Stupid Dictators. Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez seem to have a death wish.
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To take the more endangered first, Chavez, a supposed leftist, has retreated to the authoritarian bad old days of Latin American dictatorships, in a time when the U.S. can project its power to every part of the Hemisphere to crush any tinhorn dictator. Venezuela is not a closed society, and there are tens of thousands of members of the opposition who would gladly help the U.S. military pinpoint Chavez's whereabouts at any given moment, so that a "surgical strike" could kill him and his immediate circle without doing much damage to the larger Venezuelan society.
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Chavez needs to be reminded of the last Latin American dictator who trivialized U.S. power, one Manuel Noriega. On December 20th (my birthday), 1989, the United States invaded Panama for the express purpose of ousting Noriega from power, arresting him for drug trafficking and money laundering, and removing him to the United States for trial and imprisonment. He is in a Federal prison in Florida to this day, tho he may be released this September, almost 18 years later. His power is completely broken, and even if he should return to Panama, his chances of restoring his dictatorship would seem nil. Mind you, if he did succeed, we would just invade again, or kill him and his entire coterie with a brief "shock and awe" campaign.
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There is no room in the politics of Latin America for dictators. Not one. The Venezuelan legislature is not entitled to empower the 'president' to rule by decree. Decrees are for dictators. Presidents operate under the rule of laws duly passed by a legislature. They neither seek nor accept rule by decree.
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Members of the sane, humanist left understand that popular democracy is not just intrinsic to democratic socialism but indispensable to social justice, because you can't just hand people a better life. They have to earn it, and participate in their own liberation, or they will neither achieve personal liberation nor appreciate it, so lose it to the next authoritarian government, which may well have nothing like their economic nor political wellbeing at heart.
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I would like to believe that Hugo Chavez has the best interests of the downtrodden little guy of Venezuela at heart, but he is assuredly not acting as tho he does. Political opposition is important to the functioning of government. It's one major way you determine whether your programs are wise, by listening to criticisms. Even fools sometimes see foolishness in others.
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If Chavez will not allow political opposition in speech (TV, for instance), he may well have to face physical opposition in the form of guerrilla warfare. He must know that. He surely knows the violent history of dictatorship, revolution, new dictatorship, counter-revolution, and new dictatorship that has plagued Latin America for centuries. Can he possibly be so stupid as to think that he is immune to such forces? Democracy, with its free-speech steam valve, keeps societies from blowing up by giving people some power over change and the chance to blow off steam with words on placards, not guns and grenades.
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We don't have to put the people of Venezuela thru the torment of a protracted civil war. We can kill Chavez and everyone around him in one hour. Someone should tell him that.
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Several thousand miles to the northeast of Caracas, another stupid dictator is preparing his country for disaster. Not content with having lost the Cold War and seeing the Soviet Union break up, Vladimir Putin seems intent on embarking on a new brinksmanship that is likely to produce, if not World War III and the total destruction of civilization, then at least the devastating, humiliating defeat and breakup of Russia itself. Turning his back on democratic Europe and the United States, Putin is cozying up to the Butchers of Beijing, in the apparent hope of restoring Russian greatness by hitching Russia's wagon to China's (Red) star. It would seem that he is, after all, just the KGB thug he started as.
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Perhaps he has made the calculation that China will have one and a half billion people soon, and may simply pour across its long border into empty Asian Russia, in a replay of Russia's worst nitemare, a new Mongol Horde. To prevent that, Putin seems willing to risk war with the United States. China is so near; the U.S. so far.
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But, Mr. Putin, Europe is near, and it has 600 million people who are much better educated and more easily capable of mastering the technology of modern warfare than the typical Chinese peasant. In alliance with and directed by the United States (another 300 million people), Europe could be a monstrous problem for Russia.
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But Putin may think that European self-importance will prevent it from making common cause with its chief rival, the United States. That would leave Europe to its own devices, vis-a-vis Russia.
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Within itself, Europe is divided, despite the pretense of a European 'Union'. Communist China, by contrast, is united, under a centralized, authoritarian government. Europe's population is declining; China's, rising. Putin is making noises as tho he thinks the threat to Russia comes from the West, whereas it really comes from the east.
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Might he be developing new intercontinental ballistic missiles to hold in reserve against China while pretending they are to be used only against the United States and/or Europe?
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Russia is plainly capable of such cynical behavior. In the guise of the Soviet Union, Russia signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, to buy time to build up its military to fite what it saw as inevitable war against that very country. Might Putin be buying time for Russia to build defenses against China?
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If so, he is going about it in an odd and dysfunctional way. Because the West , with which he might have to realign Russia if his plan to cozy up to Communist China doesn't work, takes literally his anti-Western rhetoric and takes gravely seriously the idea that he is arming for war against us.
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The Cold War left the West so angry with Russia that even after Yeltsin overthrew the Communists, the West continued to fite the Cold War, refusing to rush to the people of Russia the technical experts, economists, political operatives, union organizers, and educators needed to ease the transition to a market economy and democratic politics. Russia was left to fend for itself, and it has suffered badly.
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Is Putin intent on avenging that slite and the 17 years, and counting, of grotesque hardship Russia need not have suffered had the West been wise and generous? Is he really so furious and disgusted at Russia's mistreatment at the hands of the West, which should have welcomed Russia with open arms but instead held it a straight-arm length away, that he really is developing a war machine targeting the West?
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How stupid can he be?
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Would the United States and other Western countries really have difficulty in fomenting insurrectionary movements in various parts of Russia's national territory, and carrying terrorism on an unprecedented scale to the very heart of all major Russian cities? Would Putin's government find international covert aid and training poured into Chechnya and other disloyal areas easy to overcome? Or would Russia find itself overwhelmed, with first this chunk of its national territory, then that chunk, then another, ripped from Holy Mother Russia by the enemies that Putin seems intent on making?
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And if Russia is ripped to shreds in the Caucasus and other areas in the western part of its realm, will Communist China really honor its own, latter-day 'nonaggression pact'? Or will it join in the feeding frenzy to rip away huge chunks of Russian territory — and resources — while Russia is distracted and prostrate due to insurrections causing devastation in the Russian heartland, insurrections supported, even incited, by the West? China may be close, Mr. Putin, but Chechnya is even closer. If you make powerful enemies, they can make powerful friends of Russia's internal enemies, and fite proxy wars thru them that could reduce Russia by hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory, and fill its streets with blood.
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Way to go, Putin! If Russia has a history after your reign, what will it say about you?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,467 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:56 AM

 
Mailbag; the Cost to Us of Israel; "Greatest Generation" Crap
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(1) 'Fanmail'. Now and then I get noxious emails from fools from hither and yon, not just the thoughtful messages I get from colleagues in Britain, Taiwan, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Let me share one hostile message and my reply.

Canada will never become part of your insane country, We are better in every way without you. except for losing wars in the middle east and asia which you excel at.

Please go fuck yourself with METER stick.

Greg in Calgary

PS. China will probably invade and destroy you within 50 years and when they do I will be happy.

I replied:

IF China attacks North America, it will likely crush Canada before taking on the United States, you fool. You are too stupid to be allowed near a computer, where you might compose idiotic emails that will embarrass you when you grow up. Do not bother intelligent people working for reasonable goals. Canada is a selfish, self-indulgent, self-important nothing in the world that refuses to step up to its responsibilities on this violent and benighted planet. Canadian nationalism is an ugly, ugly vice, and you have been twisted by its ugliness. The sooner Canada vanishes into history like the Republic of Texas, the better both the world and Canadians, who will be freed of the necessity to say stupid things out of envy.

I am very tired of Canadians, who are among the world's most selfish people, pretending moral superiority to us, who have expended hundreds of billions of dollars for others. How many hundreds of billions? See next item.
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(2) U.S. Aid to Israel, Total. I severely underestimated U.S. Government aid to Israel. I figured it had to be about $100 billion in constant dollars. But I found today an official U.S. AID website, the "Greenbook", which "shows a complete historical record of United States' (U.S.) foreign aid to the rest of the world by reporting all loans and grants authorized by the U.S. Government for each fiscal year." In constant dollars, for the entire period 1946-2005, U.S. Government aid to Israel totals $153 billion! That's for a population that has never been greater than 6.25 million, and for most of that period was less than 4 million.
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By contrast, U.S. aid to Egypt (population now 80 million) totaled $94 billion. The entire region "Middle East & North Africa", including Egypt, received $327 billion. For all of Sub-Saharan Africa (751 million people), for the same 60 years, $79 billion. For all of Latin America (pop. 550 million), $119 billion. For all of Asia (not including Israel), 3.9 billion people, $445 billion. For the entire world, $1.647 trillion.
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The population of the Earth is given, by the CIA World Factbook, as 6,602,224,175. Israel, which today has 6,426,679 people (also CIA World Factbook), comprises only 1% of the world's population, but has received 9% of all U.S. aid to this entire starving planet. Israel's per-capita income is $26,200. Why on Earth are they receiving so much as one red cent of foreign aid?
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Only 76% of Israel's population is Jewish (that is, 5 million). If one counts only Israeli Jews, who have received the bulk of the benefits of U.S. aid, the figure is even worse, and not just because its population was starkly smaller, both as an absolute number and as a percentage of the world's population, until very recently. If one were to forget about Israel's Jewish population being much smaller until the last 20 years or so, and figure disbursements on the assumption that Israel's Jews always comprised the same proportion of the world's population as now, 3/4 of 1%, they have received 12X as much, per capita, as people in other parts of the world.
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The disparity, when per-capita income is used as the criterion, is obscenely huge. Look at Sub-Saharan Africa's figure: $105.19 per person over the entire course of 60 years. Israel's tally? $153 billion, divided by 5 million Jews = $30,600 per person! Oh, that's fair. After all, they make $26,200 per year, so they need more than someone who makes $745 a year (the average per capita income for all of Sub-Saharan Africa) to make the same impact on their lives!
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Israel, one country of 193, has received 9% of all U.S. aid for the entire planet for the past six decades. And that's only Governmental aid. It does not count transfers by private entities, such as the United Jewish Appeal, Hadassah, and other charities.
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On December 9, 2002, a columnnist for the Christian Science Monitor wrote that the costs of U.S. support for Israel are even higher than the $153 billion U.S. AID reports. Much, much higher. The tally the Monitor reported includes not just aid to Israel but also costs to the United States that do not flow directly to Israel but are a drain on us due to U.S. support of Israel, such as oil-price increases imposed by Arab oil exporters in retaliation for U.S. offenses.

Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion [in Government grants, Government 'loans' that are actually grants, buyback arrangements, private transfers of funds to Israel, and various collateral costs to our economy in the form of both rewards to Egypt and Jordan for pro-Israel behavior and punishments of the U.S. inflicted by anti-Israel Arabs]. If divided by today's [U.S.] population, that is more than $5,700 per person. * * * [Note: This study appeared before the Iraq war, which was fought at Israel's insistence to make Israel safe from Iraq. So add another $500 billion, and counting. Oddly, altho that column appeared more than a year after the 9/11 attacks, and even tho the U.S. was attacked only because of Israel, the Christian Science Monitor column does not mention 9/11, nor include so much as one cent of the costs to the Nation, either direct or consequential, of those attacks. However, in the same year, 2002, as that column, CBS News estimated that the 9/11 attack would end up costing New York City $95 billion. The Afghanistan war was a direct result of the 9/11 attacks, so all the costs of that war are more or less directly attributable to U.S. support of Israel as well. So will be the costs of implementing the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, and those were estimated in February of this year at $21 billion over the next five years. These additional costs are on the order of $200 billion.]

Adjusting the official aid to 2001 dollars in purchasing power, Israel has been given $240 billion since 1973, [Thomas] Stauffer [an economist hired to investigate the matter by the Army War College] reckons. In addition, the US has given Egypt $117 billion and Jordan $22 billion in foreign aid in return for signing peace treaties with Israel. * * *

[U.S. support for Israel also produced the Arab oil embargo of the 70s.] That shortfall in oil deliveries kicked off a deep recession. The US lost $420 billion (in 2001 dollars) of output as a result, Stauffer calculates. And a boost in oil prices cost another $450 billion.

Afraid that Arab nations might use their oil clout again, the US set up a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That has since cost, conservatively, $134 billion, Stauffer reckons. * * *

• US Jewish charities and organizations have remitted grants or bought Israel bonds worth $50 billion to $60 billion. Though private in origin, the money is "a net drain" on the United States economy, says Stauffer.

• Israel uses roughly 40 percent of its $1.8 billion per year in military aid, ostensibly earmarked for purchase of US weapons, to buy Israeli-made hardware. It also has won the right to require the Defense Department or US defense contractors to buy Israeli-made equipment or subsystems, paying 50 to 60 cents on every defense dollar the US gives to Israel.

US help, financial and technical, has enabled Israel to become a major weapons supplier. Weapons make up almost half of Israel's manufactured exports. US defense contractors often resent the buy-Israel [not "Buy American"] requirements and the extra competition subsidized by US taxpayers.

The columnist who wrote that Christian Science Monitor piece, David R. Francis, was attacked by an apparently well-coordinated flood of emails "sometimes using similar phrasing, occasionally employing a rather threatening tone". That had all the earmarks of a Jewish propaganda campaign such as I described here May 19th, in which a tightly organized, tiny Jewish minority tries to make itself appear much larger than it is by virtue of the assumption of a multiplier effect on the part of recipients of complaints — that is, they assume that for every one person who writes to complain, 50, 100, or even more people were offended but did not complain.
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Be not fooled, Christian Science Monitor. The Jews are a tiny, tiny minority, and Radical Zionists an even smaller minority. Believe it or not, a substantial number of American Jews are only grudgingly Zionist. Those who remain here do so because they don't want to live in Israel, don't want to be Israelis but Americans, and actually don't even approve of a tiny, small-minded country that elevates religious identification to the be-all and end-all of one's existence. So why are Radical Zionists so influential in this country? Because they control media and government, and insane "Christian Zionists" control evangelical churches confused about what is Christian and what is Jewish, or who know full well that Christians are not Jews but believe that Jesus can return to Earth only if the world ends in Armageddon, and Israel is the most likely source for a final war of annihilation that will bring Christ back to Earth. They support Israel not to save it but to see it destroyed in the Last Days before Jesus returns. And woe be to Jews who have refused His message once He has returned!
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Oh, and those Israelis who arrested duly elected Palestinian lawmakers today, in flagrant violation of every single principle of U.S. promotion of democracy in the Middle East? They will surely burn in Hell if Jesus does return.
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(3) "Greatest Generation", My Foot! I was ticked off when the anchor of NBC Nightly News yesterday referred to World War II veterans by the idiotic term coined by his predecessor, Tom Brokaw, "The Greatest Generation". So ticked off was I that this morning I sent NBC the following email.

Brian Williams used the odious term "Greatest Generation" to refer to WWII vets last nite. Oh?
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If the Great Depression/World War II generation is "the Greatest Generation", what were the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence, won our independence, and wrote the Constitution– George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and on, and on? What of the generation that kept the Union together in the Civil War – Abraham Lincoln and the hundreds of thousands who fought and died to preserve the Union and abolish slavery? What about the generation that settled the West, won independence for Texas and then added it to the Union, won the Mexican War and added California and the rest of the Southwest to the Union?
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And what of the mess the WWII generation left us, a little thing called the "Cold War" that lasted for 45 years!
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To call any one generation the "greatest" is at best impolitic. But if we are to call any one generation the "greatest", surely the Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution are beyond any reasonable doubt our Very Greatest Generation. So far. Cheers.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,434 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:52 AM

 
Spanish PBS. Did you know that PBS launched a Spanish-language cable network two months ago? I hadn't heard about it at the time, and I watch a lot of news on TV and read a lot of news on the Internet, so I guess the story was glossed over by major English-language media. I chanced across the actual network a couple of weeks ago in channel-surfing, and thought the "ME" stood for "Mexico". But "V-me", pronounced váe.mae, stands for the Spanish compound word "veme",* meaning "see me". It is a co-production of a private company and various public broadcasters, including Newark's own PBS station, WNET (which claims to be a New York station but is actually assigned by the FCC to Newark, NJ).
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V-me maintains a website in Spanish, with some English.

“Public television exists to serve the American public, and Latinos and Spanish-speakers are an increasingly significant part of that public. With V-me, public broadcasters are able to fulfill their mission and serve this vitally important new audience,” said William F. Baker, Chief Executive, Educational Broadcasting Corporation. “An endeavor this significant could not be created by public broadcasters or private investors alone. Through this unique partnership, public television brings hundreds of hours of high-quality, exclusive programming to America’s Latino families.”

V-me Media, Inc. is a media company formed to create and distribute the best quality content for Hispanics in the U.S. and internationally. The company is a partnership of PBS flagship, [Newark's stolen] Thirteen/WNET New York [no: Newark], and private investors, led by The Baeza Group and including Syncom Funds, both of which specialize in investing in media companies to reach underserved markets. Company revenues will come from the development and launch of strategic partnerships, the international syndication of its originally produced and co-produced programs and sales of post-broadcast products such as DVDs and other program related products.

(Oddly, the website asks for your 'postal code' (not "zip code") in order to show the station in your area with which V-me is affiliated, but does not show what channel to tune to to find the programs it lists.)
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Is V-me a good thing, bad thing, or mixed?
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That depends upon its intent and effects. If the intent is to create a parallel society within the United States that does not integrate with the majority culture, then its intent is decidedly a bad thing.
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If its intent is to give Hispanics who may not have received much education in their home country the kinds of information other Americans have, that intent is a good thing.
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If one of its intents is to give students of Spanish from other language communities a whole range of quality-content broadcasting in Spanish, that intent too is good.
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What, likely, will be its results? Already, there is GED preparation in Spanish. Why? Can students take the GED in Spanish? Do we not require students to know English in order to get a high-school equivalency diploma? If that is the case, we need to crack down hard on educators, rescind all such diplomas, and demand that competence in English be a mandatory part of a high school diploma or equivalent. No one in the United States is truly educated if s/he can't speak, read, and write English fluently.
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Is teaching English thru on-air or online courses designed specifically for speakers of Spanish part of V-me's mission? Not as far as you can tell from its website. I did a search for both "english" and "inglés" (with the accent) and found almost nothing. The nitely feature films are subtitled in English, and that appears to be about it.
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Why would a PBS venture, presumably funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a governmental entity that takes money involuntarily from taxpayers, not offer English-language instruction tailored to Spanish-speakers? Is it V-me's intention to keep current speakers of Spanish speaking Spanish only rather than help them gradually learn English to fit better into the larger society? Is it V-me's mission to help Hispanics retain their language against the forces of assimilation? If that is its mission, it should be immediately de-funded by every entity, public and private, that believes that this is ONE Nation, not many, and that everyone who lives here has an obligation to learn the one language that will permit them fully to participate in national life: English.
____________________

* This is a combination of "ve" (see) + "me" (me), pushed together as one does in Spanish with imperatives and pronouns.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,431 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:15 PM

 
Dems and Cojones; "Slavery in America"; Punishing Gas Guzzlers.
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Ball-less Wonders. The Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives is caving in to Dumbya on all kinds of matters. People who thought a woman Speaker could stand up to the President have been proved sadly wrong. It seems that cojones really do matter. So I sent the following message to the Speaker today.

No Balls. When the Democrats elected you Speaker of the House, the people who unseated the Republicans hoped you would have the character to face down Dubya. But you just don't have the balls, literally, and balls do seem to matter. You have caved on the war, immigration, tax breaks for the rich, and free trade -- so far; and you've been in office less than a year. What other betrayals do the American people face from your ball-less leadership? Resign. Let a MAN take your place. This country needs a MAN as Speaker. You are unfit.

They will doubtless ignore that message, as they have more generally ignored the American people who pushed the Republicans out of power in Congress. We don't count. Everything inside the Beltway is arrogance. Those people live in a world of their own, where they compromise away the interests and imperatives of the people.
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The Democrats did not want a mandate strong enuf to override the President, because then they would be held accountable for actually doing what the people elected them to do. They wanted an excuse, so they could make noise but not enact any legislation that would actually accomplish what they claimed to want to accomplish. That's why they didn't mention personal debt or usury or undoing bankruptcy reform during the 2006 midterm election. Had they campaigned hard on the things that the people really care about, they would have won in a landslide that empowered them to override any veto. But then they would be held to account when they didn't deliver the goods.
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No, it's much better, in Washington, to make noise than to pass legislation the people want. If the problems are solved, then the Government doesn't have to be so big. We wouldn't need a huge Governmental establishment, and members of Congress couldn't posture as our champions. We wouldn't need them. They could go home most of the year instead of hanging around Washington. They don't want to go home. They want to be near the action, but not responsible for the fallout. Let the Republicans mismanage everything. Only the Presidency matters. So you wage a weak campaign midterm to keep your hand in the game, but you don't want to make people think it doesn't matter which party controls the Presidency because Congress can override him. If people thought a strong Congressional majority controlled by one party and a President controlled by the other could work, we might settle for such a balance. That would never do.
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No, Democrats want to be able to tell people in 2008 that they can't change anything unless they control the White House. The reality is starkly different. A strong majority in Congress can control a lot of things. Dems just don't want to do without the White House.
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Where does that leave us? With Republicans calling the shots and Democrats simply sitting on the sidelines, bitching. Bitching. Hm. Maybe it is appropriate that the Speaker of the House is a woman, after all.
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"Slavery in America". ABC News has mischaracterized criminal kidnapping of foreigners and holding them captive, as in brothels, in the United States as "slavery". No. In proper use, "slavery" refers to a legally permitted institution that empowers one person to own another. That is not what is at issue here. From beginning to end, everything involved in"human trafficking" is illegal. "Slavery in America" is an abuse of language that smacks of an indictment of American society. What is really at issue, however, is being fought by American society. We have no guilt in this and must rebuke ABC for outrageous mislabeling of its sexploitative reporting.
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Economic Equity in Gasoline Pricing. ABC News reports today that 54% of Americans making less than $35,000 a year find high gas prices a hardship; people making over $75,000 a year, however, find them no hardship at all. So the rich buy gas guzzlers. That raises consumption ("demand") more than if the rich bought economy cars. Combine higher demand with stagnant supply, and you get higher prices. So who is driving price increases (other than oil companies that shut down refineries maliciously, in order artificially to raise prices)? The rich.
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Since high prices for gas are not a problem for the rich, let's charge them more and the poor less on every gallon. That is a perfectly obvious solution that no one in government is considering.
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There should be a simple disparity in pricing so that anyone driving a gas guzzler, and thus disproportionately raising demand that raises prices for everybody, should have to pay more. It's no hardship for them, but they create hardship for others. That is starkly immoral, and wealth-disparity pricing is a very simple fix.
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The details can be worked out. There could be a central computer in each filling station's office that contains a list of all car models/types, and when a car pulls up to the pump, the person in the office (or at the pump, if such computers can be put in place at every pump) sets the price per gallon. People of modest means who must have a large car because they have a large family would get a waiver that could be shown as a sticker on the license plate or elsewhere on the vehicle, or in the form of a card they present on arriving at the pump. Any employee at the pump who corruptly sets a lower price than the law calls for (which would be set as a percentage of the base price given the poor, e.g., 110%, 160%, 340%, not a hard number), and any customer attempting to bribe their way to a lower price would be subject to arrest and imprisonment that they would have to pay for themselves. Simple.
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Gas guzzlers consume far more than their fair share of a finite resource. They should pay for that privilege. People who drive more efficient vehicles should be rewarded for consuming less of the planet's resources. We can do that thru differential pricing: higher prices for the rich, lower prices for the poor and middle class, as would go a very significant distance toward equalizing the now hugely disparate impact on people's lives that high gas prices make, and toward encouraging conservation.
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Why should the rich, for whom gas prices are no hardship, be allowed to create a hardship on the poor by being gas guzzling slobs?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,422 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:31 PM

 
Therapeutic Effect of Fiting the Good Fite. I got an email today from a fellow Expansionist who has been in a funk for some weeks now.

I don't know what the future holds for America anymore. This amnesty bill, I'm not so sure of. I think we should just train & educate all illegals within our borders & place them in charge of their homelands' economies. They'd turn their countries around & bring them up to par with us economically speaking. Then economic unity would follow & then ultimately political unity applying our Constitution & Bill of Rights to their political way of thinking.

Anyway I fear a Sino-Russian alliance because it will obliterate this nation a thousandfold. Our leaders don't give a rat's @$$ about us. They screwed up our future, our hopes, & our dreams for us. China & Russia already have a military alliance planned & with the current conditions of our leadership, who the hell can blame them? UN, NATO, EU, China, & Israel are only 5 of the factors that may very well be the death of us as a nation.

SORRY TO BE SUCH A PAIN IN THE @$$ ABOUT ALL OF THIS but I look at the situation of the world & I think it's about to explode or at least put us back in the late nineteenth century with EMPs & half a dozen laptops. Well, I'll try to feel better about all of this somehow. I'm truly amazed at your optimism. You don't let anything get you down, well you know what I mean. I know we've had this conversation before but I've got such a thick head in some ways.

Thanx for putting up with my crap for one e-mail. Take care.

I replied:

The thing you need to appreciate is that government is the SMALLEST PART of the United States. That's not where new things start, that's not where the dynamism of the Nation originates or functions best. Government is always YEARS BEHIND the people. It catches up only when the people move ahead and Government sees that it is out of step. Sometimes the people have to remind Government thru massive demonstrations that it is out of step. Sometimes letter-writing (and now emailing) campaigns, vicious attacks in media and now the blogosphere suffice. The point is that the bulk of the work of society is done not by Government but by "the private sector", by NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) of many types, from charities to medical-research foundations to private colleges (which do the bulk of the work in educating students from abroad who later return to transform their own societies), and by private persons doing 'their own thing'. ABC and NBC in their evening newscasts each Friday hilite some of these private persons' activities. ABC calls its feature "Person of the Week"; NBC, "Making a Difference".
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As I have said before, you need to take a more active stance, to break yourself out of your funk. Write some emails to members of both houses of Congress; write to the President about the basic civilizing mission of the United States. Tell Bush and your Senators and Representative how alarmed you are that the U.S. seems not to appreciate how dangerous things are getting vis-a-vis, for instance, Russian-Chinese cooperation, EU rivalry, etc., and how they may lose superpower status for the United States thru their actions and inaction in the face of challenges the gravity of which they seem not to recognize. If they need a wake-up call, call them! Start, perhaps, with some small step in the right direction, that in itself would be worth taking, like urging Congress to make Puerto Rico a State (incorporating the U.S. Virgin Islands as well). That little step would strengthen progressive forces in Congress by two Senators and 6 Representatives and would simultaneously eliminate one part of the colonial stain on our national honor. We'd still have some insular colonies in the Pacific whose status needs to be resolved, but the bulk of the population now suffering colonialism under our flag would be freed.
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Do not count on Government to change just because you tell them they need to change. Write to letters columns of major and minor publications. Leave comments on the message boards of, e.g., CNN and print publications on the Internet, and at the end of blog entries you find intriguing, because of what they either say or don't say. For instance, if someone writes about the U.S. trade deficit with China in strictly economic terms, leave a comment to wake their readers to the fact that Communist China is using U.S. dollars gained in unfair trade to finance the greatest military buildup in its history: that American corporations are shipping boatloads of money to the People's Liberation Army to be used against US. If someone speaks of authoritarian developments in Russia, leave a comment saying that Americans must encourage private initiatives in Russian society to create and strengthen democratic institutions that will force Putin to recognize that he is not the people's stern father, Russians don't have to be treated like stupid children, and he should work with the people, and for them, not treat them as serfs or fools who cannot be trusted to handle their own affairs. If your local colleges don't have large and aggressive foreign-student programs, write to their presidents and boards of trustees, and to local newspapers, urging them to get involved in imbuing American civilization in the leaders of tomorrow from all around the planet.
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If you just sit by and watch as things go from bad to worse, of course you will become depressed and desperate. There is, also of course, no guarantee that what we want to accomplish will ever be done, but there is a better likelihood that at least part of our program will be adopted if we work for it than if we just sit on our hands and leave the field to others. Remember that even the loser in a race experiences a physical exhilaration that makes him feel better for having run. And if the wrong things are done despite our best efforts, we can at least say "I tried."
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At end, we who favor geographic enlargement of the United States really do have the answer for almost all the problems we face, internally as well as externally. We can strengthen the will of the States to resist Federal encroachment on State areas of jurisdiction by bringing in formerly independent areas that will be militantly jealous of their own prerogatives; and we can enact things that the present close, domestic balance between progressives and retrogressives does not permit, such as a brilliant and efficient universal-healthcare program -- thru new votes from new States. We can end starvation and preventable disease in the Third World; progressively limit war; educate everyone, everywhere, and thus erode religious fanaticism by balancing it against informed rationalism.
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We can indeed become the Light unto the World and City on a Hill that the Founders envisioned, if we just remind people that that's what we're all about. We're not just one country of 193 ripping the map to shreds. We have no right to operate on a business-as-usual basis, nor cynically in the world, catering to the narrowest interest of the smallest elite of transnational corporations and tribalists. Americans want to believe they are special, and we once were. But the little people who run the Government now don't have our vision. They use the rhetoric of mission to manipulate us into wars not for democracy but for Zionism, not for the ordinary Arab on the street but against him. They pretend to be an honest broker in an Arab-Israeli peace process, then give billions to Israel but cut off the Palestinian Authority without a dime because the DEMOCRACY they insisted is the cure for everything puts into power people they don't like. Democracy, you see, is valid only if every election turns out "right". And you don't work with democratically elected governments to help their PEOPLE if their elected leaders don't agree with every single stance of the Administration of the moment in Washington. Our brave leaders pretend indignation about Darfur but do nothing as thousands die before our eyes. Are we supposed to sit still and take it? Or are we supposed to demand action?
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At end, American democracy is PARTICIPATORY democracy, in which each individual who cares DOES something. It might be no more than writing a couple of letters or emails to Congress and the President. But there is a multiplier effect, because people in power know that for everyone who writes, there are at least a hundred more who feel the same but haven't yet been moved to exert themselves to tell them. That's why tightly organized minorities, like Zionists, are able to lopsidedly impact public policy: because they organize letter-writing campaigns that fool Government into thinking they are the majority opinion. And their outspokenness, in media too, gives the silent and passive actual majority the impression that maybe they really are. A 2% Jewish minority have the great preponderance of the population believing that Judaism is one of the "three great religions" of the United States! 2% is one of the three great religions of the United States? I don't think so. But Americans in general do. Why? Because Jews are everywhere in media and government, constantly making their presence known and pushing their program, like carte-blanche, uncritical support of everything Israel does. Does the typical Midwesterner or Southerner even know what a Jewish name is? When they see a "Levin" or "Lieberman", "Bloomberg" or "Krauthammer" talking Radical Zionism and the need of the American people to identify as Israelis and defend Israel to the death, do Americans realize that these are Jews telling Christians they need to be Jews? Do Americans understand that they are being propagandized and used by people who have not our best interests at heart but the best interests of Jews in Palestine? I'm afraid they do not. They believe these are just "fellow Americans" telling them what is true-blue Americanism, not agents of a foreign power using American power to do terrible things in the world that George Washington would be appalled at. A country that is 96% Christian has been persuaded that Christianity IS Judaism, Israel IS the United States, and no price is too high to pay for the safety and security of Israel. If we have to suffer 3,000 dead and vast devastation in the largest city of the Nation, that's a small price to pay. If we have to invade a country 7,000 miles away that never attacked us, kill hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and go into debt to the tune of $500 billion and counting, that is a small price to pay. If we have to have a dirty bomb go off in the heart of every major American city, even THAT is an ACCEPTABLE price. If, indeed, we have to see full-scale nuclear war over Israel, THAT is an absolutely reasonable price to pay. And hey! That would be Armageddon, and that would mean that Jesus -- who was, we are told endlessly, a Jew (not, crucially, a Christian born Jewish but who converted not himself but his religion) -- is coming back! And that means that after the Apocalypse we will have a thousand years of peace -- for such as survive the holocaust, that is.
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There is so much madness abroad in the Nation today because the anti-Zionists, Americans who believe that Arabs are just as important as Jews and that we must not fite Israel's battles for it, [are silent, so the Radical Zionists] have the field of public opinion all to themselves, and anyone who says that Zionism was a horrendous mistake that should now be corrected, not compounded, is denounced as an "anti-Semite". Never mind that the great preponderance of Semites (speakers of a Semitic language) are ARABS. Never mind that it is not necessary to be anti-Jewish to be anti-Zionist, because Zionism is a political movement, not a religion. Never mind that to destroy Israel is not necessarily to kill a single Jew but only to dissolve one form of government and replace it with a larger one, encompassing all of Palestine in a democratic, multiethnic society in which tolerance is the highest value. "Anti-Semitic" is supposed to shut us up so that only Zionist voices can be heard. Anything but Radical Zionism -- Israel uber alles -- is to be shouted down, and we are to go on to even worse crimes in the region, such as a new war, against Iran -- because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on either side of Iran, are going so well!
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We are never to stop and say, "You know, this is crazy. Let's stop for a minute and rethink everything from first principles, to see where we went wrong and how we can go right in the future."
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None of this will happen if you and people like you just sit at home and get depressed. The new "Americans", facing the greatest power on Earth of the time, the British Empire, didn't say to themselves, "It's helpless. There's no point in fiting because we'll just lose." Iraq's Sunnis didn't say, on being invaded by the greatest power on Earth of our time, "It's helpless. There's no point in fiting because we'll just lose." The Americans fought; they found allies; they won. The Sunnis of Iraq fought, and fite today. They found allies -- unfortunately, they have allied themselves with people who do not have the Iraqi people's best interests at heart -- and they may well win the withdrawal of U.S. forces from their country.
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And the best thing is that these are not losses, but gains. Britain eventually got over its fury at Americans, and at France. Britain and the U.S. are now best buds, and Britain is part of a European Union with France. The U.S. went into Iraq for "regime change". The regime is changed. We won. Let's go home and let Iraqis sort things out in their own country. Let's encourage national reconciliation. It can happen. Look at South Africa. Ask the Arab League to offer help to Iraqis in rebuilding their country, and replace an army of 'infidels' with an army of 'the faithful'. And maybe in a year or two, a fully reconciled Iraqi nation and the U.S. will be best buds too.
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As with any emotional depression, the only antidote is positive activity. Outspoken advocacy of a foreign policy that is generous, positive, enlightened, is certain to make you feel better. You're one of the good guys. Speak generous words, promote generous deeds, and you'll feel better about yourself, whether the Nation follows your recommendations or not.

He responded:

THANKYOUVERYMUCH!!! That was something I needed to hear & I believe that there are things I can do fail as I might. I will do them starting today.

Now that's what I want to hear.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,415 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:57 PM

 
Amnesty, By Any Other Name, Would Smell. The current immigration bill, which appears to have wide support among both Republicans and Democrats, has been characterized by anti-immigration conservatives as containing an "amnesty" provision. Pro-immigration business interests who want to bring in cheap labor refuse that characterization, as do supposed liberals, who are predisposed to amnesty out of various misguided sympathies. Many progressives wish the world had no hard borders and people could move anywhere on Earth they found congenial. But the elimination of border controls would not produce an even flow of people moving all around the planet from rich countries to poor as much as from poor countries to rich. We know full well that the United States in particular and other First World countries more generally would be flooded by hundreds of millions of desperately poor people from the Third World in search of a better life. While we may want everyone to have a good life, we can't accomplish that by destroying our own civilization and the economy that sustains it.
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We have had other amnesties, which were always defended as being justified by the responsible, law-abiding people to be granted amnesty, who would 'enrich' the Nation in becoming citizens and making great contributions if they were allowed to stay. How many beneficiaries of those amnesties actually troubled to become citizens? How many instead retained the citizenship of their country of origin, rejecting loyalty to our society, our language, our civilization, while accepting our cash? Of those who did become citizens, how many did it to become "Americans" emotionally and culturally? How many did it for financial benefits available to citizens but not to permanent-resident aliens? One of those benefits from the 1987 amnesty was "chain migration", whereby a new citizen was entitled to bring in parents, siblings, and children from his or her country of origin. That feature of the current amnesty plan is supposed to be closed off. If it is, we have reason to believe that a substantial proportion of people granted amnesty will not, in fact, become citizens but remain a perpetual alien presence in our midst, owing us no loyalty and participating minimally in national life, almost as tho they were still in "the old country". If that's the way they feel about this country, they should remain in Mexico, Guatemala, or wherever else they come from.
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I don't know that anyone has hard data about how many people granted amnesty in prior years went on to become citizens, nor why they did or did not so choose.
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A fairly long discussion of immigration policy by a Senior Fellow of the conservative Heritage Foundation published a year ago, that is still online at the arch-conservative Front Page Magazine, has this to say:

The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 granted amnesty to 2.7 million illegal aliens. The primary purpose of the act was to decrease the number of illegal immigrants by limiting their inflow and by legalizing the status of illegal immigrants already here. In fact, the act did nothing to stem the tide of illegal entry. The number of illegal aliens entering the country increased five fold from around 140,000 per year in the 1980s to 700,000 per year today.

Illegal entries increased dramatically shortly after IRCA went into effect. It seems plausible that the prospect of future amnesty and citizenship served as a magnet to draw even more illegal immigrants into the country. After all, if the nation granted amnesty once why wouldn’t it do so again? * * *

[The article makes 5 recommendations, Nos. 2 and 3 of which are:]
Amnesty and citizenship should not be given to current illegal immigrants. Amnesty has negative fiscal consequences and is manifestly unfair to those who have waited for years to enter the country lawfully. Amnesty would also serve as a magnet, drawing even more future illegal immigration.

Any guest worker program should grant temporary, not permanent, residence and should not be a pathway to citizenship. A guest worker program should not disproportionately swell the ranks of low-skill workers.

There are things in which arch-conservatives and sensible progressives can agree. I concur with the two proposals I quote above (albeit with the reservation that a guest-worker program should target areas of the economy in which there really aren't adequate supplies of Americans willing to work, at things like unskilled agricultural labor, especially during planting and harvest seasons), and with a third of the five made in that article (strict border control and penalties for employers who knowingly employ illegals), tho I disagree with the other two recommendations. One advocates denying citizenship to children born here, no matter the origin of their parents. Such a measure would plainly be outrageously unconstitutional, and Americans are not about to amend the Constitution to end citizenship by birth! The last proposal has two parts, first that we raise standards for immigrants and second that we forbid even legal immigrants from bringing in anyone but spouses and minor children. But (1) (a) the main reason for bringing in large numbers of immigrants is to fill those, very, low-skill jobs that Americans supposedly don't want; (1) (b) to give our best jobs to foreigners is insane; and (2) we have always permitted citizens to bring in their relatives, and family-reunification is an honorable and indeed necessary part of enlightened immigration policy. People who want to make a life here should not have to leave their family in misery back home in order to do so. That would be dishonorable in the eyes of decent people. What kind of immigrants, then, would we get?
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As for shifting immigration preference from the unskilled to the skilled, there are millions of engineers and other highly trained Indians, Chinese, etc., who could take jobs away from Americans in our own country if we let them. Why would we do that? Americans should get the best jobs this society has to offer. If not enuf Americans are being trained to fill all the best jobs in this country, then Americans should be given better education.
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Immigration must serve our foreign-policy objectives, among which is to improve the lot of the poor in the Third World, and serve American economic and social interests. Replacing Americans with foreigners in U.S. industry must not be the goal of national economic policy as accomplished by legal importation of masses of skilled foreigners. An influx of Indian and Chinese engineers, for instance, would subvert wages and benefits for Americans in their fields, while giving us no significant competitive advantage against the bulk of Indian and Chinese engineers who remain in their own country, where they will still work much cheaper.
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As for amnesty, by any name, the last amnesty was in 1987, twenty years ago. When will the next be if this one is granted? And why would anyone doubt that there will indeed be a future amnesty if one is granted now?
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There are sensible positions midway between open borders and sealed borders.
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One is to have generous levels of legal immigration but to set standards for immigrants that protect U.S. economic and social interests. We can make taking assimilation courses a condition to admission to the Nation, whereby all immigrants must learn American English, customs, and laws if they are to remain here.
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Another midpoint position is to extend our borders to embrace the populations now seeking refuge in the United States, as by annexing Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean and, over time, creating them into prosperous Sunbelt states. If we have the right and power to change the circumstances on the ground that potential immigrants now live on, we can reduce the "push" factors that drive millions to abandon their place of birth. Given a choice between living in their home village in grinding poverty, without electricity or running water or sewage treatment or education, on the one hand, and moving to the United States, on the other, of course tens of millions would choose to move. But if you electrify their villages, provide them sanitary drinking water and indoor plumbing, good schools, and a chance to work for decent pay in their own village, without their having to learn a 'foreign' language and move away from their family and friends, how many will choose to uproot themselves and move hundreds or even thousands of miles to the older states? Most people in traditional societies like Mexico would much rather live where they were born than cut themselves off from everyone and everything they know. The ultimate solution, then, to our immigration problem is to make life better in the sending countries, and the fastest way to do that, with maximal benefit to us as well, is by bringing Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean into the Union as states.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,409 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:24 PM

 
O'Reilly Wrong, O'Donnell Right. Bill O'Reilly denounced Rosie O'Donnell today for grossly exaggerating the death toll of Iraqi civilians at 655,000. He cites IraqBodyCount.org as saying that the number of Iraqi civilians killed by the U.S. invasion is 'only' 65,000, but if you visit that site, you find a quote at the very top:

"We don't do body counts"
General Tommy Franks, US Central Command

So there are no real numbers, only estimates. Moreover, since when are civilians the only deaths that matter? Every day we hear about American MILITARY deaths in Iraq, as tho those deaths matter, but Iraqi military deaths don't matter. Why is that?
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Every honest person admits that the Iraqi government is not now and has not ever been since the U.S. invasion started, capable of gathering statistics on Iraqi dead. Islam requires the dead be buried within 24 hours, if at all possible, and for the families of the dead, tending to funerals manifestly takes precedence over making a report to the government — which can do nothing with the information anyway, even if it were inclined to. It is not possible to know what proportion of deaths go unreported.
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It is plainly not in the interest of the present, U.S.-installed Iraqi government to publicize high numbers of Iraqis killed by Americans. Nor was it in the interest of Saddam's government, for different reasons. So both governments have had good reason to suppress that information.
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Moreover, the Iraqi death toll from U.S. aggression is a lot higher than the toll from U.S. attacks alone. When you destroy a working government and produce deaths from resulting civil chaos and crime (consider any big American city whose government is destroyed, and the streets are suddenly empty of police); from disease; from malnutrition in time of health challenges (e.g., unclean drinking water, untreated sewage in puddles in schoolyards, dead bodies floating in the rivers from which drinking water is drawn); a healthcare system in disarray; inadequate or nonexistent medical supplies, including medicines; electricity (necessary for, among other things, refrigeration to keep food safe) that is unavailable 15 hours a day!; and on, and on, you are responsible for all deaths that flow from those horrendous, nitemarish conditions. You are also responsible for the bloodletting that proceeds from intercommunal violence that the prior government (Saddam's) kept in check. Every single death that Saddam would have prevented — every terrorist incident, every revenge killing, every ethnic-cleansing shooting, beating-to-death, beheading — is your doing.
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Moreover, mass death to Iraqis didn't start with the U.S. "shock and awe" campaign of March 2003. It started in January 1991, with the First Gulf War, then continued thru more than a decade of U.S.-inflicted sanctions that killed, again, literally uncounted scores of thousands of Iraqis, mostly children, the elderly, and the poor. Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, was pointedly confronted over that eleven years ago (May 12, 1996) by Lesley Stahl of the CBS News magazine program 60 Minutes:

We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.

The website on which I found that quote makes the crucial point:

It's worth noting that on 60 Minutes, Albright made no attempt to deny the figure given by Stahl — a rough rendering of the preliminary estimate in a 1995 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of the sanctions.

Doesn't that constitute an admission that the numbers are correct? If I were asked a question like that and thought the numbers were preposterous, I'd say something like "That is a ridiculous number, an absolute fabrication, pulled from the clear blue sky. No such number of Iraqis have died from the effect of sanctions. No such number at all! The actual number, if any at all, is more like X [e.g., 5,000]. While even 5,000 innocents — indeed, even 1 innocent — dying because of sanctions is a tragedy, about which I feel terrible, at end sanctions are justified because ... [reasons]." I sure as hell wouldn't let the figure of half a million dead Iraqis go out to 60 Minutes' audience of millions if it were false. So we must assume the figure is valid.
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And that figure was from 1995! Sanctions continued another 8 years. How many more Iraqis died from sanctions in those 8 years?
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Put together (a) the number of Iraqis, military as well as civilian, killed in the First Gulf War, (b) the number of Iraqi civilians who died due to more than a decade of sanctions insisted upon by the United States, (c) the number of Iraqis, military and civilian, killed by U.S. violence, deliberately or as "collateral damage", and (d) the number of Iraqis killed by the violence produced by the U.S. overthrow of the highly effective government of the (monster) Saddam, and you doubtless get far more than the 655,000 Rosie O'Donnell spoke to.
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Iraq has 1/12th the population of the United States. Multiply 'even' a 'mere' 632,000 Iraqi dead (the 567,000 Madeleine Albright admitted to plus the 65,000 that Iraq Body Count estimates and Bill O'Reilly effectively admits to) by 12, and you get how many Americans would have to die to equal the nitemare we have brought to Iraq: 7,584,000 dead Americans. We are supposed to think our less than 3,000 dead on 9/11 and the 3,403 dead (soldiers, not even counting civilian contractors' employees) is sad? If that is "sad" or even "tragic", what word conveys the grief Iraqis have been subjected to by the monsters in the United States Government — and their apologists in media, like Bill O'Reilly?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,403 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Dump 'Prince' Harry. The British Government has decided not to send Henry Mountbatten-Windsor, the so-called "Prince Harry", to Iraq because 'specific threats' endanger not just him but all those around him. "Royals"-watcher Richard Quest on CNN Headline News today said that altho some people see this action as having "handed a coup to the insurgents", the British general staff felt that the risk of attacks specific to any unit Harry served in just wasn't reasonable to take. Quest implied that the British military didn't want to face the fallout if Harry were injured "or, God forbid, killed". So in Britain, one man's life really is more important than another's. That is contemptible.
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So, of what conceivable value is his presence in the military if he can't be sent anywhere as an actual soldier? If he is to be a back-office clerk — and Quest reported that Harry has stated publicly that he "didn't want a desk job" — that is not military service, and he's not entitled to either the rank or the good opinion of society for serving in the military 'like a regular bloke'. Not that he lives like just any other bloke, mind you. Rather than bunking in barracks with "commoners", Harry lives in "Clarence House", a "royal" mansion!
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Oust him from the military. Get rid of him. Send him packing to the private sector where he belongs. And let him get a job like 'a regular bloke'.
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When will Britain tire of its layabout, make-believe "royals"? And when will media stop calling these nobodies "Prince" this and "Queen" that? They are no such thing but empty figureheads. "Queen Elizabeth" is no more "Queen of England" (and 'the other realms' of the equally make-believe "Commonwealth") than Miss America is Queen of the United States. Elizabeth Windsor is just an old woman who never worked a day in her life. She is entitled, therefore, to no respect whatsoever, any more than any other lazy woman who lies around on welfare or rich-bitch who lives off the money somebody else earned in an earlier generation. Liz2 is little more than a dull, old Paris Hilton.
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The French and Russians saw that the only way to wean the people away from monarchism was to kill the monarchs — who were actual monarchs, that is, people who actually exercised governmental power from on-high. The Bolsheviks killed not just the ruling monarch and his consort but also their children, potential heirs to the throne. Is that what it would take to break the Brits of their preposterous fascination with that family of nothings who are on the world's most expensive dole? Surely we are beyond that. But Brits plainly need help in breaking their "royals" addiction.
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The United States must return to first principles and show our contempt for monarchism and aristocracy, and the stratified, socially-immobile society it buttresses. Perhaps if Americans in government refused to receive a "Queen" as a guest of state — no President of the United States should ever have thrown a white-tie, state dinner for a make-believe British "Queen" — and American media stopped calling those nobodies "Prince" this, "Princess" that, "Lady" this and "Sir" that, Brits would start to see how contemptible their adoration of such titles is. Let's call Henry Mountbatten-Windsor just that, or "Harry" Mountbatten-Windsor if he prefers. I personally don't know why anyone would regard "Harry" as preferable to, or even related to, "Henry", but "harry" is a word, which means "to harass, annoy, or prove a nuisance to", so perhaps it is more appropriate after all. The"royals" are indeed a nuisance, a nuisance the world can do without.
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Monarchy and aristocracy are not harmless. They tell people that birth is more important than merit. Even with knighthoods and such being bestowed during one's life to people of assumed merit, only a small fraction of worthies are given titles. And what of those denied titles?
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The British monarchy and aristocracy are hereditary, not achieved by merit. No one elects the "Queen", and no one outside "the Royal Family" can become queen or king. That is to say that the very highest position in the British nation — and the Commonwealth — is refused to everyone but a tiny number of people born into 'the right' family. Which means that everyone else is from a 'wrong' family. That is wrong. The same holds for the great preponderance of those "dukes" and "duchesses", "marquesses", "earls","barons", etc., that stain European societies.
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Invidious inequality is built into the very word "aristocracy", which means rule (-cracy) by the best (aristo-). What does that make the rest of us? Less than the best? And what separates the best from the rest? Birth. If you're not born into the right family, you're not as good as they are. That is a pernicious notion that must be renounced everywhere.
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Americans are notorious for fawning over people with titles of nobility. That must end. If people in general won't renounce such behavior, the genuine best among us in media and government must attack that behavior and demand it end. Think of "nobility" as another N-word.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,400 — for Israel. Incidentally, today's tally is one less than yesterday's. Curious.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:47 PM

 
Oh, Happy Day! Someone once said, "The world changes only in that some people die and others are born." Today, the world changed for the better, because a very bad man died.
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Jerry Falwell was the face of 'Christian' intolerance, a Southern bigot who did not cleave to the racial bigotry of his region, probably because he was from Virginia (tho from the unfortunately named "Lynchburg"), not Mississippi, and saw the handwriting on the wall. So he just moved the energies a Southern bigot might ordinarily have directed against blacks to another innocent target having nothing to do with his life: homosexuals. And just as Rightwing 'Christians' had used the Bible to rationalize away racial bigotry and even slavery, Falwell used the "Good Book" to attack gay men. (As for the term "Good Book", it is to laff! The Bible, albeit mainly the Jewish part, is filled with violence and wickedness held up as God's will. What a monster the God of the Old Testament is!)
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The good that Falwell may have done in opposing abortion, helping unwed mothers, opposing embryonic stem-cell research, and everything else was more than undone by his vicious incitement to hatred of people who never did him the slitest harm before he attacked them.
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It's a pity there's no life for even an instant after death so Falwell could see there just plain isn't any God, and his whole life was based on a lie.
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Falwell was a bad man whose influence on public life was far more malevolent and destructive — genuinely un-Christian — than constructive, and now he is dead. Hurray! Next? How about Pat Robertson. Die, you old fool! When Robertson does die, there will be joy in Venezuela's Presidential Palace and in western Newark.
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Let's hope that in Falwell's and Robertson's cases, Shakespeare's observation that "The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interrèd with their bones" is wrong. Maybe, once the prime champions of Christianity as self-righteous bigotry have died, the true Christianity of charity and the pursuit of social justice — on Earth, not in nonexistent "Heaven" — will recapture the minds of Christians even in the South.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,401 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:07 PM

 
Soldiers' Morality, Militarism, 'Ratting', Exporting Jobs.
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(1) Our 'Heroes'. On May 5th, media reported disgusting attitudes among U.S. forces in Iraq. Today, General Petraeus, commander of the troop 'surge', issued a responsive letter to U.S. forces to tell them that such behavior is not only immoral but also counterproductive.

The US military commander in Iraq told his troops to fight by the rules after a Pentagon survey found many soldiers and Marines back torture and would not report colleagues for killing or injuring civilians.

"This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we – not our enemies – occupy the moral high ground," General David Petraeus wrote in a letter.

The Pentagon survey of ethics, released last week, showed that only 40 per cent of marines and 55 per cent of US Army soldiers deployed in Iraq said they would report a fellow serviceman for killing or injuring an innocent Iraqi.

It also said well over one-third of soldiers and marines believe torture should be allowed to obtain information that could save the lives of US troops or gain knowledge about Iraqi insurgents. * * *

According to the survey, ... about 10 per cent of the 1320 soldiers and 447 Marines questioned said they had mistreated civilians, either through physical violence or damage to their personal property.

It also showed increasing rates of mental health problems for troops on extended or multiple deployments. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has extended tours for US soldiers in Iraq to up to 15 months instead of one year.

In the letter, Petraeus, who is on his third tour of duty, said that "while we are warriors, we are also all human beings", and urged his troops that if they felt stress they should talk to "your chain of command, your chaplain, or a medical expert."

Oh, yeah, that will work. I have heard that soldiers know better than to look for help from military mental-health personnel because they feel they can be reported and discharged for anything they say.
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The general's comments are a step in the right direction, but the real problems are (a) military service is intrinsically evil, so attracts evil people; (b) the extreme stresses of warfare, especially being surrounded by a huge population of what come to be regarded as all enemies, can push over the edge even originally-decent people who foolishly enlisted in the military out of mistaken notions of duty or honor; and (c) punishments for wrongdoers are trivial and inconsistent.
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In one notorious crime against civilians, the "Mahmudiyah incident", five U.S. soldiers raped and killed a 14-year-old girl after murdering her parents and sister. Two of the guilty have already had their cases resolved. One was supposedly sentenced to life in prison, the other to 100 years in prison. But they will actually be eligible for parole in, respectively, 20 and 10 years! 10 years in prison for murdering four people! Why not just legalize raping and murdering Iraqis if that's the 'punishment'? The leader of the attack and two others have yet even to be tried.
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In another notorious incident, 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha were murdered by rampaging Marines. Pretrial hearings are just getting underway in that horrendous disgrace to the honor of the Nation. One of the criminals, who admitted to pissing on the body of one of the people murdered, has been granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying against others!
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How can Iraqis but feel that the United States is the enemy? How are we to win the "hearts and minds" of civilians when U.S. soldiers who commit mass murder aren't shot dead by firing squad?
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(2) Militarism. A cult of hero-worship for the military has arisen in this country, as dangerous to our civilization as militarism proved to Germany and Japan in World War II. Both Democrats and Republicans refuse to speak ill of "our heroes" in Iraq, and even bitter opponents of the war pussyfoot around the whole issue of the evil of militarism. No major figure attacks the very notion of soldiers as "heroes". Media go out of their way to puff up nonexistent "heroes" like Jessica Lynch, who admitted late last month, before Congress, to being astonished by media treating her as a "hero" (not, mind you, "heroine").
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We used to be a Nation of citizen-soldiers, and a few voices have dared to suggest that an all-volunteer, professional army is a danger to our values. Alas, most of the opposition focuses on the unfair distribution of hardship rather than the toxic effect on our civilization produced by the glorification of militarism. Charles Rangel, a black Congressman from New York City, has repeatedly argued that we should reinstate the draft, on the basis that the all-volunteer military victimizes the poor, who look upon the armed forces as the employer of last resort. Rangel's plan has essentially no chance in hell of being approved.
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Bizarrely, Virginia Tech, which suffered 33 deaths to gunfire, invited retired Army Gen. John Abizaid, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, to be commencement speaker in tonite's graduation ceremony. They invite a man responsible for tens of thousands of violent deaths of Iraqis to speak to a university that suffered 33 violent deaths in Virginia? Is that supposed to put the 33 deaths in context? What on Earth were they thinking?
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Lest you think I exaggerate the cult of militarism, consider this bit of rabid militarist drivel from the rightwing Heritage Foundation's website:

Rangel is talking about people in the profession of arms, men and women who believe it to be the most honorable path in life.

"The most honorable path in life." Honorable?!? Killing people for a living is honorable? On what planet? In what universe?
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Let's be plain: the military is a collection of career killers, people trained to murder the defenseless, as by dropping bombs from altitudes so high that the bomber cannot be hit by anti-aircraft artillery nor even missiles, or by launching cruise missiles from great distances where there is absolutely no risk to the person who sends a deadly missile on its way. The military calls noncombatants murdered by their actions "collateral damage", and dismisses such murders as at worst 'unfortunate', not crimes against humanity. What of the soldier who presses the launch button on a cruise missile that will kill dozens of civilians, including children? Oh, he bears no personal responsibility for his crime. He really was "only following orders".
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The military is a moral monstrosity. That we may need to have professional killers in our employ does not make them honorable men — yes, "and women", because women are being trained as career killers too, and told that it is honorable to slaughter in the name of "God and country". Oh, and "freedom". The military is a despicable necessity, not an honorable profession. The sooner we can change the political arrangements that produce wars, the better. But nobody is talking about that. No, our politicians and media are too busy talking about hitmen as "heroes". Well, they're not heroes to me, and I sure as hell don't want ANYONE who is taught to fire a bullet from a distance and who can watch thru a telescopic sight, with equanimity and without shame, pain, or guilt, as his (or her) victim's head explodes!, to come back to this country and walk on the streets anywhere near me.
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(3) "Ratting Out" Lance Armstrong. Media today used the term "rat out" in connection with a claim by a bicyclist charged with violating drug rules, that Federal anti-doping agents tried to get him to accuse Lance Armstrong of using dope himself. What on Earth is going on, that media are now disparaging the genuinely heroic act of informing authorities about violations of laws? Comedy Central's Daily Show with Jon Stewart recently addressed the despicable "Don't snitch" campaign in rap music (see clip here). What started with thugs in the deformed "music" of the ghetto has apparently now spread to mainstream media! Detestable.
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(4) No Jobs Left at Home? American business has become The Enemy Within, so intent on saving money that it will gladly export every single job from the United States, even local news reporter, leaving Americans destitute and desperate, until we rise up and slaughter the rich. I guess the rich look forward to being tortured to death and having their mansions looted by mobs, because their behavior certainly seems calculated to produce that result. There are 200 million guns in the United States. And plenty of ammo. Maybe those soldiers taught violence by the military and who come back home to find that all opportunities have vanished, all the jobs they might have expected having been exported to China and India, will have their uses after all.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,386 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:48 PM

 
Thoughts on Public Transportation. In my Newark fotoblog March 12th I mentioned that New Jersey transportation officials were looking for feedback on a plan to enhance public participation in transit planning. That started me thinking not just about how to involve the public in decisions about public transit, but more widely, about why we do or do not use public transportation. I offer those thoughts below. Tho specific to Northern New Jersey, the specific is the universal, writ small. Adjust for your own area. (This entry is taken from part of my Newark blog entry for today, which is illustrated with photos of the New Jersey Walk of Fame outside the NJ Performing Arts Center here in Newark. Rather than edit out those fotos, I thought I'd give readers some info about Newark and NJ celebrities that they may not have appreciated. So even if you are not interested in today's overall topic, you might nonetheless like the fotos scattered below.)

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The New Jersey Walk of Fame's initial portion runs from the south side of the plaza in front of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Downtown Newark down a slope to the Newark Light Rail station for NJPAC.

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Altho I was born and raised in New Jersey, I lived 35 years in Manhattan. My disparate experiences with public vs. private transportation have given me perspectives I think transit planners should consider.
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All transportation authorities need to ask themselves two basic questions, above all others:

Why don't people use public transportation?

and

Why do people prefer their own vehicle?

The answers to those two questions will give you answers to the third basic question,

What can we do to make people choose public transit?

The stress needs to be on function, not routes. Why would people take public transportation? Why wouldn't they? What would make people prefer a bus, lite-rail system, train, or other public alternative over a private car?
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My first couple of years back in New Jersey, I did not own a car. I selected my house in a semi-suburban area of Newark with the express intent of having urban conveniences, including public transportation, but suburban benefits, such as trees and space to breathe, as against the crammed-jammed existence everyone but the rich suffers in Manhattan. The house I chose sits between two bus routes, one some 600 feet away, the other perhaps 1/3 mile away. Both run some 20 hours a day, or longer.
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But I did eventually get a car, and not just because I inherited it. Why do I need a car? My reasons are the same as many other people's:
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(1) Shelter from the Elements;
(2) Safety;
(3) Frequency and Predictability of Service;
(4) Comfort and Capaciousness, room to accommodate groceries and other packages from shopping expeditions, and even, for some people, bicycles;
(5) Geographical spacing;
(6) Expense.
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(1) Shelter from the Elements. When I initially heard of the request for feedback from citizens, I thought of a lite-rail system to run along South Orange Avenue from Downtown Newark to the South Orange train station. Ideally, such a system would operate as an elevated monorail that would zip between stops at a good clip, perhaps 50mph, as to span the entire 5-mile distance in perhaps 10 minutes, comfortable stops included. But that would be very expensive. Even though it would almost certainly be hugely beneficial to development in my part of Newark, I had to wonder if a less expensive measure would do more good.
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I then realized that the No. 1 matter that alienates people from public transportation is the utter lack of shelter, especially in foul weather and most especially in rain or snow in winter. Waiting for a bus, or lite-rail train, in beautiful weather might be fine, even a pleasure, but standing for 20, 30, 40 minutes in rain and wind and snow can be a nitemarish misery, especially if the weather also slows down the buses and makes the wait longer than anticipated. Moreover, merely standing at a stop can be a trial, especially to people with leg problems. So the very greatest good we can do in promoting public transportation is to provide really good shelters, with heating, liting, and seating, at every stop, starting with the major stops, at transfer points between routes, and then spreading out to the entire public-transportation network, every second or third stop at first, then closing in to every single stop without exception. Passengers might even be willing to have buses stop at wider intervals, speeding the trip for everyone, if comfortable shelters were available at every single stop.
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Shelters that provide a warm place in winter and shade in the summer, with a place to sit and read while waiting, would hugely transform attitudes, such that public transportation comes to be seen as an unalloyed good, not a hardship stoically to be borne.

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Note the total absence of protection from wind at the NJPAC Newark Light Rail station. This is near the Passaic River, adjoining McCarter Highway. I suspect that this wide open area is seriously windswept in the winter. There should be wind screens. Note also the oddity that the NJPArtsCenter stop has no art in it, whereas at least two other stations, at Broad Street and Washington Park, have public art aplenty.

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New Jersey Transit has gone part of the distance to creating a comfortable shelter at Newark Penn Station's bus lane alongside Market Street. It is commodious, lited inside, and partly heated, not so hot as to make people wearing winter coats uncomfortable, but warm enuf that one is not actively oppressed by the cold. Alas, for reasons that escape me, that shelter is available only part of the day. After 10pm, it is closed, and everyone is thrown out into the cold. Why? What idiot came up with that idea? Worse, in the morning, bus drivers don't know whether to pull into the bus lane or stop on Market Street, so passengers waiting in either place risk being wrong, and having to run to catch their bus. I can't run. I have had three knee surgeries, and I have missed my bus because I was waiting where I had every reason to believe the bus would stop, but it stopped elsewhere. The next bus was not for 20 minutes or more, and I still couldn't know where to wait!
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Why are there so few benches at bus stops, lite-rail stations, etc.? Are the people in charge of transit, from Mars? or horses, who even sleep standing up? Don't they feel the need to sit? The rest of us do. Maybe they don't want to put out flat benches for fear that bums ("the homeless") will sleep on them, displacing paying passengers, but we can surely place at many stops the compartmentalized benches we see nowadays that have hard, raised separators that would prevent someone from lying comfortably on them. Such separators should be spaced at realistic widths. Those used by the PATH [Port Authority Trans-Hudson] system for benches at, for instance, the World Trade Center station, are preposterously too narrow. Americans are big, both tall and wide. One might even rudely say we are a fat country. We need wide spaces to sit. In any case, separators would prevent benches intended for paying passengers from being used by bums. And besides, there aren't many places in New Jersey that benches would be taken over by bums (and by nuts who should be in mental institutions but in the post-deinstitutionalization era are left to their own devices in a society they can't cope with). In most places, spacers wouldn't even be needed. Ordinary benches would suffice. And whatever benches are installed should be comfortable, such that people who have to wait for an hour could do so without hurting their butt!

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The very first plaque in the NJ Walk of Fame is of the NJPAC building and top-notch performers who have had intimate connection with that institution. I don't know that any of them is from NJ. See closer view, below.

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(2) Safety. Even if the bus is safe, getting to and from the bus, especially at nite, can entail dangers. There's not much a public-transit authority can do about that. My house is about 500 feet from the bus stop I would get off at on the way home at nite, and another hundred feet to the stop I would need to wait at to go Downtown. By contrast, with a car, I drive up my driveway to the back of my house, 80 feet from the street, and enter via the back door, avoiding potential miscreants on the street. In a neighborhood perceived by its residents to be safe, such a difference would not make a difference. But public transportation officials must be concerned about perceptions of danger. As I say, there's not much, that I can think of, that a transit authority can do about the safety or the distance between a transit stop and a potential rider's home. So let's move on to things we can control.

Every bus or other transit stop should have a public phone with free 9-1-1 calling so that people who feel themselves in danger can call for help. The mere presence of such a phone would discourage criminals and increase the number of decent people on the streets able and willing to watch out for each other, and to call police about crimes or dangers they perceive that the police would otherwise not know about. The police cannot be everywhere, but passengers of public-transit systems can be an awful lot of places. 9-1-1 phones can also be used to report fires and medical emergencies. And pay phones would give people waiting for the bus who don't happen to own cellphones a chance to catch up with personal business or pass the time with friends while waiting for the bus. NJ Transit might even be able to negotiate special untimed rates for payphones at transit stops so that people wouldn't have to feed the phone every few minutes but could talk leisurely to friends and catch up on personal business while waiting for the bus or lite-rail train. Waiting could thus be, for many, transformed into useful time, much as some commuters see their time on the train as a refuge from phone calls and other demands, a chance to catch up on their reading and relax before plunging into the rigors of the office on the way in or kids and housework on the way home.
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Safety is part reality and part perception. In many places, perception trumps reality, and people may fear for their safety in places where there is actually little or no risk. People are irrational. It is not enuf that a bus or lite-rail stop be safe. It must be thought safe. Phones at every stop would go some distance to making people feel safe.

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The second plaque is dedicated to Neeme Järvi, an Estonian who served as the NJSO's musical director.

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(3) Frequency and Predictability of Service. When you have a car, you know when you're going to leave, and have some control over when you will arrive at your destination, tho congestion renders unpredictable all surface transportation but trains that travel over dedicated tracks, separated from other traffic. When you set out for a bus stop, however, you have no assurance whatsoever that if you leave your house at 12:20 for a 12:26 bus that stops a two-minute walk away, you will make it in time. You might walk down the street and see the 12:26 pass in front of you 4 minutes early, when the next bus isn't until 12:46 or 12:55. That is infuriating. In the alternative, you might arrive at 12:22 for the 12:26, and have to wait until 12:43, in the freezing rain, until the bus finally arrives. And then you might not be able to find a seat, because a driver was out sick and was not replaced, so two busloads of passengers had to cram onto one bus.
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Public transit must be reliable, predictable, and on-schedule, not ahead by anything, not behind by more than a couple of minutes. If everyone understands that buses must not pass a stop early, everyone will be patient if a bus slows down or even stops for a couple of minutes to stick to a schedule. Because they wouldn't want to miss a bus that arrives early either.
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Frequency is a function of demand. Peak travel times must provide greater frequency of service than off-peak, but off-peak service must still be frequent enuf to allow people to go places when crowding has subsided. Ideally, a transit system should have a steady stream of paying customers at all times.
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In my area, New Jersey transit authorities must consider bar-closing time, not just in New Jersey but also in Manhattan. Bars in New York City close at 4am, but many bargoers are too tired from their day at work to stay out to closing time. On Fridays and Saturdays, then, PATH trains from Manhattan are absolutely jammed the whole nite long, till at least 5am at the last Manhattan station, Christopher Street. Has the PATH system increased its service on Fridays and Saturdays to accommodate that enormous increase in passenger volume? Of course not. Because the people who run the PATH are idiots. They never heard of bars. It is inconceivable to them that passenger volume would vary to any significant degree from one nite to another. But every sensible, intelligent person knows that late-nite travel is much greater on Friday and Saturday nites, and Sunday nites before Monday-shifted holidays, than on other nites of the week. New Jersey's transit overseers must be alert to changes in passenger volume.
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How can you tell if passenger volume varies by time of day, or day of the week? Well, you have fare boxes and total receipts. If you see greater receipts for some nites on buses that run late, you have some indication. Perhaps fare boxes could be made to record the time fares are paid. But even if you have no automated way to determine passenger volume (that is, no time-stamped record made on paper or electronically), you do have human bus drivers who could press a clicker to count passengers as they enter. They might not like doing so, at first, but if it were to mean that the bosses run more buses on heavy passenger-traffic nites, they might be very happy to do so, at least on occasional days or nites scattered across the year.

Predictability of service is enormously important. People must be able to trust in a schedule, especially in bad weather. They must be able to calculate, "If I leave now, I can make the X" or "Oh, darn, it's too late to make the X. Now I have to wait for the X2." If they think, instead, "It should be too late for the X, but maybe it's running late, so if I hurry, I might just make it" — but then see the X run past them and face a long wait for the next, they will be disgusted — not with themselves for leaving late, but with the transit system for making them think, from prior experience, that they might just make the bus they should miss if it were running on time. That is maddening.
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There is another aspect to predictability that most people would not think about but which the disabled or partially disabled (like me) do think about: where the heck is the PATH train from 33rd Street going to let us off at Jersey City? Will it be on the same platform as the Newark train, in which case we need merely cross the platform to catch our ride? Or will it be on the other platform altogether? — in which case we will have to find a stairway or, if we can't climb stairs, then an escalator (the elevator goes only to an exit to the street), in a hurry so we can get up from one platform and over and down to the other platform in time to catch our train. If we aren't in the right location, we can miss the train. Late at nite, that could mean we have to wait a half hour for the next train, not because we did anything wrong but because the PATH system decided to pull the train into the wrong platform for no apparent reason, as almost willfully and maliciously to make us miss our train!
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(4) Comfort and Capaciousness, capable of accommodating grocery and other shopping. People often need to haul heavy things or numerous bags from the supermarket to their home. A bus is far from ideal for that purpose. Not only is there little room for packages if the bus is crowded with passengers, but there is also no mechanical lift to help bring onto the bus a heavy shopping cart, nor room for a passenger to roll and store a shopping cart once on the bus. That must change.
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(a) We should create a new form of public transportation, the CargoBus. (Think "Airbus" for publicity purposes.) A cursory search of the Internet reveals no transit feature of that sort by that name, but perhaps some transit systems provide means by which passengers can comfortably carry large packages, multiple shopping bags, and bicycles on the bus, obviating private ownership or rental of a car, van, or SUV. A CargoBus would be an ordinary bus on the outside, with, however, some prominent indication, like windows overpainted in huge letters "CargoBus" or "Shoppers' Special", to indicate that this particular bus is intended for people with large or multiple packages or a bike to carry. On the inside, a CargoBus would have perhaps half the regular seats and many tie-downs, as for wheelchairs on present buses, to keep shopping carts and bicycles from rolling around dangerously. Heavily burdened passengers would pay the same fare as if they were carrying nothing.
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Initially, CargoBuses would run along regular routes that stop at shopping centers, supermarkets, etc., and are regularly patronized by passengers carrying shopping bags or packages. They would run on an absolutely predictable schedule, adjusted to accommodate shopping patterns. For instance, they might run more often on weekends and on the days that welfare and Social Security checks arrive. They would, for the most part, run along the same route as the regular bus(es) that stop at those shopping complexes, but, like NJTransit's Access Link service for the handicapped, be capable of deviating from that route by a given permissible distance (say, a quarter mile) to let someone who is particularly heavily burdened, get off at his or her house. Other passengers, recognizing that someday they too might want such a service, would be patient with such departures from the regular route. Or they would just take the regular bus if such departures irritated them too much.
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(b) In carrying bicycles, a CargoBus network would empower people to use their bikes over longer distances than would otherwise be possible, the CargoBus making up for the part of their trip they do not care to pedal.

(c) As to comfort more generally, bucket seats must be abolished in favor of benches. The bucket-seat size now in place is nothing like realistic. Only children and small adults can sit comfortably side-by-side in, for instance, the seats on PATH trains, alongside strangers.
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(d) One major issue of comfort is more like a necessity for a great many passengers and potential passengers: elevators and escalators for people who have trouble with stairs or are carrying heavy luggage or packages. Elevators are in very short supply, and unreliable, in much of New Jersey. Most stations of the PATH system, for instance, have no elevators, ever. Others are supposed to have elevator service, but the elevators go out of service with infuriating frequency. In Newark Penn Station, the elevator from platform H is completely unreliable, especially late at nite, and passengers must walk down a RAMP! Ramps are notoriously difficult to negotiate for people who have difficulty walking even flat-horizontal. Having to walk down a 100-foot ramp is as close to a nitemare as most walking-impaired people ever want to deal with. Elevators must be widely installed, reliable, and available at all hours.
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Lavatories are another thing New Jersey transit systems give absolutely no regard to. It is as tho the executives in charge of our transit operations aren't people at all but some kind of alien that evaporates or incinerates all wastes and doesn't need to go to the bathroom, ever. But human beings DO need to go to the bathroom, fairly often. And if in a trip one must walk 10 minutes to a stop, wait 40 minutes for a bus or train, sit (or stand) 30 minutes during the trip, then face another wait, as for a bus that could also take 40 minutes to arrive at their stop, or they have to walk 15 minutes to get home, that gets to be a very significant span of time, especially if one has been out on the town drinking beer! Add it up: 10 + 40 + 30 + 15 = 95 minutes, over an hour and a half, minimum, and maybe a half hour longer if a connecting bus is involved — with not a single lavatory in sight. That is literally inhuman. ARE the 'people' in charge of our transit systems from another planet? DO they evaporate or incinerate their wastes? WE sure don't. WE need lavatories. But where are they? There are none in the entire PATH system, and the lavatories in Newark Penn Station close in the middle of the nite. On weekends, especially, huge numbers of passengers move thru Penn Station in the middle of the nite, discharged from PATH trains from Manhattan. Many arrive in desperate need of a place to pee, but find nothing! Why the hell is that?
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(5) Geographical spacing. Public transit lines that are more than about a quarter mile away are prohibitively unattractive to most people. A ten-minute leisurely walk is about the uppermost limit most people are willing to contemplate in opting for public transit, and if once they get to the stop they have to wait standing up, exposed to the elements in bad weather, public transit becomes unacceptably harsh an alternative to the private car. The willingness of a person to walk or wait is proportional to the distance s/he will travel on the bus or train once aboard. For long journeys, then, a person may be willing to put up with more inconvenience than for a short journey. However, we must keep ever in mind the model of the train station. Many train stations have indoor waiting rooms, or at least covered platforms sheltered from both rain or snow and wind, and they also have lavatories. That is civilized.
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The comfort or discomfort in which a person must wait for the next ride is also important, and interacts dynamically with other considerations, like distance and cost. If a bus is cheaper than the train but there is no shelter while waiting for a bus but is while waiting for a train, each potential passenger will do a personal calculation of what is more important, money or comfort. At end, public transit authorities should strive to minimize discomfort at every step of the process of getting from home to work, school, store, etc., because beyond a general, variable, and indefinite point, depending upon weather and time of day, the choice will be not between bus and train but between public transit in any form and driving one's own vehicle.
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Many trips involve a combination of private and public transportation, and parking must be a consideration in all transit planning. When I need to travel into Manhattan from my home in western Newark, I have to drive beyond Newark, to Harrison, to find parking near the PATH station. There is no parking near Newark Penn Station that ordinary people can afford. The alternative seems to most people to take the bus to Penn Station's PATH terminal, and then the bus home. But the bus doesn't run all nite; there is no shelter after 10pm; there is no place to sit to wait; and many people, especially women traveling alone, may feel very insecure waiting for a bus at nite, even at a stop as well occupied by good people as Newark Penn Station. For public transportation over longer distances to be attractive, parking must be available free or at very low cost near major transit hubs.

In areas of dense populations of potential passengers, we need to consider "people movers", be they in the form of extremely frequent buses or trains operating in shuttle fashion, back and forth frequently over short distances, or of moving sidewalks as are found in some large airports that save travelers having to walk long distances burdened by heavy luggage. There are not, in New Jersey, many such areas of dense pedestrian traffic as would make people-movers appropriate, but parts of Newark and Jersey City might warrant people-mover treatment.
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Public transit should be denser in terms of both distance and wait time, within densely populated areas and especially within areas that we as a society decide we want to back-fill. That is, there has been a stark and socially unhealthy emptying of our cities and older towns, in favor of suburbs, especially new suburbs. We spent a huge amount of money in creating the infrastructure of our cities and long-established towns, in water, gas, electric, and telephone distribution systems, sewer lines, sidewalks, schools, parks, hospitals, and other facilities. And then the people moved away!
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New Jersey should be doing everything it can to restore the populations of cities and older towns that have been progressively depopulated for no good reason. Providing really good public transit, of people and their personal cargo, is one way to do that. In places like Newark and Jersey City now, and perhaps even Camden in a few years, we should strive to provide 24-hour transportation within a half mile (at the most) of every densely populated point in the city, and provide warm shelters with comfortable seating at every single urban bus and lite-rail stop. If our cities and older towns have fantastic public transportation, with comfortable waits and room to carry groceries, hundreds of thousands of people now resident in suburbs will give serious thought to returning to the cities and towns they abandoned, especially as they get older and have only themselves, and not children, to think about.
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If we are serious, then, about moving large numbers of people away from the private car, SUV, van, and pickup truck, we must make public transit an acceptable alternative to any and all of those private conveyances.
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It's not good enuf to assume we are just dealing with commuters, because commuters need to pick things up from the supermarket too, and some of those things, like a gallon of milk, two-liter bottles of soda, and ten-pound bags of cat litter can, individually and collectively, be both heavy and space-consuming. How are you going to get someone to ride the bus, lite-rail system, or train if s/he wants to stop at the supermarket on the way home, but carrying heavy or bulky shopping bags on public transit is impractically difficult and unpleasant?
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Thus do I urge transit planners to think FUNCTIONALLY, not in terms of routes or fares or other specifics of geography or economics. They must think about what people need to DO — in their lives, in their day — and how public transportation fits, or does NOT fit, their needs.


(6) Expense. For a single person traveling alone, public transit may seem cost-effective, even if less convenient than a private car. In some situations, such as the lack of affordable parking at one's destination, public transportation will actually seem far the better choice. But if multiple people are traveling together, to multiple destinations, public transportation may seem more expensive as well as far more inconvenient, especially if one is traveling with small children. The costs of a private car are the same whether a single person takes a trip or several people do.
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A partial solution to that problem is to discount the fares of people traveling together. The first pays full fare; the second, half-fare; a third, one-third fare; fourth, one-fourth the fare; fifth, one-fifth the fare. A group larger than five could not usually travel in a single private car unless some were small children, and small children ride free on public transit, as they should (unless they occupy a seat to themselves that other people need).
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But owners of private cars may underestimate the costs of traveling by car (or SUV, etc.). Yes, the costs of owning a vehicle are fixed (purchase price, maintenance, insurance), but the costs of using a private car for a given trip may not be adequately appreciated. Better education, as for instance, a website with a trip-cost calculator that figures in gas, tolls, and parking, and reminds people of non-monetary costs of driving yourself (risk of accident, frustration in traffic, difficulty finding a parking space, risk of a parking ticket or citation for a moving violation, etc.) could give people a more realistic appreciation of the advantages of public transportation. It could also remind people of the "and leave the driving to us" idea: when you ride, you rest, and can catch up with reading or listening to music or talking books or downloads of TV shows without risking an accident due to distraction. Once people run the costs, side-by-side, of public vs. private travel, some will doubtless still see public transportation as more of a hassle and expense, but others might be pleasantly surprised to see that they can actually save by taking the bus or train.

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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,357 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:42 PM