impose a Federal standard on the drawing of Congressional districts in every single state of the Nation, to forbid gerrymandering and require that computer programs that consider only geometry and raw population statistics, but nothing else, redraw all Congressional districts across the Nation, to make them as close to square as possible and still maintain equal numbers of constituents in each. While they're at it, Democrats should also set national standards for ballot access, to eliminate the many barriers to third-party presence in elections that many states — including, bizarrely, New York, in the Liberal Northeast — erect to keep elections a major-party monopoly. Uniform Federal standards must control Federal elections.
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No one knows how such reforms would affect the distribution of House seats by party, so Democrats will be taking a leap of faith in the good sense and sound judgment of the people in insisting that Congressional districts be square and that all parties have a chance to display candidates' names on the ballot, as finally to give democracy a genuinely "square" deal in a country whose major parties bravely champion democracy abroad — but do everything to thwart it at home.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,742 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:22 AM

 
Static View = Idiocy. I received this morning an email from someone in Florida who objected to the very idea of enlarging the United States to incorporate any new geographic area, even Puerto Rico:

Dear Mr. Schoonmaker,

I am both deeply troubled and disturbed by your website. The world certainly does not want to become part of the United States, and increasing the size of this country will do nothing. I think, in fact, decreasing the size might do something a little better.

Maybe the world becoming one country could solve some problems, but the United States of America becoming this global country? No, of course not.

You say that one of your biggest reasons for not liking Bush is the fact he, and I quote, "has done nothing to annex Puerto Rico". Well, Mr. S[c]hoonmaker, the people of Puerto Rico do not want to be annexed. There is not only sustained support for the current status of commonwealth, but growing and steadily increasing support for the status of independence.

Your advocacy of these ideas is well within your rights under the First Amendment, but you are not immune to criticism. Your advocacy of expansionism and annexation of the countries of this world is offensive.

If I were to believe you when you say you originated the term, "gay pride" in the early 1970's, then that would be something of pride. I am a gay man. Your spelling reform proposal is interesting. But I can not imagine why in all these years since you say you founded the Expansionist Party in 1977 you would advocate this crazy, insane, offensive idea. Whether you advocate these nations be annexed through peaceful or imperialist means is of no matter, it is still one of the craziest ideas I have ever heard.

I doubt your dream will ever come to pass, but if it does, I will assume that everyone in the world has gone mad.

I replied:

YOU merely WISH that sentiment for independence were growing in Puerto Rico. In reality, it has never been significant in the past 50 years and is unlikely EVER to amount to much. Every hurricane that roars across or even near the island reminds Puerto Ricans of the mess they'd be in if they were ever to be thrown back upon their own extremely meager resources in time of trouble.
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>>Whether you advocate these nations be annexed through peaceful or imperialist means is of no matter, it is still one of the craziest ideas I have ever heard.<< So you think that even if other countries should WANT to be annexed, we should refuse, for their own good? You are to tell everyone what is best for them, are you?
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You are typical of a type of American who hasn't a clue as to how bad things are elsewhere, so think things here are awful -- solely for want of perspective. I have a (gay) friend like that, who spent much of his adult life in the perpetual infantilism of academia, who keeps bitching and moaning about unfairness here, even tho he has never been ANYWHERE ELSE. He has never even traveled to Europe, much less lived anywhere else. Yet he keeps holding up Europe as a model of socialist progressivism, and happily forgets that not long ago half of Europe was Communist and a fourth of what remained, Fascist (Spain, Portugal, Greece). Medievalist wars of religion (the "troubles") have killed thousands in Ireland. Tens of thousands were killed in the wars in the various parts of exploded Yugoslavia. All this and more has happened since WWII! -- in Europe, the most advanced part of the entire planet after the U.S. and Canada, tied with Japan. Japan hasn't had a change of controlling parties in the entire postwar period, but suffers one-party rule.
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I suspect that a large part, if not the entirety, of your objection to Expansionism is an inclination to believe that in expanding, the U.S. would merely be imposing the worst of the present dominant Rightwing Republican program upon areas annexed. That is the exact opposite of what would actually happen.
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The reality is that even within our current borders, there may be a shift in power from Republicans to Democrats in at least the House of Representatives in next month's elections -- tho that will be extremely difficult, given the fact that almost all seats are now "safe" for one party or the other due to gerrymandering by partisan state legislatures. Would such a shift in party control alter policy at the federal level? Of course it would.
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Now, consider the effect 22 million Canadian votes* would have on the U.S. political system: 47 votes in the House of Representatives, perhaps 14 in the Senate. There are presently 232 Republicans and 205 Democrats in the House, a difference of 27 votes. A shift in 14 would alter the political complexion of the Nation. What would 47 Canadian votes do? What would 85 British votes do? What would 128 Philippine votes do? What would 154 Mexican votes do?
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Puerto Rico alone would have about 6 votes in the House, and 2 in the Senate. The split in the Senate is 55 Republicans to 45 Democrats (includes one Independent who usually votes Democratic). Speculation is that this November's elections could not move the Senate to Democratic control because there aren't 6 seats likely to change hands. But if the number were 4 rather than 6? And what if there were 7 Canadian states, with 14 votes in the Senate? An additional 5 British states, with 10 votes in the Senate? Three Philippine states, with 6 votes in the Senate? 10 Mexican states, with 20 votes in the Senate? Put any of these accessions, or all of them, into the equation, and anyone will see the potential for massive political change in the new-domestic politics of the United States, not just in the foreign policy of the expanded country.
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It irritates the hell out of me that people insist on seeing a static version of what would happen if the U.S. expanded. Expansionism is dynamic: the core changes as much as the now-exterior. Everything changes, as more people and more resources are added to the stew.
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I suggest that you do not appreciate how important it is for our own, domestic, progress that we admit new areas to the Union. With Canada OR Britain, and especially with both, we could have universal healthcare within a year of accession. With PR only, we might have seen a change in control of both houses of Congress this November. Would that have been worthwhile? Would a more progressive and forward-looking Congress now, and a liberal President in 2008, thanks to the addition of far more than the 4 million votes that separated Bush and Kerry in 2004, be worth having? I suggest it would.

____________________

* "Votes" here refers to individual voters, as for President. Congressional apportionment is based upon population, not actual voters, and Congressional representation is what is tallied in the passage that follows this reference to voters.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,737 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:57 AM

 
Little Chuckle, Big Hole. Two pix today that I took this week in Manhattan. The first shows an alteration — call it "defacement", if you will — of a poster in a subway car that urges riders (the MTA curiously calls them "customers" rather than "passengers") to be alert to unattended packages of any kind. The original tells people to "be suspicious of anything unattended". I like this version better. The MTA's* version smacks of paranoia. The altered state warns people of a real danger.

(The picture is of a poster in place in the less-than-brilliantly-lited interior of a subway car. The version on the MTA's website is of the poster as it appears in the best of lite, when you can take a crisp picture at a high shutter speed. It's very hard to get a crisp picture with a handheld camera in poor lite, so please pardon the slite fuzziness.)
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The second foto is a nite view of the big hole in the ground that persists at Ground Zero, the former World Trade Center site, which New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin rightly called attention to not long ago. This is not a halftone rendering. The criss-cross pattern superimposed upon the worksite is a mat of some kind that has been placed between the worksite and onlookers. I don't know if it's to protect onlookers from any debris that might issue from the site (tho there isn't any dynamiting going on as might throw off debris) or just to protect some unwarranted privacy of a public project. Puzzling. Still, one might feel that what it takes away from clarity of view, it adds in textural interest.
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I work nites and am usually so rushed, going in to work, that I cannot take pix of that gaping hole in the daytime. Should I manage to get myself out early enuf to show that site in Downtown Manhattan, you can see that foto here.

For now, suffice it to say that day or nite, Manhattan still has a huge hole in its Downtown heart five years after 9/11. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but should it also be the city that never fills in that hole?
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Local Cooling. While I was writing this, the steam heat in my house went on for the first time this season. Due to the high cost of oil heat (thank you, Republicans), I hadn't even put water into my boiler until tonite, but the forecast was for temperatures to drop into the 50s, so I set the thermostat to about 63 and put water in the furnace so if the interior of my house should get that cold it would get no colder. My state, New Jersey, is tiny, but we have what passes for mountains around here, in the northwest of the state (Sussex County),** and the forecast there was for temps to drop into the upper 30s — less than two weeks after the formal end of SUMMER.
____________________

* MTA = Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a New York State agency that controls City subways and commuter trains into the suburbs and exurbs (since the Long Island Railroad, an MTA unit, goes as far as Montauk, about 110 miles from New York Penn Station. I say "New York Penn Station" to distinguish from my own city's magnificent art-deco version, Newark Penn Station).

** Placenames in New Jersey, as in many older states of the eastern United States, alternate among three main categories: names from England (and, in lesser measure, other countries of the Old World), names from Indians, and names for distinguished personages. My county is Essex, which is also the name of a county in England. We also have a Middlesex, Somerset, Gloucester, and Monmouth County. And of course the name of the state derives from Jersey, a little island off the coast of France, part of Britain's Channel Islands Dependency.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:40 PM