Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Help wanted

From Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese businessman has advertised on the Internet for a stand-in mistress to be beaten up by his wife to vent her anger and to protect his real mistress, Chinese media reported on Monday.

"When the woman found out her husband had a mistress, she insisted on beating her up," the Beijing Youth Daily said, citing the advertisement posted on a popular online jobs forum on sina.com.

More than 10 people had applied for the job, the newspaper said. The "successful" candidate would be 35 and originally from northeastern China and would be paid 3,000 yuan ($400) per 10 minutes, it said.

Many Chinese businessmen keep mistresses in second homes, a trend banished after the Communists swept to power in 1949 but which has made a comeback with market reforms in recent decades.

A new perk

UST, makers of smokeless tobacco products and mass market wine, have decided to give their CEO and members of the board an allowance to buy wine. The CEO gets $6500, board members $5000. Their wines retail for around $10 - $15. So, I guess this CEO went out and bought 500 or so bottles.

No one is all bad

I don't think that I've ever agreed with Jeff Jacoby, a quite conservative columnist whose work appears in the Boston Globe. But, today is a new day and I find myself agreeing with his column which highlights the money-grubbing ways of many of our former presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike.

A step in the right direction

I guess that we'll actually be in the same room and sit at the same table with the nasty people from Iran and Syria. Can this administration be changing its ways?

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Another area where China matters

Apparently our stock market can be adversely affected by that of China. They dropped 9%, we dropped almost 4%. Globalization is wonderful.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Building Democracy

In yesterday's Washington Post an article entitled "Iraq Rebuilding Short on Qualified Civilians" began with these words

In Diyala, the vast province northeast of Baghdad where Sunnis and Shiites are battling for primacy with mortars and nighttime abductions, the U.S. government has contracted the job of promoting democracy to a Pakistani citizen who has never lived or worked in a democracy.

The management of reconstruction projects in the province has been assigned to a Border Patrol commander with no reconstruction experience. The task of communicating with the embassy in Baghdad has been handed off to a man with no background in drafting diplomatic cables. The post of agriculture adviser has gone unfilled because the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided just one of the six farming experts the State Department asked for a year ago.

"The people our government has sent to Iraq are all dedicated, well-meaning people, but are they really the right people -- the best people -- for the job?" asked Kiki Skagen Munshi, a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer who, until last month, headed the team in Diyala that included the Pakistani democracy educator and the Border Patrol commander. "If you can't get experts, it's really hard to do an expert job."

Almost four years after the United States set about trying to rebuild Iraq, the job remains overwhelmingly unfinished. The provincial reconstruction teams like those in Diyala are often understaffed and underqualified -- and almost unable to work outside the military outposts where they are hunkered down for security reasons. Today, there are just 10 of the 30-person teams operating in all of Iraq.

President Bush proposed last month to double the number of teams, saying such civilians are central to American efforts to "pursue reconciliation, strengthen the moderates and speed the transition to Iraqi self-reliance." But the new plan is running into what Munshi and several officials familiar with their work described as the problems that have plagued the U.S. government effort from the start: Turf wars between federal agencies. Outright refusal to fill certain vital posts by some departments. A State Department in charge of the teams that just doesn't have any agronomists, engineers, police officers or technicians of its own to send to Iraq. "No foreign service in the world has those people," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complained.

We're moving deeper and deeper into a 1984 Heart of Darkness.

A Blogger Gone Off The Deep End or A Cover-up?

Philip Barron in his blog Waveflux.net reports on the death of PFC Lavena Johnson. The Army says she committed suicide, her family says no. From the blog

Reporter Matt Sczesny spoke with LaVena's father and examined documents and photos sent by Army investigators. So far from supporting the claim that LaVena died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the documents provided elements of another scenario altogether:

  • Indications of physical abuse that went unremarked by the autopsy
  • The absence of psychological indicators of suicidal thoughts; indeed, testimony that LaVena was happy and healthy prior to her death
  • Indications, via residue tests, that LaVena may not even have handled the weapon that killed her
  • A blood trail outside the tent where Lavena's body was found
  • Indications that someone attenpted to set LaVena's body on fire

The Army has resisted calls by Dr. Johnson and by KMOV to reopen its investigation.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

The Best of Times

The McClatchy Newspapers commissioned a study of severe poverty in the U.S., severe poverty being defined at half the federal poverty line. In dollars and cents that's an annual income of $9,903 for a family of four or $5,080 for an individual. The study found that the number of those experiencing severe poverty increased by 26% from 2001 to 2005, when it seems to have leveled off somewhat. Almost half of this nation's poor are severely poor.

For the past twenty years this country has been at or near the top of the charts recording the poverty rates for children, individual adults and families (Luxembourg Income Study). We rank third (after Mexico and Russia) in the share of GDP going to federal anti-poverty programs, which, according to a study by the Center for Policy Research, don't do a very good job in reducing poverty; in fact, only Russia and Mexico do a worse job. But, why worry? We can still treat our dogs to spa days.

It appears as though the rapid rise in the number of the severely poor is due to the fraying of the social safety net as well as the decline in low-skilled jobs.

A pretty girl is like a melody

Apparently, Delta Zeta, a sorority, only wants pretty girls as members. Concerned about falling membership at DePauw, national leaders of the sorority visited the university and interviewed the members. They decided that twenty-three of the members were not sufficiently committed and told these members to leave the sorority house and quit the sorority. All twenty-three were overweight; the twelve who were left were all sufficiently slender and attractive. Of these twelve, six quit in anger.

This is not the first time Delta Zeta has made the news. In the 1980s they prevented a black girl from joining.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Cleaning out old files

Here's a talk I gave at the local Unitarian church a couple of years ago. It was one of four talks on the topic “Men’s Spirituality”. The other speakers were Alan Wilson, Bill Christian and Blair Shick, none of whose talk was available in electronic format.

Men’s Spirituality: Does It Need the Gift of Faith?

As I walked to the podium today, I heard my mother speaking to me from the grave. “Now you’ve done it.”, she said. “How can you even be in a Protestant church? Let alone about to tell people about your spiritual journey without mentioning God or the one true Church (that’s church with a capital C). You’re making things more complex than they are.”

To my mother a spiritual journey was simple; it was a known and well-charted journey. You’re born in sin, you get baptized to remove the sin; live a few years and, naturally, you sin, but you make your confession so that, as a pure soul, you can receive the body and blood of Christ. You live a few more years and get confirmed; you’re now a soldier for Christ. Ten or so years later you marry a nice girl or, better yet, join the priesthood. And then you die, but only after receiving extreme unction. Along the way, you obey the Church and you obey the priests, so that at the end when you shuffle off this earth, you’ll shuffle into heaven.

And, to be fair, many dictionaries back her up. Look up spirituality and you’ll see the words ‘religion’, ‘ecclesiastical’, ‘faith’ as part of the definition. But, for me these words do not define spirituality. Spirituality is not dependent upon a religion nor is it connected to faith.

For me, spirituality is an attempt to get outside oneself, to establish a deep connection with the past, the present and the future of what we call the universe. It does not need a religion or a faith. It is an attempt to give meaning to one’s life.

But, let’s get to the theme of today’s service - Men’s Spirituality. Is there such a thing as men’s spirituality, as opposed to women’s spirituality? In my judgment, no, despite the preachings and writings of Robert Bly and other proponents of the supposed new man; spirituality is a human endeavor. To me, there is no difference between men’s and women’s spirituality. Both strive to achieve a connection with what they perceive to be the eternal so that their life can have meaning, so that when they die they are not simply an old picture on the wall, so that they are another link in the eternal chain which strives to make this earth a better place for all people.

Many men and women have adopted the well charted journey of my mother and others who follow a traditional path to spirituality, a path which has been well defined by those who came before us, a path which depends, in large measure, on the gift of faith. And, believe me, faith is a gift. It’s a wonderful gift. It makes one’s life easier in that there is always a reason for the nastiness that sooner or later touches all of our lives. There is a whole spiritual edifice you can tap into, people you can consult, sacred texts with all the answers. It’s a gift that I wish I had. But, despite being baptized in the one true faith and growing up in a staunch Catholic household, I did not receive the gift or, maybe, it was offered to me and I was too dumb and blind to accept it.

The dictionary definition of spirituality implies that if you don’t have faith, you can’t be a spiritual person. Well, I disagree. You can be a spiritual person without having received the gift of faith. You can connect with the eternal. You can give meaning to your life. Without having the gift of faith, you can find spiritual experiences in the actions of nature or of man.

The spiritual journey is hard. Without faith it is harder. You can get so caught up in your daily life that it becomes difficult to take the step back that is needed, to stop for a moment and contemplate life and your place in it. Oftentimes the spiritual experience creeps up on you, catching you unawares. It can happen just suddenly looking up on a starry winter night in West Tisbury and seeing your place in the universe – infinitesimal yet very human and aware. Or, it can be a more intense experience of sitting on South Beach a few hours after narrowly escaping a near fatal car accident while driving to the Vineyard..

There are a variety of experiences that have become spiritual experiences for me. Reading the opening words of the Gospel of John, the first section of Remembrance of Things Past, the last chapter of The Stranger. Seeing Our Town for the first time and hearing Emily’s words: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” Hearing Brubeck introduce Take Five at Newport or Tebaldi as Mimi or Sondheim’s Move On.

But it is not only the aesthetic that has become spiritual for me. Some conversations with a kindred soul have turned into spiritual experiences for me and, I hope, for the person I’m speaking with. Seeing my kids being born linked me to the past, the present and the future of the universe. Watching serious, trained athletes striving to achieve their potential can bring one out of his daily life and into the attempts of man to transcend this place. A variety of experiences, through all of which you try to connect with the eternal.

I’ll close with some words from Thornton Wilder. They are spoken by the Stage Manager at the start of Act 3 of Our Town: “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

A second look

Apparently, there is a reevaluation of Reagan going around. Russell Baker reviews a number of books about Reagan in the current NY Review of Books. One of the authors reviewed describes Reagan as Emersonian in his view of the world.

For me, the highlight of the review was this excerpt from a note Reagan wrote after meeting with Gorbachev:
Seriously it was worthwhile but it would be foolish to believe the leopard will change its spots. He is a firm believer in their system.... At the same time he is practical and knows his economy is a basket case. I think our job is to try to show him he and they will be better off if we make some practical agreements without attempting to convert him to our way of thinking.
I've emphasized the last sentence because it is such a sharp contrast with the thinking in today's White House.

Another screwing of our veterans?

The Army Times alleges that the Army is deliberately giving wounded troops a lower disability rating in order to keep costs low. The sources of their charge are veterans advocates and the wounded.

Based on numbers alone, it would appear that something strange is going on. In 2001 642 soldiers received a permanent disability retirement; in 2005 that number had shrunk two-thirds to 209. How that can be when we've been at war for the past several years makes no sense. Not surprisingly, the number of wounded placed on temporary disability has increased from 165 in 2001 to 837 in 2005. It's the process of moving from temporary to permanent that is the problem. Soldiers can stay in the temporary category for as long as five years.

As with the Walter Reed case, the system is complicated. It seems that we can quickly get someone to the front lines, but we have major problems if that person does not come back whole from the front lines.

It's not as though we're talking big bucks here, at least in Pentagon terms. In 2004 only $1.2 billion was spent on disability benefits. Spread over 90,000 wounded, that amounts to $13,333 a year. Tell me again how much we're spending on weapons of the future.

Friday, February 23, 2007

The Island Home


The photo above is of the new ferry, Island Home. It was taken by Susan Safford for the MV Times. This is the first new ferry for Martha's Vineyard in many years. And, as the following photograph by Amy Williams (again for the MV Times) shows, the new ferry dwarfs the current ferry.

The season has begun

That's the political season on Martha's Vineyard that I'm talking about. The Annual Meeting warrants have closed in four of the six towns. Nomination papers have been filed. So, for the next six weeks or so we'll be talking about the election and Town Meeting.

As usual, Oak Bluffs has the most interesting race. A former Town Administrator, Casey Sharpe, opposes a current Selectmen, Kerry Scott. Reading between the lines of newspaper articles over the past year or so, one gets the sense that Mesdames Sharpe and Scott are not exactly close friends. And, then, longtime Town activist, Linda Marinelli, started her campaign for re-election to the Board of Health by calling the cops on one of her opponents who, Ms Marinelli believed, was posting an "inappropriate" sign in Town Hall.

West Tisbury, where I live, should be quieter although there are enough contests to keep life interesting. There are two candidates for the Selectman's seat of John Early, who is retiring after thirty years in office. One candidate happens to be Mr. Early's ex-wife, the other opposed Mr. Early three years ago.

The Finance Committee will have a new face or two. Skipper Manter, who has served eight (?) terms on the committee has decided not to run. His seat and that of another long term committee member, Sharon Estrella, are up for grabs. There will be three candidates - Ms Estrella, Ann Nelson (owner of a book store) and Joan Ames (activist) - for two seats.

Jonathan Revere, who came close last year, will once more challenge Cynthia Mitchell for a seat on the Board of Assessors.

West Tisbury interest in politics is so great this year that there is even a contest for Library Trustee.

I suspect, however, that the Town's interest will be focused more on two warrant articles. The Space Needs Committee will be looking for seed money to get the Town Hall project finally off the ground. The Town has been talking about a new Town Hall since the last century (really only ten years or so), but has been unwilling to approve any final construction plans brought before Town Meeting. I suspect that the vote will come down to a question of whether the Town wants to pay the costs to restore the historic Town Hall or is willing to pay less for a new building.

The other lightning rod warrant article concerns the school district. The Finance Committee has sponsored an article to have the Town withdraw from the district. The committee has been complaining about the high cost of the school (it's now about $23,000 per pupil for a grammar school) for years. The Town approved a non-binding resolution to withdraw from the district in 2005, but has never had an opportunity to vote on the matter at Town Meeting. This is a classic battle of those who seem to be willing to pay any price for education and those who feel that the Town's and taxpayers' resources are not infinite and that the school district must be more fiscally responsible.

It will be an interesting six weeks.

9 cents a liter

That's how much gas costs in Iran. Other oil-based energy is just as cheap. Iranians are now wealthy enough to afford the energy-using trappings of the West - cars, appliances, etc. Cheap energy and rising incomes have led to a situation where Iran, which supplies 5% of the world's oil, has to import oil to meet the demand.

At the same time production is declining. In the 1970s it was 6,000,000 barrels a day. In 2006 it was 2,290,000 barrels a day. And production does not show signs of increasing due to the sanctions, policies severely limiting deals with foreign companies which have the technology Iran needs, and the aging of many of the country's largest oil fields. Some feel that Iran will no longer be able to export oil in ten years or so.

It sure seems as though Iran does need nuclear energy.

Voices of Reason?

Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian studies at Stanford and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, claims that the leading mullahs may be willing to suspend Iran's enrichment program. To me, what is surprising about this article is the fact that the author is affiliated with the right-leaning Hoover Institution, which, you would think, would make him an advocate of attacking Iran. Far from it, Milani believes that an attack would backfire by isolating us and strengthening Iran.

He concludes, "With prudence, backed by power but guided by the wisdom to recognize the new signals coming from Tehran, the United States can today achieve a principled solution to the nuclear crisis."

Oh, he also reports that at least two leading mullahs acknowledge the reality of the Holocaust.

Same old, same old

Helping your fellow Shi'ite seems to still be the norm, at least for policemen in Baghdad, to judge by an article in the NY Times today. Often, the police warn people to hide weapons and anything else that they wish to keep secret from the U.S. troops. Will the surge have any effect other than to put more of our soldiers in harm's way?

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Courtesy of R.J.

R.J. Adams, who comments often on this blog, writes the SparrowChat blog. His lead article yesterday introduced me to Riverbend, an Iraqi woman who has some devastating comments on our Iraq adventure. They're worth a look.

Who does the counting?

The Inspector General of the Justice Department has found that the department cannot count well and, as a result, does not have an accurate or near-accurate count of actual terrorism cases that have been initiated in the past 5+ years. For example, only two of twenty-six sets of 'terrorism' cases were found to be as reported; others were for marriage fraud, drugs or immigration violations.

The fundamental cause of the errors did not appear to be a pumping up of the numbers (although I suspect some of it was). It was just crappy record-keeping.

Swift Action at Walter Reed?

That's what the Army promises. We shall see. All the big shots who visited the hospital did not see the problems, which are not new. It's only because of the articles in the Post that something may be done about this travesty.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

It's a new century

I'm a child and parent of the 20th century and I know that I probably shouldn't comment on the children and parents of the 21st century but sometimes I just can't help it.

I'm sure that I could have been a better father, but there are some things I can't see myself doing. For example, I can't see moving the family so that my kids could attend a particular private school. Yet, that is what more and more private schools are seeing. Today's Wall Street Journal features the O'Gormans who moved from California so that their two daughters could attend Winsor School in Boston.

The O'Gormans are not wealthy. They could not afford to move their furniture. The parents took the profit they made on selling their house in California and used it for the Winsor tuition. The father quit his job without having a job in Boston; as a result he was out of work for three months. Yet, they were willing to make these sacrifices for their kids. It's something I could not do.


I know that parents often sacrifice for their kids, but this phenomenon is ridiculous. Yes, schools can dramatically change lives. However, for most people, any one of a hundred schools could give a student a life-changing experience. There is seldom a need to uproot your family in the belief that you've found the perfect school for your child. It seems to me that 21st century parents are trying to create a perfect world for what they probably perceive are their perfect kids. That is a fantasy.

Monday, February 19, 2007

That'll teach the devil

The body of a nun was found chained to a cross at a convent in Romania. Examination revealed she had also been starved. She was crucified by a priest and four fellow nuns as part of an exorcism ceremony.

The priest will begin serving 14 years in jail; the nuns received sentences of five - eight years.

Part 2

In today's Washington Post, there is a second article about our treatment of some of our veterans of the current war. It's another dispiriting read profiling a half-dozen or so soldiers. Some excerpts:
  • Each morning the patients rise at dawn for formation with a platoon sergeant.
  • One day he's led on stage at a Toby Keith concert with dozens of other wounded Operation Iraqi Freedom troops from Mologne House, and the next he's sitting in a cluttered cubbyhole at Walter Reed, fighting the Army for every penny of his disability.
  • "If Iraq don't kill you, Walter Reed will", a veteran's wife.
  • Mologne House is afloat on a river of painkillers and psychotic drugs.
  • 60% of blast victims suffer from traumatic brain injury.
  • While Mologne House has a full bar, there is not one counselor or psychologist assigned there to assist soldiers and families in crisis - an idea proposed by Walter Reed social workers but rejected by the military command that runs the post.
  • A soldier is there because of injuries received when his head was smashed by a steel door; the door hinges were tied together with a plastic hamburger-bun bag.
  • One soldier spent his first three months at Walter Reed with no decent clothes; medics in Samarra had cut off his uniform.
  • A father says, "He was okay to sacrifice his body, but now it's time that he needs some help, they are not here."

Caring for our veterans

Jonathan Schulze was another example of how well we are caring for the veterans of the current wars. Note the use of 'was'. He's dead. Depressed and suicidal after coming home, he hung himself in the cellar of his parent's home.

Although Jonathan was hit by shrapnel, his real problem was his emotional health. He and his family recognized the problem and went to the local VA hospital. The person who screens people complaining of mental problems was not in that day; Jonathan and his family went home. The next day he learned that he was 26th on the waiting list for the 12 beds that were available. A few days later he killed himself.

There are 1,500,000 people who have served and are serving this country in Iraq and Afghanistan. Estimates are that 20% of them will have some form of PTSD. What will happen with these people? Will this country try to help them? Or, will we continue to cut our taxes and plan trips to Mars?

Sunday, February 18, 2007

What the f*** is going on?

"I hate it. There are cockroaches. The elevator doesn't work. The garage door doesn't work. Sometimes there's no heat, no water." Comments from George Romero, an Iraq veteran and outpatient at Walter Reed Hospital, the premier military hospital in this country. He's speaking of the outpatient section of the hospital, which, judging from a Washington Post article by Dana Priest and Anne Hull, is a virtual hell on earth.

The outpatients need further treatment or - and this is what really gets me - bureaucrats have to produce the paperwork enabling them to leave the hospital. Some are there for months on end awaiting release. Sgt. Ryan Groves, who was at Walter Reed for sixteen months, says, "The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling." A mother who spent over a year with her son at Walter Reed has a similar comment, "It just absolutely took forever to get anything done. They do the paperwork, they lose the paperwork. Then they have to redo the paperwork. You are talking about guys and girls whose lives are disrupted for the rest of their lives, and they don't put any priority on it."

To enter and leave the world of Walter Reed, soldiers have to file 22 documents with 8 different commands. It takes 16 different IT systems to process the documents but communication between these systems is non-existent. And records get lost. One soldier, with an eye patch and a skull implant, had to bring his purple heart to prove he had been in Iraq.

But, hey, this is the army and you have to be in uniform no matter what your condition. That's why the hospital has break-away clothing with velcro.

Hell, we couldn't supply the troops with enough equipment when they were there. Now, we can't even get rid of rats in the soldiers' rooms. But we can spend billions on weapons that may never see the light of day. What's wrong with this picture?

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Some sensible talk about North Korea

Foreign Policy has a brief interview with Robert Gallucci of Georgetown about the deal struck with North Korea. Read it here.

Friday, February 16, 2007

It's not about money

Unicef has just released a report of a study made of the well-being of children in wealthy countries. There was not enough data on some wealthy countries, such as Australia, Japan and South Korea, so that children in only twenty-one countries were studied. The authors acknowledge the study's limitations, but feel that it is a good indication of reality.

The study looked at kids over six 'dimensions':
  1. Material well-being - how many live in homes with incomes in the lower half, without a working adult, with few educational resources, with fewer than ten books.
  2. Health and safety - infant deaths per 1000 births, percent with low birth weight, percent not immunized against measles, DPT and polio, deaths from accidents and injuries.
  3. Educational well-being - average achievement in reading, math and science, percent of teenagers in school, percent not doing anything (work or school), percent expecting to find low-skilled work.
  4. Family and peer relationships - percent living in single parent families, percent eating the main meal with parents more than once a week, percent reporting parents spend time with them, percent who find their peers kind and helpful.
  5. Behaviors and risks - percent who eat a daily breakfast and fruit, percent physically active, percent obese, percent who smoke, have gotten drunk, use dope, have sex by 15, use condoms, involved in fights, being bullied.
  6. Subjective well-being - percent rating health fair or less, percent feeling negative about themselves.
The authors conclude that kids in the Northern European countries - Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland - fare best when measured along the above dimensions. Britain's kids fare worst, just behind those of the U.S. Surprisingly, we rank low in health and safety. Less surprisingly, we also rank low in family and peer relationships and behaviors and risks. Our best rating is in educational well-being, where we rank twelfth.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Difficulty Recruiting

The Army continues to have trouble meeting their recruiting goals. Almost 12% of the soldiers recruited last year had criminal pasts. True, the crimes may have been committed when they were teenagers, but the number of 2006 recruits with a criminal past was about 65% more than the number of 2003 recruits with a similar past.

Couple this with the lowering of standards as evidenced by the increase in the number of recruits who have not finished high school or those who score poorly on the Army's aptitude tests -and you've got to wonder at the quality of our military.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Fung Wah does it again

This is the latest accident involving a Fung Wah bus. Last month another Fung Wah bus was involved in an accident. Last year they had a couple more.

It's a cheap way to get from Boston to New York City. How safe is it?

Is Iran supplying the Sunni Insurgents?

In Sunday's briefing about Iran's involvement in Iraq the claim was made that "Iran is a significant contributor to attacks on coalition forces." Well, most of our casualties have been in Sunni, not Shi'ite areas. Why would Shi'ite Iran help the Sunnis? Would they not supply the Iraqi Shi'ites? Aren't many of the Sunni forces supplied by other Sunni countries, such as our ally Saudi Arabia?

A Green Company

The Atlantic Monthly profiles Zhang Yue, founder and CEO of Broad Air Conditioning, a Chinese company selling a different kind of air conditioning.

The air conditioning we are familiar with uses electric power to compress a refrigerant which, when it expands, cools the air. Broad's air conditioners use natural gas to boil a liquid which, when the vapors from the liquid condense, cools the air. Broad's air conditioners use less energy to reach the stage where your room is cooled. Ours require the conversion of fossil fuel to electricity and electricity to power the compressor. Broad's do not. Hence, the savings in energy.

Broad's energy saving qualities have led to a company with $300,000,000 in sales and customers in Boston, New York, Madrid, Athens, Bangkok and, interestingly, Fort Bragg and other military bases.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

A different way of looking at the world


The above is from Worldmapper, an experiment in using maps to get a different perspective on the world. This map shows the world's population as related to geography. In the words of the Worldmapper people

In Spring 2000 world population estimates reached 6 billion; that is 6 thousand million. The distribution of the earth's population is shown in this map.

India, China and Japan appear large on the map because they have large populations. Panama, Namibia and Guinea-Bissau have small populations so are barely visible on the map.

Population is very weakly related to land area. However, Sudan which is geographically the largest country in Africa, has a smaller population than Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa and Tanzania.

There are a host of intriguing world views at the site.

Even Pace Doesn't Back It

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff , Peter Pace, has not supported the allegations of Iran's involvement in Iraq. Sure, "it's clear that Iranians are involved" but "what I would not say is that the Iranian government, per se, knows about this". Surprising comments especially when the briefing in Baghdad was run by the military.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Trust me. We have the proof

This whole Iran thing just sounds so phony I want to throw up. The government has been talking about this for almost a year. Now they've reached the state where they can 'demonstrate' that Iran is supplying weapons in Iraq. Of course, they don't allow the reporters to tell who the people demonstrating this proof are, nor is anyone allowed to see all the relevant documents. But, hey, we have to trust them. Would they lie to us?

What's really interesting to me is that the proof seems to be that they have found weapons from Iran being used by the insurgents. Ergo, Iran is helping the insurgents. Don't you think that we have also found weapons from America being used by the insurgents? Ergo, America is helping the insurgents.

It seems as though the powers that be will do anything, say anything to try to divert our attention away from the disaster we have wrought. How many Congressmen or Senators have had the courage to speak about this charade? Have things changed with a Democratic majority in the legislative branch? Of course not. A plague on both their houses.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Truth will out

Elie Wiesel, former inmate of Auschwitz, was attacked by a holocaust denier at a conference aptly entitled "Facing Violence: Justice, Religion and Conflict Resolution". The attacker was a very brave man. After all, Wiesel is only 78 years old and I'm sure that his claim that his mother, his father and three sisters died in concentration camps is false.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Gee. What a Surprise

HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, entered the U.S. market by buying Household Finance in 2003. HSBC wanted to really grow the business so they entered the market of sub-prime mortgage loans with a vengeance. Like similar banks, they made loans to almost anyone and - the worst part of it - did not verify income in many cases. Now they have a slight problem. The sub-prime borrowers are having a hard time making their payments; many are as late as 60 days, some have defaulted.

There will be more mortgage lenders crying uncle this year.

More budget discoveries

It looks as though the Pentagon is trying to use the war to get some of their pet projects funded. Some examples:
$400,000,000 for two F-35 fighters, which won't be ready until 2010
$74,000,000 to design a spy plane that won't be tested for two years
$300,000,000 more for the Osprey which has never seen combat and likely will never do so.
Bernie Sanders summed it up, "Our soldiers are knocking on doors in Baghdad, but they (the Pentagon) want billions of dollars for high-tech weapons that are designed for the Cold War."

Will Gates make any sort of difference relative to the waste of our money?

Another problem we'd just as soon ignore

In 2005 the American Society of Civil Engineers said we are facing serious problems with our water and wastewater infrastructure. Admittedly, the society has a vested interest, but if you expect pipes to last fifty to a hundred years beyond their normal life you'll probably lose that bet. But that is what we are doing in this wonderful economy that we are enjoying.

It's only been 2 days....

since I wrote about the difficulty of knowing who your friends are in Iraq. Now the papers are full of the arrest of a deputy Health Minister in Iraq for a number of things - involvement in murders and kickbacks, hiring Mahdi terrorists.

How does one define 'disaster'?

I don't understand this

But physicists at Harvard can stop light, store it somewhere, move the stored light somewhere else and then send it on its way. Read more by someone who seems to know more about this than I.

It just boggles my mind

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

The stupid things we do

Here's another. In the state of Washington there is a drive to put Initiative 957 on the ballot. This petition would allow only fertile people to marry and if they don't produce a child within three years the marriage would be annulled.

Perhaps the supporters of this initiative should select the people who would marry each other. Or, maybe expand the initiative to allow only big, blond people to marry.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Who is the enemy? Who the friend?

Just this past week I wrote about the difficulties of distinguishing friend from foe in Iraq. In the past few months we've read about attacks by Iraqis dressed in police or military garb. Now Iraqis with official IDs have apparently kidnapped an Iranian diplomat.

"Our fiscal and financial condition is worse than advertised"

Words from David Walker, head of the Government Accountability Office.

The sorry state of our government's financial reporting cannot be laid at Bush's door. This issue goes back several administrations. For example,
  • Just about all federal workers will get a pension. Where is this liability of $200 billion or so shown on the government's financial statements?
  • Why does the government not invest the social security taxes instead of considering it an offset to the deficit?
  • Just how much should we be putting away for the costs of Social Security and Medicare when the boomers really get old? It looks as though these obligations increased by $3 trillion this past year.
  • Why don't we keep the books on a true accrual basis?
Why do we have such trouble seeking the truth?

Monday, February 05, 2007

Must reading

This article, "Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America", published in the NY Review of Books is a cogent exegesis of our current predicament. It's written by William Pfaff, who has been called the Walter Lippman for our age.

On first reading, Pfaff's approach might be considered isolationist. But, I think it raises fundamental questions about the U.S. and its relationship to the rest of the world. The article focuses on our beliefs that we are unique and virtuous and that our kind of democracy is what the world needs. 'Belief' is the right word to use here as Pfaff feels that our Calvinist heritage is what has caused us to believe that we are building a new and better world. These belief is so ingrained that it causes us to leave some fundamental matters unquestioned and to make some basic, but faulty, assumptions about the world and our place in it.

Some excerpts:
The United States today is the leading world power by many if not most conventional measures. With the largest economy and the largest and most advanced arsenal of weapons, it is acknowledged as such and exercises wide influence. However, it is in the nature of political relationships that an effort to translate a position of material superiority into power over others will provoke resistance and may fail, possibly in costly ways. In the present case, it implies the subordination of others, notably the other democracies that are expected to accept US leadership in a new international order, and may resist this for a variety of well-founded reasons.

Today's major democracies are all advanced societies; in some ways, in social standards, distribution of wealth and opportunity, the provision of universal health care and free or affordable education, and certain technologies and industries, many are more advanced than the United States. They are willing to cooperate with the United States in matters of common concern, as they have for a half-century, but not to subordinate themselves to Washington. They are aware that this administration's effort to establish a system of Central Asian and Middle Eastern client states (the "Greater Middle East") has already produced two ruinous and continuing wars, and worsened situations in Lebanon, Gaza and the Palestinian territories, and Israel.

Elephants are also known to trample people, uproot crops and gardens, topple trees and houses, and occasionally go mad (hence, "rogue nations"). Americans, moreover, are carnivores. The administration has attacked the existing international order by renouncing inconvenient treaties and conventions and reintroducing torture, and arbitrary and indefinite imprisonment, into advanced civilization. Where is the stability that Mandelbaum tells us has been provided by this American military and political deployment? The doomed and destructive war of choice in Iraq, continuing and mounting disorder in Afghanistan following another such war, war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, as well as between Hamas and Fatah, accompanied by continuing crisis in Palestine, with rumbles of new American wars of choice with Iran or Syria, and the emergence of a nuclear North Korea —all demonstrate deep international instability.

American efforts to deregulate the international economy and promote globalization, whatever its benefits, have been the most powerful force of political, economic, social, and cultural destabilization the world has known since World War II, providing what closely resembles that "constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" forecast by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.

he new American militarism, as Andrew Bacevich calls it, encourages reliance on obsolete notions about power based on quantitative military advantage. Power now comes primarily from economic, financial, industrial, political, and cultural assets and influence, in all of which the United States is vulnerable.[7] If American international hegemony is considered a threat, there are political and economic ways for international society to check it, not to speak of unconventional forms of military resistance, which have been employed with success in Iraq, in Lebanon last summer, and, much earlier, in Vietnam.

War tends now to be driven by nationalism and religious or political ideology. Nationalism and communalism, the defense of a community's identity and autonomy, remain eminently powerful political forces, as in Vietnam three decades ago. The recent history of Lebanon, Iraq, Chechnya, the Palestinian intifadas, failed states, the memory of the Vietnam War, and the specter of rogue nations possessing nuclear weapons combine to make military interventions in the non-Western world an unattractive prospect.

"To have real self-government, a people must understand what that means, want it, and be willing to sacrifice for it." Many nondemocratic systems are inherently unstable. "But so what?" he (George Kennan) asked. "We are not their keepers. We never will be." (He did not say that we might one day try to be.) He suggested that nondemocratic societies should be left "to be governed or misgoverned as habit and tradition may dictate, asking of their governing cliques only that they observe, in their bilateral relations with us and with the remainder of the world community, the minimum standards of civilized diplomatic intercourse."

With the cold war over, Kennan saw no need for the continuing presence of American troops in Europe, and little need for them in Asia, subject to the security interests of Japan, allied to the United States by treaty. He deplored economic and military programs that existed in "so great a profusion and complexity that they escape the normal possibilities for official, not to mention private oversight." He asked why the United States was [in 1992] giving military assistance to forty-three African countries and twenty-two (of twenty-four) countries in Latin America. "Against whom are these weapons conceivably to be employed?... [Presumably] their neighbors or, in civil conflict, against themselves. Is it our business to prepare them for that?"

Yet little sign exists of a challenge in American foreign policy debates to the principles and assumptions of an international interventionism motivated by belief in a special national mission. The country might find itself with a new administration in 2009 which provides a less abrasive and more courteous version of the American pursuit of world hegemony, but one still condemned by the inherent impossibility of success.

The intellectual and material commitments made during the past half-century of American military, bureaucratic, and intellectual investment in global interventionism will be hard to reverse. The Washington political class remains largely convinced that the United States supplies the essential structure of international security, and that a withdrawal of American forces from their expanding network of overseas military bases, or disengagement from present American interventions into the affairs of many dozens of countries, would destabilize the international system and produce unacceptable consequences for American security. Why this should be so is rarely explained.

The noninterventionist alternative to the policies followed in the United States since the 1950s is to minimize interference in other societies and accept the existence of an international system of plural and legitimate powers and interests. One would think the idea that nations are responsible for themselves, and that American military interference in their affairs is more likely to turn small problems into big ones than to solve them, would appeal to an American public that believes in individual responsibility and the autonomy of markets, considers itself hostile to political ideology (largely unaware of its own), and professes to be governed by constitutional order, pragmatism, and compromise.

A noninterventionist policy would shun ideology and emphasize pragmatic and empirical judgment of the interests and needs of this nation and of others, with reliance on diplomacy and analytical intelligence, giving particular attention to history, since nearly all serious problems between nations are recurrent or have important recurrent elements in them. The current crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, and Iran are all colonial or postcolonial in nature, which is generally ignored in American political and press discussion.

Political and diplomatic action would be the primary and essential instruments of international relations and persuasion; military action the last and worst one, evidence of political failure. Military deployments abroad would be reexamined with particular attention to whether they might actually be impediments to solutions of the conflicts of clients, or reinforce intransigence in the complex dynamics of relations among nations such as the two Koreas, China, Taiwan, and Japan, where lasting solutions can only be found in political settlements between principals.

The United States would not have suffered its catastrophic implication in what was essentially a domestic crisis in Iran in 1979, which still poisons Near and Middle Eastern affairs, since there would never have been the huge and provocative American investment in the Shah's regime as American "gendarme" in the region, compromising the Shah and contributing to the fundamentalist backlash against his secularizing modernization.

Without entering further into what rapidly would become an otiose discussion of the "mights" or "might nots" of the last half-century, one can certainly argue that a noninterventionist United States would not be at war in Iraq today. While obviously concerned about the free flow of Middle Eastern oil, Washington would have assumed that the oil-using states bought their oil on the market and that oil producers had to sell, having nothing else they can do with their oil, and that politically motivated interference in the market by the oil producers would in the mid- and long term fail, as happened after the OPEC oil price rise of 1973.

Israel, with its conventional and unconventional arms, is capable of assuring its own defense against external aggression, if newly aware of the limits of its ability to combat irregular forces. It cannot expect total security without political resolution of the Palestinian question, a problem only it can solve, by withdrawing from the territories to some negotiated approximation of the 1967 border. International engagement would undoubtedly be necessary to a solution, and would willingly be supplied. Forty years of American involvement have unfortunately served mainly to allow the Israelis to avoid facing facts, contributing to radicalization in Islamic society.

"Regime change" is better left to the people whose regime it is, who know what they want, and who will benefit from or suffer the consequences of change.

A hard-headed doctrine concerning the responsibilities of people themselves may seem unacceptable when the CNN audience witnesses mass murder in Darfur, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. However an interventionist foreign policy in which the US aggressively interferes in other states in order to shape their affairs according to American interest or ideology is not the same as responding to atrocious public crimes.

There are limits to the feasibility of humanitarian intervention. It can create its own problems, as nongovernmental groups now acknowledge. Their and UN efforts to feed and support refugees can facilitate aggression by taking the victims off the aggressor's hands, as happened in the initial Yugoslav intervention, where the Security Council limited the UN force to "protection" of civilians while a war of sectarian and territorial aggression was going on.[10] Eventual military intervention produced the Dayton agreement, which nonetheless left Kosovo and the explosive problem of the Albanian regional diaspora unsettled.

Humanitarian crises are often the current manifestation of intractable historical grievances, as in the former Yugoslavia, and in Rwanda, where the Tutsi, Hamitic cattle-raising people who migrated to the Lake Kivu area some four centuries ago, presumably from Ethiopia, had imposed a form of monarchical and aristocratic rule on the Bantu-speaking Hutus, despite the latter's much greater numbers. German and Belgian colonial authorities left this system as they found it, and it persisted until independence in the 1960s, when the Hutus' bid for democratic power launched the conflicts that followed, culminating in the genocidal upheaval of 1994 against the Tutsis that ended with them once again in power.

This is not, obviously, a situation susceptible to solution by foreign military intervention. However the US Army is pressing for a new Africa Command, possibly based in Djibouti, with "forward-based troops" ready to deal with Africa's "emergence...as a strategic reality" (as Marine General James Jones, departing commander of US forces in Europe, said in December). The 2004 US National Security Strategy declaration identifies "failed states" in Africa as well as "rogue states" as threats to American interests.

US support of the Ethiopian intervention in Somalia, which overturned Islamist rule in that "failed state," together with demands in the US and Europe for military intervention against the Muslim "Arab" tormentors of the Darfur refugees, suggest that in government circles as well as the public mind, the African humanitarian crisis is beginning to be confused with or assimilated to the larger US "war on terror." This is a profound error, and risks setting the United States on a course of endless and fruitless military interventions against Africa's miseries—a "long war" indeed.

History does not offer nations permanent security, and when it seems to offer hegemonic domination this usually is only to take it away again, often in unpleasant ways. The United States was fortunate to enjoy relative isolation for as long as it did. The conviction of Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the country was exempt from the common fate has been succeeded in the twenty-first century by an American determination to fight (to "victory," as the President insists) against the conditions of existence history now actually does offer. It sets against them the consoling illusion that power will always prevail, despite the evidence that this is not true.

we have gone beyond the belief in national exception to make an ideology of progress and universal leadership into our moral justification for a policy of simple power expansion. In that case we have entered into a logic of history that in the past has invariably ended in tragedy.


How we should conduct ourselves

Buried in a footnote in an intriguing essay by Willam Pfaff in the current NY Review of Books is this from George Kennan:
while always bearing in mind that its first duty is to the national interest, it (the United States) w(sh)ould never lose sight of the principle that the greatest service this country could render to the rest of the world would be to put its own house in order and to make of American civilization an example of decency, humanity and societal success from which others could derive whatever they might find useful to their own purposes.
There are more nuggets to be gleaned from this essay.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

What's next to outsource?

Today the NY Times begins a series on the growth of government contractors. They seem to be everywhere - collect taxes, prepare budgets, control aircraft drones, take minutes of war policy meetings, protect ambassadors, investigate other contractors. The cost of government contractors has doubled in the Bush administration, but it all started with Clinton's reinvention of government.

Things have reached a state such that less than half of the government contracts are open to competition. Lockheed Corp. gets more federal money than the Department of Energy.

Is this the kind of government we want? Perhaps, we should outsource our representatives.

It's not only in Iraq

The Sunni - Shiite attacks on each other continue here in the US. In the heartland of American Muslim settlements, Michigan, windows have been broken in mosques and stores. At the University of Michigan Shiites cannot lead prayers. At Johns Hopkins University the Muslim Student Association ordered books removed from a reading room because too many were written by Shiites. In New York prisons Sunnis and Shiites engage in knife fights.

All this hatred and violence! To what end?

A Job Well Done

Ford management did such a super job last year when the company they managed lost almost $13 billion that they will be given a performance bonus. Of course, the 50,000 workers Ford laid off applauded the move.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

China bashing

Moving into and becoming a major factor in a country is not an easy task. As I've written previously, China is moving into Africa, primarily to obtain natural resources. Zambia is proving to be an especially difficult country for China. In the most recent presidential election the primary opponent campaigned on an anti-China platform, much as happens in some Latin American countries with regard to the U.S. He did well enough so that his party now has some degree of control in Zambia.

The anti-China movement was fueled by an explosion in a Chinese-controlled mine which killed a couple of dozen of the locals. Plus, the Chinese disbanded the union at the mine and paid people less than the country's minimum wage of $67 per month. Such practices do not win 'hearts and minds'. China may not care about 'hearts and minds' today, but it will care tomorrow.

$2070 each

That's about how much the Pentagon is asking each of us to spend for their FY2008 budget of $622 billion. Is that how you want to spend your money?

Walking in a winter wonderland

There is a new winter wonderland in Siberia, one with orange snow.

Everybody says something stupid every so often

Sam Bodman, Energy Secretary, is a smart guy - a doctorate from MIT, at which he later taught - and a successful businessman - president of Fidelity and Cabot Corp. Why he would say that the US is a small contributor to global warming can only be attributed to man's penchant for saying a stupid thing every so often, ala Joe Biden, another bright guy.

While the scientific establishment has been wrong on major issues every so often (witness Galileo for starters), it seems to this non-scientist that we're in deep s**t with regards to global warming. Every report that has been issued on global warming has been more dire. The situation may become even worse faster than the report issued this week predicts. An article in the journal Science compared today's world with that predicted in 2001 by the climate change establishment. Temperatures and sea levels are either worse than predicted or very close to the maximums that were predicted.

The American Enterprise Institute apparently does not believe that the world is getting warmer. They have offered $10,000 plus expenses for articles that point out errors in the UN report referred to above. Would the fact that the Institute has received a bundle of money from Exxon have had any influence on the offer?

Sinking deeper and deeper

How many times have we heard, "As the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down"? Well, Tom Lasseter of the McClatchy Newspapers, has some interesting interviews which illustrate the virtual impossibility of this ever happening. What is happening is that many of those who we are trying to get to stand up are, in fact, siding with the insurgents. A quote from a US officer, "Half of them are JAM. They'll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night."

Lasseter writes mainly of the Mahdi Army's success in infiltrating the Iraqi police and security forces. But, things have reached such a pass that you have to believe that this is happening all over Iraq.

This week's release of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq - the previous estimate, by the way, was issued more than two-and-a-half years ago - reinforces the conclusion that we are near the death throes of a country. It looks like it's either the three region solution or complete anarchy.