Second Amendment – A discussion, not an forum for argument

The Second Amendment – A discussion
By Stafford “Doc” Williamson
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, it seems, is never far away from the pro-gun people who are my friends. The anti-personal weapons have a good point, too. Gun violence in the United States of America is both tragically high and in total contrast to almost every nation on earth that does not allow guns to be freely available to members of the public. The mere definition of “gun” can bring out some dividing line that typically ends at a line surrounding suburbia, and those more accustomed to living a “farm life” or on a ranch, or other more isolated locations including small towns where the neighbors all have “sporting” rifles for both the “sport” of hunting allowed game in season and to protect themselves and their families not from roving bands of hostile street gangs but from predators who are taking a bite out of their means of making a living. Wolves, especially in packs, wolverines, coyotes especially in packs, mountain lions, bears and a number of others including foxes in the hen house, or even packs of feral dogs that kill indiscriminately for anything that might be their food.
A good and dear friend of mine asked fairly recently, specifically to spark a discussion, if there was any reason for a person to own an assault rifle. Again the definition for “assault rifle” comes into play because “assault rifles” are usually called “automatic” weapons, and rarely, if ever does any gun toting person actually a have a genuine “automatic” weapon because those are illegal to possess in the United State. Indeed, another friend told me that even owning a kit to change a semi-automatic weapon into a genuinely automatic is a felony, although they are easy enough to get via several different means. An automatic weapon would mean a weapon is an “automatic” if you can hold down the trigger and it fires as rapidly as the weapon’s mechanism will allow until all the bullets in the gun are gone and it is time to reload. Semi-automatic weapons include ordinary .22 caliber rifles that fire one bullet, then eject the casing, and load another bullet into the chamber, using the gases released when the weapon is fired. The “semi-“ part is that even though it had “reloaded” it will not fire again until the trigger is pulled a separate time, one for every bullet discharged. The answer then, to Michael’s question, in my opinion, is “yes”, especially if the “enemy” being faced is a pack of coyotes or wolves. In some cases, I can even see licensing genuine “automatic” firing weapons.
But does the Second Amendment really “guarantee” the right of the individual to “bear Arms”, and more specifically does it guarantee that such a right “shall not be infringed.” Just for quick reference, here is the entire Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” In such a short clause there is no elaboration as to the meanings ascribed to these few words. That gives rise, somewhat surprisingly, to a lot of speculation over a few key meanings, the implications of which are the basis for many a discussion (okay, let’s not mince words, I should say, “argument”) on these points. Here are some of them.
The phrase, “the people” is sufficiently ambiguous to be interpreted as “every individual” (remembering that at the time, a person was only a full-fledged citizen if they were white, male and a landowner) or does it really mean, “the people” as a collective noun, meaning some organization or group(s) of people. (More on this one in a moment.)
The term “state” in the phrase, “the security of a free state,” can have a variety of meanings too. At minimum, it could be that the phrase intended “state” to be interpreted as “the nation”, which then offers the possibilities of the nation as a government, or the nation as a geographical unit (many, if not most wars are fought over territorial control, though very often with an undergirding of religious fervour), or did it mean, a state, in the sense of the thirteen colonies which were in the process of joining into a nation, so in effect each was an independent state. Then there remains the question of what constitutes a “militia” both then and now. I will return to militia in more detail later, but for the moment, let us consider the historical significance of “state” and “militia” taken together.
I have just read a rather academic paper which was included in the University of California at Davis Law Review journal by a Professor Carl T. Bogus (yes, that is his actual name) published in 1998. The article is 100 pages in length in the journal covering pages 311 to 408 (okay, so it is only 97 pages), of which nearly a full one-third of which is just the footnotes Professor Bogus includes, which also include some commentary on his sources in some cases. You can now sigh in relief that I am not trying to make this a strictly academic article (not that anyone except academics usually read the footnotes anyway). Professor Bogus points out that for the Southern (read “slave”) states, one of their greatest fears at the time following the revolutionary war, was that a strong federal government might turn the state militias into an instrument of the federal government, or worse yet, disband them altogether. It was a great fear because there were now many more black slaves than there were white property owners in some places (even though slaves were considered “personal property” in this case as opposed to just plain “property” which means real estate). White slave owners feared a rebellion by the slaves that would see them hacked to pieces in their own beds at night.
To prevent that possibility, property owners were obliged, as an extension of their militia duties (in effect) to ride “night patrol” the responsibility of which was to return runaway slaves to their owners, or kill them in the process if they were too difficult to manage. Since “night patrol” and “militia” were virtually the same people doing different things for these states maintenance of a “strong militia” in the sense of the individual state militias was crucial to their willingness to enter into this national partnership of a federalist government under a constitution, until and unless a bill of rights contained certain guarantees, one of which was just such a clause, indicating that each state had the right to maintain a militia without too much interference from the federal government, especially because Article 1 Section 8 of the constitution authorised Congress, “to provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the militia,” which in effect says that the federal government was responsible for the creation of the militias. More specifically it also says that Congress may call out these militias to “suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” This historic perspective is one which argues strongly that the states were the ones whose right to bear arms would no be infringed. Southern states feared that abolition of state militias would leave them subject to a bloody slave rebellion, and equally, destruction of their entire economic base. They wanted to be sure that the abolitionist leaning Northern states did not have some giant loophole through which they could rain destructive effects on their Southern neighbours.
Since it was the case that only about fourteen percent of the population (excluding hundreds of thousands of slaves) actually owned guns, and of those, probate records show about half of that sparse number were listed in “not working” condition the effectiveness of state militias was questionable at best. Militias provided by the state were offered to assist General George Washington, but he refused to accept them because they had shown themselves to be almost entirely undisciplined, poor shots, and prone to desertion, in many cases simply out of boredom. The idea of a rag-tag militia standing up against a standing army [the British] or an army of foreign mercenaries [the Hessians] seemed hopeless, despite their recent role in defeating the British and mercenary Hessian troops to win the revolution and freedom from the tyranny of the British King.
In one place, returning regular soldiers and militia men faced an economic downturn following the war of independence. They felt that they were being taxed into bankruptcy, essentially the same justification of taxation without representation that led to the revolution itself. Thus began a rebellion of citizens who were considered a militia, although they were not formally constituted as such, the incident became known as “Shay’s rebellion.” The initially small group swelled as it moved about causing mayhem, some sources putting the eventual peak of participants at one hundred men. This uprising was fairly quickly controlled, as with today’s self-appointed militias that try to opt-out of recognizing the authority of the federal government, fairly typically survivalists, tend to be small, like the participants in Shay’s rebellion. Although Professor Bogus distinguishes quite nicely between state militias and the whole country militia consisting of every able-bodied white man, but even so, with less than 14% owning guns, and only half of those in working condition, it was fairly clear that at that time a militia was no match for a professional army despite the recent success, partly because being ill-equipped and untrained any rebellion was usually limited to those in the immediate area, expressing local concern about local matters. There never was an instance in which the militia of the whole country attempted to rise up to throw off the tyranny of the instantiated government in Washington. That still remains the case.
But it was also true that standing armies, in general, were considered to be potential instruments of intimidation to enforce the tyranny of those in power. The evidence was clear. That was how King George had used his military in enforcing the edicts from the crown and eventually fighting the battle for America (or rather “against” Americans, except that they were not actually “Americans” until after the Revolutionary War).
Let me pause here a moment to look at the contemporary version of the American “militia”. We would probably, generally, consider the various state’s “National Guard” to be their militia, which like the militias of post-revolutionary America can be called upon to fight for the country in wars, or to provide aid to disaster victims whether in their own state or far away. The National Guard, as the name implies is an instrument of the federal government, but also, as the more detailed description indicates, (e.g. The Montana National Guard,) the state has some control of those groups as well. The federal government supplies the equipment the National Guard uses as is provided for in the constitution. So those who might expect or hope that a national militia or state-based militia might be an instrument to control and limit, or to eliminate a national government that had turned tyrannical, are mistaken. But now comes the “sticky” part, as the British might say.
If, as some believe, the purpose the founding Fathers was to establish militias as a guard against tyrannical behaviour on the part of our own government or against invading forces, it would be the very kinds of guns (assault rifles and large magazine guns) that people are trying to have banned that could make the militia of the whole into a viable counter-revolutionary force. In fact, the militia would probably need resources comparable to our “standing army” even though that army is less than one-third of a percent of the population. At this moment, the weapons belonging to the National Guard are, in effect, owned by the federal government, and hardly available to throw off the mantle of tyranny.
What mantle of tyranny, you might very well say. Isn’t the government structured on the basis of balance and shared responsibilities by three branches of government? Let’s take a look at that for a brief moment. Remember too that I am an American citizen by choice. I was born in Canada, long, long ago, during the ice age (well, to me it was the ice age, and that was one of the main reasons I left). But at the time when I came to the United States to live, my (unabashedly liberal) Canadian friends told me, “You don’t want to go there now! They just elected Ronald Reagan. He’s a cowboy and there is no telling what he will do to the country, especially with his attitude toward the Soviet Union.” Reagan’s somewhat far-fetched idea of a “space-based missile defense” seemed to confirm my Canadian friends’ suspicions. When that President’s two terms were over, the population chose as its next supreme leader a man who was best know (outside the USA, at least) as the former head of the CIA (not one of the world’s favorite institutions, since it has long been known that the CIA played an active role in fomenting several revolutions and coups around the world). The Canadians heaved a collective sigh of relief when the liberal President Clinton was elected (and the British, I can tell you from my conversations in Britain at the time, were just mystified why anyone cared about the Presidential sex scandals that seemed to have turned into a witch hunt in the USA. Those happened almost daily somewhere in Britain or somewhere in Europe.) But then we got another Bush, and that was followed rather quickly by the attack on the World Trade center, the greatest loss of life since the bombing of Pearl Harbour. George W. Bush and his associates took it to be a declaration of war, except that it was not a declaration of war from a country, it was “terrorists”. This brought on a panic attack within the government, especially because they so easily deposed and defeated the government of Afghanistan that had offered safe haven to Osama Bin Laden and his al Queda fanatics, but they didn’t get bin Laden at that point, and it seemed a puny response to the loss of so many American (and other) lives. So they picked on Saddam Hussein and Iraq which actually offered some financial advantages, especially to Vice President Dick Cheney whose background was in the oil business (and hadn’t they just handed a humiliating defeat to Iraq while driving them out of Kuwait?). Despite the cost of thousands of American lives, much discussion of the costs of the Iraq War, and how President Obama mishandled the withdrawal (actually it was the Bush administration who had already failed to arrange for any troops to remain in Iraq at the time of the withdrawal), having a “big” war was a great economic stimulus to the industrial manufacturing segment of the American economy, it was just concentrated in the military manufacturing sector. Defeating and deposing the Taliban government in Afghanistan took only a few months, and hardly had any economic effect at all, although extending the hunt for bin Laden and declaring that Taliban was an insurgent force made it into Obama’s “good war” as opposed to the Iraq war that he promised to bring to a close. Oddly enough, no one blames President Clinton for the World Trade Center attack, yet the fact that Clinton’s military strategy for retaliating against the first attempt on the World Trade Center (a car bomb in the underground parking) and the attacks on embassies in Africa was to send cruise missiles to where they believed bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan. He missed, and the World Trade Center destruction appears to some people to be the al Queda retaliation for the attack on bin Laden. But I digress in what must already seem a long way about to arrive at a relevant point. Here it is.
In order to detect and defeat non-state agents of an opposing force, Bush and Congress passed the “Patriot Act.” This is not an uncommon reaction of military confrontation, although it is often called something like the “War Powers Act” (but only Congress can declare war, and they were not ready to do that on a non-state actor like al Queda). The 1941 War Powers Act actually gave President Roosevelt broad powers to organize and conduct the war effort, but that was after Congress had actually declared war. The Patriot act was broad and sweeping in its scope especially because no official state of war actually existed. It granted previously unprecedented powers to law enforcement and military agencies. It is not so surprising that these powers were unprecedented. They specifically trampled rights that had been appended to the Constitution of the United States as protections for the citizens of the United States, and as interpreted by the courts over two hundred years.
In particular, the FBI was granted special exceptions to normal warrant procedures which included post-reporting of surveillance rather than obtaining a warrant in advance as is normally required. Of those post-reported 763 warrants only 3 were issued officially naming “terrorism” and another 3 for “conspiracy” the rest were broad, far-reaching attempts to gather intelligence on drugs, fraud, weapons, tax and extortion and racketeering according to the Report of the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts covering October 2007 to September 2008. The FBI were allowed (and one of the first mass gathering of “intelligence”was) to search the borrowing records of every library in America, of all the library users and what they had been reading. When the Patriot Act came up for renewal (as it did more than once) Senator Bernie Sanders, with the support of the ACLU and the American Library Association, introduced an amendment to remove this provision from the Act. It was defeated. Meanwhile, the “meta-data” of numbers called by every telephone and every cell phone in the country were being recorded to be able to “extract patterns” of calling which just might be indicative of terror cell activity, and at the same time the NSA was given the power to intercept and record any overseas telecommunication involving an American citizen. The convenience of which was aided by the cooperation of all the major long distance companies, and the routeing of which, since virtually all long distance calls were passing through the United States, in effect gave the NSA the right to do so to any telephone call they cared to scrutinise. There was a kind of redefinition of Habeus Corpus (part of the right to representation and a speedy trial)(such a provision is allowed under the Constitution in times of “war”, but there was no declared state of war at the time), and to avoid the protections under the Miranda provision, anyone taken prisoner was declared an “enemy combatant” (but without being in military uniform not the protections of captured soldiers under the Geneva Convention) and shipped off to either a “rendition” site, sometimes in a third country with less stringent laws about torturing prisoners to obtain information, or to the famous detainment center on the Marine base on the island of Cuba, where again, as “enemy combatants” they essentially had no rights whatsoever. These kinds of elaborate machinations were, at least some recognition that in the United States laws existed that still granted people rights (citizen or not) fairly clearly amount to some rather broad suspension to the rights granted by the “Bill of Rights” amendments to the constitution.
Nor should the mention of Senator Sanders be taken as a political slant, because it was President Obama who promoted the great urgency to renew the Patriot Act when it came up for renewal again in 2011. He urged that it be passed without any additions or delay, despite the fact that in 2003 and 2005, before he was in office, he was adamantly opposed to it. Political winds blow stronger in the Oval Office and the West Wing, one would likely have to surmise from this. Nonetheless, it mitigates the concept that the measures of the Patriot Act were as Machievalian as they might otherwise be construed.
At the same time, both the effect and the fact that specific Bill of Rights protections were seized by the Administration for purposes of circumventing their effects (at least amendments 4, 5, 6, 8 and 14 according to my estimate, and others claim more instances of even more violations) as well as what appears to be a bill of attainder creating a whole class of persons from whom rights are denied without trial or conviction, it is not difficult to see through the lenses of people keeping a close watch that these were steps, potentially large steps, towards a tyrannical government. It is possible, too, to see that one might perceive these extraordinary measures could readily be extended to encompass a deeply rooted form of Marshal Law or other fascist government steamroller when the imbalance of partisan politics of all three branches of government tilted toward a single party including both houses of Congress, all of which seemed comfortable with giving up rights and freedoms for a little increase in security. That is not necessarily to say that these were, in fact, such steps, but they doubtless could be perceived by some as a validation of the concept that the Second Amendment was intended to be a double-edged sword for the purposes of repelling tyranny from foreign invasion, but also from tyranny from within as a result of undemocratic policies and actions of a previously elected and properly constituted government of the country itself.
If that double edged sword intent exists in the wording of the Second Amendment, and it is quite apparently vague without definitions or reference from which to draw meaning to the brief phrases (except perhaps in the contexts discussed here) it appears to me that the Second Amendment is designed to protect the right of the people to retain the weapons of revolution of sufficient potency that they could, or would be able to throw off the shackles of any tyrannical government. Specifically, that means individual ownership of weapons of war. I don’t recall where I saw it, but, as I read somewhere recently, “You don’t ‘bear arms’ against a flock of birds.” I remind you here that the weapons of the “militia”, defined narrowly as the various states’ National Guard units, are actually almost entirely on loan from the federal government, which might be the object of the attempt to overthrow tyrannical governance, and therefore not available to “the people”. I, therefore, take the Second Amendment, in our current context and under the structure of “militia” established, to be protection for owning the very kind of “assault weapons” that anti-gun-violence campaigners wish to abolish.
However, no one, and especially not I, wishes to convey that the right to bear arms extends individual rights to include torpedoes, howitzers or shoulder-fired missiles. Many of the philosophical and legal principles espoused by the framers and amenders of the Constitution have endured the test of time, and the crucible of the courts but the simple language of the Second Amendment has left its clear and full intent in the past. We need to write a better, workable Second Amendment and substitute that for the current obsolete clause.
A good deal more thought still needs to be applied to what our contemporary society wishes to convey in a constitutional amendment covering this topic. We need to consider, especially, the fact that the lack of specificity of the language of the Second Amendment has led us to an impasse, but also that we need to avoid such a degree of specificity that we narrowly define weapons that hurl projectiles and electrical charges (i.e. “stun-guns”) but neglect particle beam weapons or other technologies which may exist in the future that we cannot today foresee.
In the meantime, however, we need to regulate possession and use of firearms. The tens of thousands of deaths in the USA annually, comparable only to nations engaged in nations caught up in revolutions and rebellions where only boundless immorality rules and the bodies stack up like cordwood in the urban battlefields. The sad fact is that if the violence of a single weekend in the United States was geographically concentrated into a single battlefield, the numbers of dead bodies would stack higher than almost any comparable period in those war-torn nations. Stricter regulations regarding guns is not an “attempt” to collect and destroy private citizens’ weapons. That is a boogeyman myth propagated by the NRA and the gun manufacturers designed to create fear about an “unknown” future. All of the future is “unknown”, and as Roosevelt said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
If we can survive the deep dive into the injustices of the Patriot Act carving off (one would hope, temporarily) so many pieces of so many of the Bill of Rights amendments, surely we can make an effort and still avoid apoplexy if we put in place limits on Second Amendment rights that save thousands of American lives every year. Can’t we?
Sincerely,
Stafford “Doc” Williamson

Beijing, Dartmouth and Physics Forums

I was going to start this post with news about my own life, but I am so excited for a business colleague of mine that I have to tell you about Martin’s Big Adventure. Next week he is traveling with a trade delegation to Beijing (China) and expects to sign an agreement with a Chinese company who does disposal of sewage. Now that may not sound so exciting to the average person, but re-use of poop is one of my main goals in life, and I am just thrilled for Martin’s shrewd business moves. Congratulations Martin and all your team!

Okay, next item of business is I received a recruiting letter from Dartmouth.  Dartmouth!  You know, that little, tiny IVY LEAGUE school in Hanover, New Hampshire. Or maybe I should say, that big little school that contains the tiny New Hampshire town of Hanover. I believe there are more students in the university that “regular” citizens of the town. But never mind the geography (for the moment).  They picked ME. I can hardly believe it. In fact I didn’t believe it at first, but I re-read the email earlier this week and realized it was not just a sort of “catch all” solicitation to every Tom, Dick and Albert who graduated this year with a Master’s degree, for reasons I don’t know, they actually picked me.  (I wrote a reply yesterday asking “why me”, and although I may not want to hear the answer, especially if it turns out it really was just a general sort of dragnet, it has left me very curious.)  Oh, yes, the other “thrilling” part about this solicitation is that they say that ALL their PhD students get a waiver of tuition and most other fees, and a “stipend” of about $27K per year. That’s more than I’ve earned some years when I was working at a job for a whole year (I keep moving from one “field” to another and having to start over at the bottom rung of the ladder, but I just accept and move on with it.).

Oh, yes, the third reason for posting this particular note is that I discovered a very interesting place for some serious discussions. It is called the Physics Forum. I joined just today, and don’t know all that much about it, but I did discover a “thread” of discussion about algae (one of my favorite subjects) that has been going on for about 6 years now. More particularly, I have found a person who seems to be both intelligent and from all those discussions and his background reading and accumulation of algae knowledge over all these years, could be a great source of information.  I hope he will be a sounding board for me.

Just in case you want to follow along on some of their interesting discussions they will be found at:

http://www.physicsforums.com/

I hope you find it half as interesting (or more) as I did. Pretty cool place.

Love

Stafford “Doc” Williamson

 

Middle (age?) Spread to Prosperity

This post is a little longer than usual, even for me, so I’ve made it in a slightly larger font to make it easier to read, which, of course, made it LOOK even longer than it already is.

I watched a documentary film a couple of days ago, and there on my screen tonight was one of the “characters” from the documentary in the middle of the PBS Newshour. It was not quite the blending and bending of finding “Ironman III” in the midst of the “news” although that in itself is not such a strange event any more since the commercial side of television has subjugated the News division of the networks under the Entertainment division.  What once was “news” is now actually “infotainment”. All you have to do is count the number of letters in the term to divine the implied emphasis. But this was a genuine billionaire plucked from the politically liberal documentary (well, I assume it was intended to be “liberal” since it was taken from the notes and lectures of Bill Clinton’s secretary of Labor, Robert Reich’s course at Berkley, a strongly liberal pedigree if ever there was one) and plunked down in the decidedly liberal “news” of the Public Broadcasting System.

Now admittedly the Public Broadcasting System is perhaps a little more socialistic than purely unbiased “in the PUBLIC interest”, though it does seem to me, being a liberal sort, that is has more right to the claim of “fair and balanced” than the network that claims that slogan (Fox, if you didn’t know). But here we are amidst the “debate” about how to improve the economy, and the “liberal” side is being defended not by a “community organizer-in-chief”, nor any of his cabinet or any such person, but one of the first Amazon investors (number seven according to the stock certificate he showed us on his wall during the Reich documentary) who also sold his second company to Microsoft for some six point some odd billions of dollars as well (though I presume his was not the sole proprietor of that business either). Still, during the PBS news multi-millionaire Nick Hanauer was making the same point that he had made in Reich’s film: One billionaire can still only drive one car at a time, even if he buys five or six.  That is no way to stimulate the economy compared to paying thousands of people a decent wage so that those thousands of people are each able to afford to buy and operate a car. Making tens of thousands of cars employs a lot of other people who would then be able to afford a car, and so on. It is the middle class that will be the make or break factor in the economy, and we’ve got to find a way for them to get past their long stagnated wages and back into something like a middle class life style. The “American dream” of a comfortable lifestyle was not based on “chicken” as the standard meat to support the nutritional needs of a family. The consumer price index, which was attuned to that American dream was “adjusted” (downward) to the much cheaper meat (to chicken from beef) so that the market basket of consumer goods would not appear to be inflating so rapidly. It was an accounting trick, or more specifically a political trick to make people think that things were “fine” as the economy was “adjusted” to favor the already wealthiest people’s acquisitive financial capability.

The middle class meanwhile has been going through various strategies. Most recently, they were using the equity in their homes as a “piggy bank” to finance their lifestyle, and that is one factor that helped bring on the mortgage crisis. The so-called mortgage crisis was also brought on with a liberal dose of help from the mortgage companies lending practices (more on that in a moment) and Wall Street bundling those supposedly solidly collateralized loans as stable investments, when they knew the underlying collateral, the mortgages were not investment quality. And for that matter that the equity value in the homes that were mortgaged was not sufficient to satisfy the criteria for investment grade. Meanwhile all of this was being insured against losses by similarly worthless paper known as debt-swap insurance from AIG.  The banks, and especially AIG got bailed out by the government. I say “especially AIG” because claims against AIG were paid in full, with little or no proof of loss, and no haggling in the manner typical of insurance adjusters over the actual value of loss (if any). But the ones who got little or no help were the homeowners who lost their homes (and in some cases substantial amounts of equity, which was due to a large extent of the vast availability of foreclosed homes), the homes themselves lost most of their equity value anyway.  Whether led by their own greed to overspend or misled by misrepresentations of the stability of their mortgages’ low, low rates, which were variable, not fixed. That was a fact that many borrowers either failed to understand or were led to be overly optimistic about by the nearly constant news reports that the federal reserve bank’s prime lending rate had been virtually perpetually low, at least for a very long time, with announcements that they had no plans to raise it. Ah, but our greedy mortgage bankers got very itchy, very early on, to bump those rates, a notch or five higher, generally to the maximum increase they were allowed under the terms of the variable rate changes permitted by those variable mortgages.  That put the “regular” mortgage payments well beyond the rates that the borrowers had originally qualified to pay, and put them out of reach of their actual ability to pay, thus the mortgage default crisis came into being, self-created by the mortgage lenders. And by this time, mortgage subsidies from the federal government were not enough to put a stable footing under the FANNIE MAE and FREDDIE MAC bundles in which those institutions had “invested”.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were virtually obligated to buy up those mortgages under the terms of their charters, although some sense of discrimination should have prevailed over the ACTUAL viability of both borrowers and the ACTUAL equity value in the homes. There were, after all, minimum standards that had to be met for the mortgages to qualify, and one of those was real equity, which in many cases just wasn’t there.  And everyone, every over-reaching, and greedy or unknowingly vulnerable one was spread over-a-barrel, or living in one, especially since the IRS still wanted its share, and its share of ordinary income was double or more (in at least some cases) what wealthy, top 1% had to pay. The bite it was taking out “ordinary” (earned) income was often more than double compared to the “unearned income” the kind received mainly by the people earning so much the last thing they needed was a lower tax rate than their employees as Warren Buffet himself eagerly pointed out was the case in his own office.

 Before the “piggy bank” strategy there was also a more disruptive social trend that was a positive step toward social equality, but away from that “American Dream” as conceived in the earlier part of the 20^th Century. That dream which looked so promising and really possible by mid-century following the end of the Second World War. This “progress” was accepting that a single wage earner in a family was insufficient to pay the bills, the spouse also had to find a job.

Not only was this a major tilt from a more-or-less level field for lower middle class and the lower classes to attain that middle class “dream” status, it became an uphill struggle in several different ways. Let’s just start with the change that came about in the field of “child care”.  Now, as wages stagnated and prices kept rising, forcing both parents to seek employment outside the home, the practice of sending the little ones off to pre-school or kindergarten was no longer a brief respite during the day for the homemaker to be able to have a couple hours relief from the hectic pace of caring for the children and “relax” by “merely” dashing out to pick up new socks for the boys at Penny’s, and groceries for the family at Safeway, and stop by the local bakery for some fresh bread, and pick up the dry cleaning from the corner outlet, just in time to greet the tiny van delivering the children home, all of which was facilitated by “borrowing” the family car (the one and only family car) after dropping the spouse at work in the morning, expecting them to catch a  ride home with a co-worker who lived nearby.

Of course this happened starting in the 1960’s and led to the “Women’s Movement” because spouses (mainly women, of course, at that time) were only given the opportunity to take lower paying and relatively menial jobs.  After all, the “wage earner” was supporting the family and spouses were just supplementing income, a little “pin money” as it was known at the time. Employers exploited this attitude to its maximum in those years with never a thought about equal pay being “fair”. But over the next 20 years, the “need” for a second income grew as wages continued to fall behind inflation (and the Consumer Price Index continued to hide it by masking the real price changes behind market basket adjustments: You will notice that the CPI is now quoted as being “excluding food and fuel”, because, the claim is, that food and fuel prices are “too volatile” to be included, and thus, at any given point in time would disproportionately skew the index number in one direction or the other). Of course we still have to buy food and fuel, but that doesn’t figure into the pure “index” of how the economy is doing. The fact that it is the “consumer” price index is an historical anomaly. But one of the areas that continued to inflate the cost of living was that now child care, outside school hours as well as for pre-school and kindergarten age kids, was now essentially a necessity.  Demand exceeded supply, and prices for child care rose to the point where the lower classes either had to rely on relatives and skip “professional” care (I use professional in the loosest possible sense here, since training for being a worker in a child care facility is about as rigorous as being a dog walker in Billings, Montana), or pay through the nose (well, not quite but in many cases the cost of child care ate up almost the entire second salary). There is no question that the demand for child care did create jobs by the thousands, that is, by the time you count every town in North America. The fact that child care of any sort was expensive made the cost of “private school” prohibitively high for most lower middle to middle middle class families.

Now as I have already pointed out, this prompted the so-called “Women’s Movement” which began in the 1960’s and continued through the 1980’s and even into the 1990’s.  (Actually, of course, the “women’s movement” began in upstate New York in Seneca in the mid-19^th century, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion.) The equal pay for equal work efforts have never reached actual parity, but opportunities did start to open up. The “glass ceiling” has been broken, several times in the Supreme Court of the United States, twice in a major party candidate for Vice-President of the United State (so far), female governors pepper the states, and so on. But even with both parents working outside the home, incomes have failed to keep pace with the demands of home ownership for most of the lower echelons of the economy. Recognition of this fact spawned a brief subsidy program for first time home buyers that was intended as much to try to revive the home construction industry as to put those first time buyers into homes.  It was a costly experiment that essentially failed to accomplish either of those goals, though it did help a few people a little bit.

What the first time buyers’ subsidization package failed to do was a more important lesson than what it did accomplish. It failed to be a broad stimulus to the economy as a whole. It did create some jobs, but it was seen for what it was, an attempt to see a blip in the uptick on construction employment as a positive sign that the economy as a whole was on the mend from the disastrous financial crisis of 2008. It fooled very few. You can pull the wool over almost the entire American public’s eyes, but this was not one of those times. The now famous quote of Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin actually applied to the initial stimulus package that the new President managed to get through Congress, loaded with tax cuts that the Republicans considered “stimulus” but you can’t tax cut your way to prosperity.  The so-called US$800 billion in “stimulus” was, in fact, “lipstick on a pig,” heavily burdened with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations (“small business owners” was the term favored by Republicans), with very, very little for the kind of massive infrastructure projects that would have created massive numbers of new middle class employment. This stimulus was nothing like the interstate highways system that President Eisenhower managed to get through Congress. Unfortunately, while it was a visionary and highly worthwhile deficit spending program, it was passed under the (secret) guise of a military spending bill because the very “definition” of an interstate highway was such that it must create a whole national system of emergency “airports”, which is to say, emergency landing strips of highway to allow rapid airborne deployment of American forces anywhere they might be needed within the United State in case of invasion by a foreign power. Since it was “military” spending, as well as infrastructure, in the wake of the Second World War, it was not hard to convince Congressmen (still almost exclusively men) that this was a wise application of taxes being collected, and even deficit spending to accomplish this defensive military goal. It was not a goal that received a lot of public attention, the military deployment purpose of the landing strip designs was intended to be a “secret” national defense strategy based on the experiences of the previous war. As they say, the military is always fighting the previous war (or in this case, anticipating that the next war, whoever “the enemy” might be, would be fighting in roughly the same manner as the last war, a strategy which was fairly self-evidently unwise since the Americans had been a significant factor in winning the prior war.

However, with his attention elsewhere (on social welfare problems, as could be expected from a President whose previous employment had been oriented toward just such problems of urban blight) President Obama failed to produce a vision of equivalent inspiration and scope. Of course, too, the previous Democratic administration had been waiting eight years (through the 2nd Bush interregnum) to try again to put forth a national health plan, and were no small influence (especially in the peacemaking process following the rather bitterly fought primary campaign between Clinton #2 and Obama).  But worse still, the insurance lobby had grown “fat”, which is to say, even more powerful than it had been, especially by the introduction of a diversion of Medicare money to the insurance companies’ “Medicare Advantage” plans that siphoned off a considerable (approximately $700 billion per year) in administrative fees from actual Medicare benefits, and their buddies in Congress, were not about to let “socialized medicine” (a single payer plan, like Medicare itself) take away that rather rich icing from their “cake”.  The rhetoric arising from this eventually became a Republican claim that the Obama administration plan for their “Affordable Care Act” (eventually known as, proudly, by President Obama himself, “Obamacare”) was “taking $700 billion away from senior citizens” while the administration said it was adding the $700 billion which the (Republican) Congressman Ryan’s proposed Republican budget diverted away from public health care. None of which created any jobs (except for the lawyers who already worked for the politicians drafting legislation to counter the other party’s proposals, and a few ad agency jobs to publicize the fight).

At that time (early in the Obama administration), which was, you will recall, shortly after the financial debacle that virtually coincided with the 2008 presidential election, the various calls for stimulus was a virtually a shouting match between Republicans calling for tax cuts and Democrats calling for spending as the best economic stimulus. The resulting compromise (some claim that governing is the art of compromise) did very little to stimulate the economy largely because of smallness. That is, the smallness of the size of stimulus that President Obama’s colleagues managed to squeeze from Congress. If President Obama had been able to pull out as visionary an infrastructure project as President Eisenhower had done with the Interstate Highway System, say, as an interstate railway system upgrade to equal the quality and speed of tracks and trains that now crisscrossed Europe and Japan (and more recently selected routes in China, too), it would have been the kind of economic stimulus that would have “kept jobs at home”, a key element of stimulating the domestic economy, and put thousands upon thousands to work across the country. Again, flooding the demand for workers, pushing up wages, moving out of wage stagnation for the lower middle class, and under girding the lower classes, too. You can’t lay track in Malaysia using Malaysian labor if you are upgrading the track between Baltimore and Boston, or Atlanta and Houston.  In fact, this is exactly the kind of national infrastructure project that could be initially targeted to begin in areas of depressed economic conditions, starting in multiple locations, eventually joining up at distant points (a lot less tricky than joining the eastbound and westbound track of the first transcontinental railroad now that we have pinpoint accurate GPS. So even if you had to spread the political “pork” of government spending across every state in the nation, all of those joints would be laser aligned and GPS positioned. Would $700 billion have been enough?  Not a chance, but once undertaken, the commitment to making a nationwide system workable would draw in private capital wanting to gain advantage, state and municipal budgets being applied to assure that railway stations were attractive not only to passengers but to concession lessees who would profit from the foot traffic of passengers boarding and unloading.  Then too, there would be all the private shipping companies who would be eager to add loading and unloading facilities. It might be expensive to load flatcars with trailers from trucks, but trucks can’t travel at near airplane speeds across the country for less fuel per ton than they can as part of a high speed train.  Once the tracks can handle the speeds, the overcrowding and delays of airports reduces air travel costs too (not necessarily airline ticket prices, which are, today, operating on very thin margins already).

Was Obamacare the greatest social program since Medicare?  Since Social Security, perhaps?  Well, no, not nearly, especially since it still ended up in the hands of the insurance companies whose overhead was still far higher than the single payer system of Medicare itself, but added regulations that required insurers to pay back a portion of premiums not used on actual care of the subscriber, and other details of the overall plan, like no exclusions for pre-existing medical conditions, made it better than it appears on the surface as just another means of funneling federal money to already profitable insurance companies. But did it create jobs? Did it mean that more of the middle class went back to work? It did not. In fact, fairly significant reductions in the jobless rate from over 8% to around 6% more recently are reportedly due more to long term unemployed persons simply leaving the workforce, no longer seeking jobs and therefore no longer being counted as officially “unemployed”.  The size of the workforce itself adds about 200,000 persons per month.  Young people mature, though, unfortunately fully one third of them are not even graduating from high school. That is not exactly the kind of highly skilled workforce one would want to be expanding every month.  So job growth has to keep pace with that expansion just to stay at the same level.  New jobs must be created at the rate of 200,000 every month just to keep up with population growth.

There are those who advocate an increase in the minimum wage, but there are two flaws with that plan.  Firstly there is the inflation that will cause, not only will a hamburger now cost $11 instead of the already over priced $4 for a pretty plain burger at the corner burger joint, which will hit the poorest the hardest, but they want to “phase it in” over several years to allow people to adjust to the higher wages, which will merely guarantee the price inflation time to phase in as a parallel effect.  And worst of all, rents will rise and landlords will reap the majority of the benefits, exactly the richest 1% who are already excessively compensated (but in this case not taxed until the real estate asset is sold, so essentially this is a tax deferred increase in income, like an IRA for rich people).

Another interesting proposal that has backing from both Nick Hanauer and Robert Reich is an increase in the EIC, the “Earned Income Credit”. This, in case you haven’t heard of it or benefited from it is a “bonus” from the government that they hand out at tax time (April 15^th each year) to people who have had a poor income (lower classes and lower middle classes) especially mothers with children who have no husband to help support those children (or even one child) although it also applies to single fathers too, but that is a relatively rare occasion.  One of worst features of this program, the income from which can be quite substantial (in terms of the small income these people earn in the first place). It is intended to assure as the name implies that they have at least some non-government income, this program subsidizes their income, in other words encourage people to have at least part of the annual income from actual “work” from someone, preferably backed up with a W2 form to prove that the work was actually done.  The BIG problem with how this is handled is that although there is an “option” to spread out the payments over the entire year, adding it to income being earned by the low wage earner week by week supplementing the low pay to make it something closer to a living wage.  That option, however,  is almost never chosen by the person receiving this subsidy from the IRS/government.  They take it as a lump sum, on the day they file their taxes. Ask the folks at any tax preparation firm.  The early filers are almost always, mainly, the ones who expect the Earned Income Credit, because it is like Christmas to them. Indeed, the onslaught at tax preparation firms starts a couple of days before the deadline for employers to deliver those W2 forms to their employees, which since it comes around the end of January is very much like a late Christmas (bonus) for them. They take the “bonus” and spend it so quickly it almost never affects the lifestyle, the nutrition of the children, or any of the other benefits to poor families that the legislators intended it to fulfill when they passed the law funding this program. Typically they pay off the huge credit card debt that they have accumulated over the prior year, or they pay off the debts to merchants who have been kind enough to lend them credit (usually at a very profitable rate of interest), or they use it to go out and buy a “new” used car, trading up from the old piece of junk car they are already driving that is sapping them dry with repair bills to one they hope will get them through to the next Earned Income Day, when they will be able to afford to do the same again. That is how Earned Income Credit is actually used by the typical recipient.

The economists have wisely, I think, settled upon this mechanism as one which can have the maximum benefit to the people who need it most, and without causing a general inflationary trend like raising the minimum wage would (which, as we know from the above, tends to benefit the rich more than the poor anyway).  I would endorse that move, except that they need to FIX the Earned Income Credit FIRST.  They should make it mandatory that the EIC be distributed to the eligible recipients over the course of their employment.  The EIC should also be scaled the amount of employment that they have managed to engage in.  If they work 20 hours a week for 40 weeks a year, the EIC should be proportional to those 40 weeks, perhaps inversely proportional to the wages they earned, but NOT as it is now, increase for every child they have.  Tying EIC to number of children may benefit the elected officials by keeping their electorate population high, or even the churches in the district by adding annually to the number of potential parishioners. But there is no provision in the EIC that the parent must feed and clothe the child adequately.  It is entirely local provisions that the parent must educate the child, and believe me, I have heard tales from social workers that would make your skin crawl if not outright vomit at the kind of treatment (no let’s call it what it is, “neglect) that children supposedly being educated at home, were receiving. I am not talking about children who could not merely read, I am talking about kids wandering nearly or actually naked around an apartment in which dirty diapers line the walls and a dead, already stiff from rigor mortis dog was still being ignored under the television set, the drunken mother, well pickled in her favorite alcohol, asleep on the kitchen table. It may sound unbelievable, but it was a true story told to me by a social services worker about the work she was doing. Lump sum EIC should immediately be abolished.

Most important, however, is to create and follow an inspired vision for the future.  It doesn’t matter in the short term whether that might be high speed railway system across the nation. North and South, East and west and everywhere in between, or some other environmentally beneficial program, like a national flood prevention program that created adequate levies, and drainage alternatives everywhere there has ever been a devastating loss of life and property.  I am admittedly biased. I would like to see that “vision” being a renewable economy based on renewable energy resources, including a re-envisioning of agriculture as an industry that used less water than the human beings on the planet (aqua-culture, aquaponic farming, recycling both water and nutrients in leakless containers that allow water to enter the ground and the natural water table only after multiple cycles of use on the cultivation of plants that feed people, or for that matter switching to algae as a main source of food, fuel and feed for animal “crops”, while also feeding the algae its favorite food, excess carbon dioxide (CO2) from fuel burning energy stations, smelters and furnaces. But whatever course we choose, it must be soon, it must be before the legislatures stall action until it is too late to reverse the effects of climate’s changing patterns of more and more devastating storms, years of drought including failure to resupply aquifers with adequate snow pack in the mountains to replenish the aquifers in the spring, and scorching hot weather in spring, cold snaps in summer, rising sea levels that threaten to completely submerge island chains. Whole island nations in the Indian Ocean are rapidly decreasing in size as rising ocean levels actually have already covered some of their island lands. We need to pay attention to the fact that we have warm the sunny melts in Winter causing runoff that is forced to be contained between frozen river banks, unable to moisten the land needed for Spring crops and generally highly unfavorable conditions for the survival of humans on the planet.

 Some vision is needed.  Any vision that puts people to work on worthwhile projects. Helping American is also not the only solution.  Creating economically viable nations in other parts of the world, whether by shoring up failing bureaucracies in under-governed countries, or showing them how small scale capitalism can benefit local communities.  We need to put thousands of people to work, and we need it now, to get the middle class back on track toward a living wage, preferably a living wage from a single family member so that the other spouse can choose to be the homemaker/childrearing patent, because neglect of children, especially failing to instill in them a sense of the real importance of their education to their future success is going to be the ruin of our society if we don’t reverse the trend toward 30 to 50% high school drop-out rates.  People with that little education are not destined to join the middle class, they are destined for a life of poverty and misery and I do not want to see that happen.  Do you?

Sincerely,

Stafford “Doc” Williamson

It Sounds IMPOSSIBLE but SCOTUS Ruling is Unconstitutional

SCOTUS lets the Greens (Hobby Lobby) redefine abortion based on their religious “beliefs” that preventing pregnancy IS abortion. That’s a little to the right of Attila the Hun, isn’t it?

The very specific list of birth control items to which they objected, “PlanB”, “Elle”, and “IUD’s” (rather generally) (an IUD incase you don’t/didn’t know, is an “Intra-Uterine Device” which comes in many shapes, some of the common ones are the “coil” a flat spiral with a long “tail” at one end, the “bowtie” a slightly rounded pair of triangles joined at one pair of corners so that it looks like a bow tie, but before I bore you with a long list …) these are placed (usually by a doctor) inside a woman’s uterus which wraps it in cells much like it might do with a fertilized egg, thus fooling the body into believing that it is already pregnant and almost never allowing another egg to attach itself to the uterus, thus avoiding a real pregnancy.

All of these methods of birth control (more accurately called “pregnancy prevention”) methods prevent a fertilized egg from every becoming embedded in a uterine wall to start a pregnancy. PlanB and Elle do so (to the best of my understanding, and I admit I am often wrong) by triggering the start of the shedding of the uterine lining, more commonly known as a “period” or menstruation, but no pregnancy ever existed. Birth control by pregnancy prevention is NOT abortion.

Neither the Supreme Court of the United States, nor certainly the “serious religious beliefs” of one family can change the medical definition of either “pregnancy” nor of “abortion”, regardless of what they think they are entitled to do. The long established meaning of those words is contained in every dictionary of the English language, plainly and clearly stated, and although language is a living thing that can change meanings, I don’t think all the publishers of dictionaries are going to look upon this as a great marketing opportunity.

The constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion means two things to me, and to most Constitutional scholars, I understand. It means that I can practice your religion (even if that is atheism), and you can practice yours, but it does not give you the right to enforce your religious beliefs on me, or in any other way impinge on my religious freedom. Secondly it specifically prohibits the establishment of a national religion. It seems to me quite plain that SCOTUS has violated the constitution with this unjustified ruling no matter how narrowly this decision was intended by the Justices that it “should” to be construed. Nor is it a tiny step in the battle to overturn Roe v, Wade.

I won’t try to predict what form the next battle line will take, in the attempt to eliminate abortion (and even birth control) (as someone pointed out, the entire concurring majority of the SCOTUS opinion were elderly, Catholic, and hardly surprisingly, MEN) but I can assure you that it will take place as soon as the people who condone killing of doctors as a legitimate means of “saving” “lives” can arrange their troops, and their gangs of legal professionals. In fact, I don’t doubt that such a battle is already raging its way through the courts already. The good news today is that one federal court ruled that closing the last legal abortion facility in Mississippi was an “unusual” burden on the women of that state, and that it could not be closed because of that unreasonable burden of forcing Mississippi residents to travel to another state to seek a legal abortion.

It is hard, if not impossible, to remain dispassionate about this issue. It is possible to remain civil even in the face of the ill mannered, sometimes even violent opposition. However, we must remain so if we are to prevail in the long run.

Sincerely,
Stafford “Doc” Williamson

Does McConnel Think He Can Override Constitutional Protections?

I confess I have a bad habit of meandering from subject to subject because this is, after all is said and done, a place to express my opinions. I wrote this title before beginning the “column” this week because I want to make this short and pointed. Perhaps you could think of it as a Roman sword, the kind one is said to “fall on” when in shame and disrepute.

In this case it is Republican Minority Leader of the Senate who, unfortunately does not possess such an object, or surely, once he removed himself from the heat of the moment (provided in large part, no doubt, by the bright lights of the media cameras focused on his at the time). I would hope, at least, that he took the time to contemplate what he had done, but like a dog-of-war that he has become as a political animal, I doubt that he even noticed his grievous error.

The man stood in front of cameras on Capital Hill and said (I hope I am quoting him correctly, but I assure you the spirit is captured here even if not every comma and colon), “We usually give these fellows a lawyer and read them their rights, and that’s the end of it. I sure hope that isn’t what they are doing on the ship, right now, to that fellow from Benghazi.”

The situation at that point was that although he, Abu Khattala, had been interviewed several times by the media in Libya about any connection to the attack on the American consulate that killed Ambassador Steven in Benghazi, he had repeatedly denied any association with that particular group of terrorists, and had been living quite openly in Libya since the day of that tragic attack. However the elite troops of the US Delta Force “captured” him (against his will) and spirited him away to a waiting US ship off the coast of Libya in the Mediterranean Sea. So, essentially we “arrested” him without official permission or sanction, which legally speaking is called “kidnapping” (although we do it so often it falls into the general category of “rendition” a word we coined for the purpose) and took him across international borders to be held as a captive of the US Navy. No actual evidence has been shown (although a plan to prosecute him in the USA suggests that there is some hard evidence beyond circumstantial and “hearsay”, but if the “plan” was a criminal prosecution in the legal system of the USA, what authority was Senator McConnell evoking that should permit us to ignore the rights he had as a US prisoner (not an enemy combatant if we are going to have a criminal prosecution). As the Omaha World Herald (a Berkshire Hathawy company controled by none other than the relatively peaceful Oracle of Ohmaha) in it’s online version Omaha.comput it, “Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said the U.S. should skip the legal niceties and focus on interrogation.”

Now is that any way for one of the leaders of the “free” world to speak or behave? I ask you.

Clearly, in my opinion, ignoring anyone’s constitutional rights is a violation of law, his citizenship notwithstanding. Isn’t that how it is supposed to work?

Sincerely,
Stafford “Doc” Williamson

Human Rights, Water, Sewers, Food

Human Rights are “rights” a basic entitlement to those rights is the responsibility of every citizen of the world. I have created a couple of spaces on the internet where I try to raise awareness of certain issues for which I have concerns, but my “life’s work” is about integrating “green energy” (energy we grow, and energy from the waste we create) and at the same time creating food for the people growing the energy crop, as well as using the human waste as a resource that feeds the crop. Since the main thing that this crop “eats” is carbon dioxide, the sewage is the only major resource required to feed this stuff. The “stuff” is microalgae, and by making the sewage a NECESSARY input to growing algae for energy AND food, it give the sewers an economic value by delivering that set of essential nutrients to the crop. It makes it profitable to install sewers (or at least significant income producers) which is a major step toward both better sanitation and clean water availability, since one of the most worrisome forms of “pollution” to water supplies (other than dangerous chemical discharges from large industries) is from the other people who have diseases that are transmitted in the water.
Growing algae, which produces food and fuel (an exportable, profitable source of money for community development) is not some “miracle” or dream. It is real, it works today and integrates both inputs and outputs for the benefit of all.
It is something to think about. I hope anyone reading this will not only think about it, but will discuss it with others.
Thanks
Stafford “Doc” Williamson

War,Freedom, VITAL INTERESTS

SCOTUS lets the Greens (Hobby Lobby) redefine abortion based on their religious “beliefs” that preventing pregnancy IS abortion,  That’s a little to the right of Attilla the Hun, isn’t it?

Due to a wandering cursor and an inadvertent “enter” I lost a whole editorial on that subect, so i will proceed with the original intent of this post.  It is a copy of an email ( sent to some friends who are veterans of the Canadian military, and among my best friends.  (though I confess I am not as fond of soldiers as was my deceased sister,she married, in order, a captain in the reserves a Major who was a trainer for Special Forces, and a Colonel who was part of the command staff in the capital as well as former commander of the base where the Royal Military College is based,)  Anyway here’s the whole email.

Karen (and Doug)

I’ve met more than one Vietnam veteran who would be saluting the kid, and a few draft dodgers who had run away to Canada and were (smart enough?) not to trust the US Government that it meant what it said when it offered “amnesty”.  After all, one of the first things the American government does to someone who enlists (or is drafted) into the army here in the USA is to take away almost every civil right they ever had as a civilian, and substitute the “Uniform Code of Military Justice” for all laws and jurisdictions. That’s one of the main reasons they (the US military) couldn’t agree with the Iraqi government on a “status of forces” agreement to leave a residual force in Iraq.  The US military demanded immunity from local prosecution, in fact total immunity, so that only the “Uniform Code of Military Justice” was the governing law over US soldiers. (And the abuses of that immunity by the Blackwater contractors was one of the main reasons Iraq wasn’t having any of that shit from the US any more.) (Although they seemed to have “caved” on that issue to get US “advisors” back to help fight ISIS.)

The arguments are a lot more nuanced than the writer of this (original) message seems to think. (That email contained a cartoon of a the kid refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance, and the disabled veteran who “fought for his right” to do so.)   Before the “Muslims” it was the Catholics (who couldn’t even hope to get a President elected for almost 200 years), not to mention the Irish, and the Negroes, and the Jews.  It is SUPPOSED to be for the freedoms of ALL, and especially the 14% who disagree with the 86% for whom the military are engaged in either “protection” or battle.

There is something “noble” about people like you, who (Karen and Doug) are willing to maintain watch, manning the barricades, as it were, against potential threats, willing to sacrifice all if need be.

It has been over 70 years since any of: the US, Canada or Britain; fought a war of aggression against their countries. Terrorism isn’t an ideology, it is a strategy.

Now, I don’t deny that Islamism and the Islamists do mean ill to all our “countries” (although only to the extent that we don’t want to submit to their religion, so the “we believe in ‘God'” really means, in the context of this email (the cartoon contained that phrase from the Teacher character) that we believe in the Christian “GOD”, not just “god” in general, because that would have to include believe in Buddha, or Allah, too.) But Muslims are not the same as Islamists.  Islamists are the UN-crusaders, they just took a thousand years to getting around to doing with the (mostly Catholic) Christians were doing on their crusades through (and especially on the way to and from) the “Holy Lands”, trying to rid the world of “infidels”, although they enjoyed a good slaughter and pillage without inquiring as to the beliefs of small towns before they burned and pillaged to obtain supplies for their massive (hundreds or thousands) or knights and logistical staff.

Unfortunately the Islamists are also a little too like the Inquisition; theoretically if you profess to follow the “true faith” you are “saved” and therefore not subject to death or imprisonment, but like the Inquisition, sometimes that wasn’t good enough and they lopped off your head anyway. Putting away your religious fervour is not quite as easy as taking off your cowboy hat and gun belt, especially if your sword is already drawn. Watching a good beheading was more popular than football in France for a while, and it drove the crowds wild when they combined the football and beheadings in Iran not so long ago. (I think it was Iran, although my memory never was as good as I thought it was.)

Islamists are a little like Jehovah’s Witnesses, except that when they come to your door, if you don’t want to let them in to talk about Allah, they grab you by the throat and say, “You MUST believe in Allah, or I will have to strangle you to death. Two simple choices, yes?”

Muslims are not all Islamists.  One guy I talk to, a writer, in Pakistan says about 10% are on the side of the radicals … wait, more on that in a minute.  I just remembered something.

About 80 or 90 years ago in New York city you could spit on people and not be very likely to be arrested if it was one of those women with the scarves over their heads and dark clothing, or their men who wore the funny hats and almost always had beards … ooops, sorry, that’s what a lot of Muslims look like today, but back then that was the Jews.  My mistake. Never mind.  Back to my story.

But even in Pakistan, only about 10% of the radical 10% are genuinely supporters of violent means of spreading Islam.

Islamists, at least the current violent crop in ISISIL (or ISIL, or ISIS) are almost all Sunnis, which is kind of like the “Catholics” among Christians, it’s the most popular subdivision, but many, if not most, of the Islamists are like the radial Evangelicals (in the USA at least) the literalists in bible interpretation (Islamist also emphasize a lot of “selective” use of the Qu’ran for motivation) and as I say, many from the Osama (or Usama if you like) bin Laden followers are from the Wahabi sect (the “Evangelicals” of the Moslem world), as are a lot of the rest of al Qaeda.

Anyway, if you had your state impose a religion on you, like Henry VIII did to a country of Catholics you’d probably grumble a bit, but when another ruler tried to reinstate Catholicism after a few generations, and well, say 86% were Catholic, there (might) have been some pretty bloody opposition (again).  For that matter, isn’t that what started the last 400 years of war in Ireland?

Okay, I’m getting in over my depth here, but my point is that yes, the Soldier in the previous email’s cartoon, actually ALSO fought for the right of the Moslems to pray in the streets, and the Jews to wear funny hats (not just the yamakas, but those flat black felt ones of the really devote sects too), but NOT for the 86% to impose their religious beliefs on “other people’s children” through state sponsored education, or courts, or city halls.  Us Jews (like Maggie) and atheists (like me, although we both are more “pantheists” than completely any organized religion) can stand up for our own beliefs, but little kids don’t know any better than going along with the crowd, and succumbing to peer pressure to be “Christians” too. Hey even my Jewish wife is a bigger fan of Christmas than I am (she loves to get presents, I was raised in a Protestant home) and I am the one who tries to keep her on the “straight and narrow” of using only blue and white lights consistent with the tradition of Chanukah (not always successfully, since some years I don’t want to participate in the light hanging at all).

Right now, the fighting in the Middle East is a religious war between Muslim sects, the Sunni against the Shia, it involves “the West” because we seem to believe that the political borders as they were drawn on a map by the British at the end of WW I are still “important”.  But that is not the main reason. Syria doesn’t have a lot of oil. Did you notice how “laissez faire” the US has been with regard to the largely religiously sectarian civil war in Syria between the Sunni rebels and the [Shia] Alawites (despite the obvious excesses of the dictator), though removing chemical weapons was a clever “coup”.  Now in Iraq it also involves the West,, i.e. USA, because Iraq is now the SECOND LARGEST EXPORTER of crude oil of all the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC), and that’s a BIG economic interest, especially to the extent that a lot of the shareholders of the multinational oil companies are American citizens (and pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies and other “corporate citizens”), and thereby we are “protecting the vital strategic interests of the United States“, as we were in the first Gulf War.

Now that is not as patently clear as a political rant from Keith Olberman, or “lesson” from Rachel Maddow, but I hope it is a fairly balanced and factual account of how some of us come to our opinions based on more than jingoistic, xenophobic slogans.

So pass THIS along if you believe in religious freedom,or the “right” (??) to chose your foreign military entanglements.  (What was Canada doing in Laos in the mid-1960’s anyway?)

Love,

Doc Williamson

EPA, Coal, Clean Energy, Sustainable Energy

Just a few days ago, the EPA announced new rules on the emission of carbon (and specifically carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere. This was specifically aimed at coal fired electric generating plants, being seen as one of the largest contributors to non-organic carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, especially here in the USA, although also with a nudge to the People’s Republic of China who are opening a new coal fired electric generating plant every week for the last couple of years.

 

I just read an article from Sheeraz Haji, CEO, Cleantech Group, which took a very optimistic view of how this would be a positive step for utility companies, and pointed to some of the more forward looking of those, especially those who had made investments in Cleantech like the purchase of cleantech companies and technologies.  Those were encouraging signs, but there are also warning posts on every fence post along this superhighway to the future, and I thought it was necessary to comment on at least a couple of them. I’ll try to limit myself to just a couple, because I am sorry to report that despite my usual optimism about getting some of the really “green” and sustainable alternative to overwhelm the practices of today, I tend to have a lump of pessimism in my throat every time I try to imagine that there are not a whole cavalry of well paid lawyers and engineers out there working to preserve the status quo and protect the capital value of their assets in the ground (coal, oil and natural gas, for a start) rather than thinking of new ways to make them worth even more by switching to alternative energy sources and turning their assets into source material for more highly manufactured goods with higher profit margins than $10/ton coal.

Sad to say, there IS NOT SUCH THING AS GREEN COAL. Obviously I don’t mean green colored coal (there probably is some of that somewhere), I mean that no matter how clean burning it, you would have to invent a machine that defied the laws of physics to be able to “burn” coal, extract a net amount of energy from it, and then put the carbon back into the rock and make it part of the geology again, rather than part of the atmosphere. That is the essence of the coal/oil problem, we are essentially taking what geology has turned into “fossil carbon” (by storing that old carbon in rock formations, whether in solid forms like coal, or fluid forms like oil and natural gas) millions of years ago. Now we are taking that fossil carbon, which the earth has, but very slow and natural geological processes, turned into a “stored” form of carbon, and putting it back into circulation in what I call the “living carbon cycle” or “live carbon cycle” in which plants “breath in” the carbon dioxide, and convert it to stored energy either as sugars and starches for short term use, or as long chain carbons like lignin, or cellulose that build the structure of the plants themselves. (Algae, especially microalgae, shortcut this process a bit by only building the shorter end of those, mainly sugars, starches, and a little bit to form cell membranes (but relatively rarely into conventional plant structures like stems and roots and leaves, etc.although California Giant Kelp is also a form of algae and they have PLENTY of stems and leaves, hundreds of feet long).  But in terms of total biomass, microalgae are almost half the known “plant” life on the planet, and are rivaled only by (their former cousins, now recognized as bacteria, not algae at all) cyanobacteria  (although plain old bacteria probably outweigh even those two combined, and who knows how much “biomass” all the active and dormant viruses [virii] there may be) (but I digress, as usual).  Anyway, microalgae start the whole animal food chain, in both oceans and fresh water, and pretty close to every other living thing in the ocean (water) depend on that progression of consumption starting with micro algae being “eaten” by something larger, and so on up to whales. Meanwhile, back on land, the terrestrial plants do much the same thing (except the skipping roots and leaves thing), absorbing and temporarily storing the carbon dioxide, and only releasing it as a result of their own respiration, or as they rot after they die (or are eaten)(which generally speaking, means they are, or at least become dead, too).

So, it stands to reason, that even though all that biomass of microalgae, not-so-micro algae, all the things that eat it, or that eat the things that eat it, the land based plants, including everything from mushrooms and lichen to giant redwood and sequoia trees, ants, grasshoppers, cattle, elephants, gorillas and humans (these last three resembling each other more and more, lately, it seems to me) have a limit on how much carbon dioxide they can effectively process.  Beyond that quantity (and remember that all of these things have cell walls, or at least cell membranes, in addition to the parts for respiration and the creation and storage of energy), carbon dioxide in the atmosphere become “excess”, and adds to the mix of gases in the atmosphere. Now we have to look at the proven effect of more carbon dioxide in a given space of “atmosphere.”

It is well know, especially by people who actually grow things in greenhouses, that if you trap the carbon dioxide that the plants growing under the closed space contained by a “house of glass” (aka a “greenhouse”) absorb and hold more heat that the ordinary atmosphere outside. One of the effect of which allows them to expend less energy heating the glass houses in winter than they otherwise might, considering the rather poor insulating effect of plain old glass. But the really noticeable occurrence of this “capturing more heat because there is more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air” is on a warm day when it is, say perhaps, 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade outdoors, if you can find a shady spot inside the greenhouse where the plants are enjoying the sunshine, doing their photosynthesis thing that stores the sunlight’s energy in sugars, starches and oils, but outputs large amounts of carbon dioxide, you will find that the temperature inside is at least a couple of degrees warmer, and if you are a person with a scientific bent (and most scientists are at least a little bit “bent”) you put up another greenhouse next door and compare the temperatures on the same day with no plants growing in the same size and type of greenhouse, and you find that it is a little warmer, because the glass prevents the air from escaping upwards (hot air rises, and mixes with other cooler air up there in the clouds), but not as “extra warm” as it is in the greenhouse full of photosynthesising plants putting extra CO2 into the air inside the greenhouse.  Now this easily observed “scientific” fact is what is called the “greenhouse effect”, and it blamed for mankind adding fossil carbon to the atmosphere as triggering a general warming of the air around the planet, which is causing climate changes.

Those changes in climate are blamed for extra hurricanes, and extra violent storms, more tornados, droughts in some areas, and floods in others, hotter summers and colder winters (or in some cases even warmer winters). We have certainly seen all of those things happen. Yet some people argue that the larger, overall trend is toward a colder future because we are sliding right past the peak of the turn and are headed back into another mini-glacier period.  That interpretation is becoming harder to accept because we have seen, recently, that a very large chunk of Antarctica has broken off, and seems to be feeding a current of colder water into the overall pattern of ocean currents that circulate across the entire world. I was going to set aside the whole issue from psychology that people generally have a tendency to see patterns where there is none.  This is especially true of trying to organize “face” patterns from random sets of lines. The addition of extra quantities of cold water from Antarctic ice could result in higher water levels, and a smaller cooling region effect from Antarctica itself, or it could be the turning point of more and more cold water cooling the planet that compensates for the increase in carbon dioxide, the slight rise in temperature and ocean levels so far.

A similar warming trend at the opposite “end” of the earth, the Arctic, has shrunken the polar ice cap there, to the point that the legendary “NorthWest Passage” that took many men’s lives in the 18th and 19th centuries searching for this shortcut across the frozen oceans North of the Western continent of North America (that is to say, the continent to the West of Europe where commerce was centered as far as the Western world was concerned during those centuries). Now the passage across the North of Canada is usually open for the passage of ships during almost the entire year. No sea ice or polar ice cap prevents modern cargo ships from getting through. Indeed Canadian’s ice breaking ships, while now build larger and stronger, are less in demand, at least along this Northern corridor. Larger chunks, too, are breaking off the icecaps of Eastern Greenland. The cumulative effect of cooling the larger flows of global ocean currents at both ends is still fairly unpredictable, although that hasn’t prevented both sides of the “climate change” arguments from trying to latch onto this as a support for their side.

The Northern warming trend has another huge factor, too, which is that so much of the frozen “tundra” of Northern Canada and Russia.  Much of this area is covered by only partially decayed “muskeg”, swampy bogs of partially decayed plants and roots in thick bogs that, although they remain frozen much of the year, come summer, they now get warm enough to melt and the rot progresses. That rotting releases more methane (also known as “swamp gas”) and carbon dioxide. Methane is considered to be some 32 times more harmful to the atmosphere than is carbon dioxide. The total area involved in this melting and rotting muskeg is about equal in size to the Amazon river’s wide tropical rainforest basin. If this is a phenomenon that has not come to your attention, or at least has not been explained to you this way before, please be aware that most (if not all) of the budget to repair leaks in the great Trans-Alaska pipeline is due to the fact that many of the supports that hold the level above the ground to where it is supposed to avoid melting the muskeg from the heated pipes carrying the oil, have been supported on muskeg that was never expect to soften.  The idea was that they would be dug down so deep that these supports would be sitting on “solid” ground. This “solid” ground that was supposed to be solid because it was expected to be permanently frozen because it was so deep. It got warmer up there than they ever expected. It did not, however, get warm enough to promote significant growth, the way that “normal” forest leaves rot on the floor of the area, while the trees above produce oxygen and consume carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. Natural processes are assumed (overall) to roughly balance CO2 production and consumption     

 Now, they say, and by “they,” I mean the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency of the USA (NOAA) that estimates are from about 1750 from which we have little if any real data, CO2 estimates were about 300 parts per million (so that’s about 0.03% of the atmosphere) which rose to about 320 parts per million in about 1901.  And finally it is now around 380 parts per million (which is roughly 0.038%, or to be generous, about 0.04% or 4 one hundreds of one percent, any and all of which is/are the same as 4 parts in 10,000). It is not easy to draw a picture of that, but imagine your bathroom floor (a moderately large bathroom, 6 feet wide, and 9 feet long, filled with 10,000 marbles (each marble is about 1/2 inch across [diameter] which would roughly fill that bathroom floor.  9,996 of those marbles are medium blue, 4 marbles are light blue. Now the next room is exactly the same size, and it has 9,997 blue marbles and 3 light blue marbles in it. That’s how much change there was in the last 250 years, 3 marbles versus 4 marbles in 10,000 marbles.

Okay, now let’s look at the last, say, 100 years, and frankly I don’t think there was a big change in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from 1900 to 1920 despite the best efforts of Henry Ford and his competitors trying to sell automobiles (which ran on methanol in those early days). So let’s say 1920 had 320 parts per million, while today we have (pessimistically) 400 parts per million. Now, conveniently, 400 and 320 are both evenly divisible by 80, which gives us 5 and 4 respectively, so that’s our ratio.  We have gone from 4 to 5 parts in 100 years (including those “worst” years recently since 1980). But if we look at the precentage change, we went from 3 parts to 4 parts over 250 years, and now we’ve gone from 4 parts to 5 parts.  Restated those changes are 4 thirds (i.e. 4/3 or 133% in 250 years) and more recently, 5 quarters (i.e. 5/4 or 125% for 100 years). Obviously that’s a vast degree of acceleration. Translated to “real world” terms, that 6% change over the first 150 years but 20% change in just the last 100 years.

It seems like the biggest change over the last 100 years is the addition of fossil carbon burning by humans.  Anthropogenic CO2 is what they call it. And it seems like a logical explanation. Much of the world, and most of the world’s “scientific community” (especially according to the IPCC report) agree that the “crisis” is man-made. But when people start to call this “settled science” it is more of an indication that they don’t understand science than that the “facts” are proven.  Science is always subject to questioning, and always a matter of the “best available solution” (that can be replicated by others under similar conditions).  Unfortunately, when the whole world is affected, we don’t have the chance to go back and do it again to test if the theory is correct.  But we do have an obligation to continue to look at ALL the possible explanations and to see if some other explanation is equally valid in terms of the facts as best we understand them.

One of the other untested postulates is that the temperature changes we are seeing are due to changes at the earth’s liquid core.  Not something that is easy to test.

Another explanation is that “sun spot” activity are affecting the protective “bow wave” that protects the earth from much of the solar radiation that might otherwise come slamming into our planet.  Perhaps it is, but at such a small level that it only warms the planet by 2 degrees per century.

Another important one to consider is that it has been reported (and fairly well verified) that the total number of phytoplankton in the oceans has declined by as much as 40% since 1950.  Phytoplankton is another name for microalgae. Microalgae “eat” CO2.  They also “breath” (i.e. respire, the process that uses stored energy and oxygen to carry out the process of living, which gives off CO2,) but a lot less than they store. Indeed some kinds of phytoplankton sink to the bottom of the ocean and in a few million years turn into limestone.  Others sink to the bottom of the ocean and a few million years of heat and pressure turn them into … are you ready for this?  Petroleum.  But meanwhile they are taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and turning it into rock or “rock oil” (that’s what “petr-oleum” means) taking it out of circulation in the “active” carbon cycle, and keeping a balance in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content that promotes a stable growing environment. Now some scientists have begun to think that global warming (and specifically warming of sea temperatures) have been killing off the phytoplankton.  They may be right.  But I am inclined to think that it is the dying off of the phytoplankton and their tremendously valuable work as CO2 absorbers that has allowed extra CO2 to accumulate in the atmosphere.

I am less certain, but I am hopeful that a gentleman who died in 1993 according to the biographical information I read about him in a discussion of his theory, may have a solution for much of the decline in phytoplankton in vast, vast amounts of the world’s oceans.  He discovered that by adding a little bit of chelated iron to the water made water that was already rich in the other nutrient needed by phytoplankton (i.e. algae) caused them to flourish there again. He specifically claimed that 1 kilogram of iron would result in something like 3000 to 20,000 kilograms of phytoplankton. It has been 20 years since John Martin (inventor of the theory of iron fertilizer to stimulate plankton growth) but the research has been investigated by 13 subsequent teams who confirm his results. “Mesoscale Iron Enrichment Experiments 1993-2005: Synthesis and Future Directions”. Science 315 (5812): 612–7.

Although “sequestration” of CO2 is assumed by some people to mean immediate and permanent removal, there really is no such thing. Trees and bushes are considered by the IPCC as “sequestration” even though they only last a few decades. And even the carbon that become sequestered in sedimentary layers at the bottom of the oceans eventually gets swallowed by the drift of the continental plates, pushed down into the melted core of the earth and comes out again in the form of exploding volcanic eruptions. Which brings me to my final point for the day. If one was to total up all of the volcanic eruptions for the last 50 years, and calculate all the carbon dioxide they put into the atmosphere, I would wager a dollar that you would find the result was more than all the anthropogenic carbon in the entire history of mankind, including cavemen’s cave fires. It’s just a guess, but mankind it rather puny in the face of the vast power of nature, as we have seen recently with the tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, typhoons, and earthquakes that have killed so many thousands of people in just the last couple of decades.  I am inclined to think it is excessively ego centric to think that “man” has had such a huge effect on the temperature of the earth, but like most things on earth, earth will find a way to be “self-correcting” even if it means making living conditions unsuitable for the offending species.

Sincerely,

Stafford “Doc” Williamson

 

 

Rape, Carbon, Ukraine, Guantanamo, It is an Interdisciplinary World

A great deal has happened recently and some of it, it appeared to me in the last couple of days was worth a comment here. Foremost in my mind among international events is the rape and subsequent murder to two girls in India (more on that in a minute). Russia rescinding its “gift” of the Crimea to the Ukrainian People’s Republic (formerly the Ukrainian People’s Socialist Republic, at the time of the gift, one should remember), and the subsequent ambitions to re-absorb other certain other parts of the Ukraine where the population is predominantly Russian in heritage (more on that in a minute, too). And, certainly neither last nor least is the Obama administration’s backing of the Environmental Protection Agency’s weak-kneed, (or horrendous, depending on your side of the coal issue, I suppose) regulations on the emissions of carbon dioxide as a result of human activity. Lastly, and probably leastly with respect to this set of world events enumerated here is the prisoner exchange of the five Afghan religious fanatics (and violently insurgent) former prisoners of the illegal prison in the US military base in Cuba. (Yup, you can expect an expansion on those items too, shortly.)

But, meanwhile I wanted to add a couple of comments that American media might call, burying the lead. (That’s lead as in led, as opposed to leading as in stained glass.)  Frankly, I am, possibly too much influenced by local news policy which is so widespread in North American media whether or not it has infected all media across the globe (and with some relatively rare exceptions, like dictatorships or other closely controlled media).  That policy is, roughly stated, as, “If it bleeds, it leads.” And roughly translated that means if it involves violence, bloodshed, and especially death from the expanded borders of the metropolitan area locally, it should be used to grab the attention of the audience as the opening story in any media coverage.  Occasionally, as happened nationally in the USA, in June of 2014, there is a sufficiently violent (and relatively rare) instance of foreign violence (in this case, a young man shooting and killing three members of the Canadian national police force known as the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police]) that it takes the leading position in most news coverage. However I note also with some substantial cynicism, that it was mere hours before the fatal shooting of one person with two additional wounded on the campus of a relatively obscure college in Seattle, Washington that took precedence over the Canadian triple homicide in most venues and media.Americans have such a localized opinion of what constitutes news that airliner crashes in foreign territories, especially of foreign based airlines, such events barely get a mention unless American citizens were aboard. (This is what used to be called “provincial” in France, when people in the provinces considered local issues important, which was the French way of sneering at things of lesser importance, because they happened in “the provinces”, those dirty, grubby farming places outside of Paris, which was [pardonez moi, SVP, naturally I meant to say, “is”] the only important place in the world. So the American perspective is not entirely “new” or confined entirely to American, either.) (In fact it was also called “Chauvinistic”, after the famous Frenchman who publicly declared such an attitude, a term still used today, although not much in most of American popular media, the American educational system being so poor that the majority of Americans would not be familiar with the term “chauvinistic” [notice how it has joined the language enough that it has lost the capital letter from the gentleman’s name].) But as is so often my case, I have wandered rather far from my original point which is that a good number of people “tune in” for the local news, which in my case  is that I have recently graduated from Arizona State University with a Master of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Studies. Interdisciplinary pursuits are all the rage now in institutions of hire learning, (and higher learning too) and virtually every discipline has adopted an interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary program of some sort or another. Not only did I “rocket” through that degree in under 12 months total, from start to finish (a program designed to take 4 semesters and be spread over 2 years at least), but by the time I got around to realizing that I might want to continue my education at the PhD level, I discovered that virtually every doctoral program across the country had a deadline for application for entry to the Fall 2014 semester back in December of 2013.  I had no idea that it was such a long process, nor, apparently fairly competitive.  I am hoping my 12 month version of an MA may impress a little, and that my recent overall (for the whole degree) GPA of 3.87 is high enough to put me ahead of most applicants.  (My wife just notice that this would be a “summa cum laud” for an undergraduate degree.) Nor are these the only those factors that are now in my favor. I am not eligible to be considered under  “diversity” criteria. It is now a little bit on my side, since diversity generally extends to all protected “classes”, thus I am now a “minority” because of my age. By next fall, I will be one year short of eligibility for medicare, and still two and half  years (I think) from full retirement age as far as social security is concerned.

Attending ASU has had a couple of other side benefits, I (and a team I gathered around me) were selected as “finalists” in a business incubator competition held by the intellectual property commercialization group of ASU (with backing from several corporations, including the Mayo Clinic, and Dignity Health, as well as from the ACA, the Arizona Commerce Agency).  We did not get the grant, but we did learn about some interesting intellectual property that I am still pursuing and actually seeking financial backing for a privatization via sponsoring further developmental research at the University.  Another competition held by a “change oriented” (self-evidently) ASU organization called “Changemakers” at ASU also select me (without a team to back me) for another project to create a biomass power station in Kenya. Again, a finalist, although no award, but it was a chance to publicize my G.E.M.P.A.L.A. plan (Green Energy Marshall Plan for Africa and Latin America), which is a much broader and most ambitious plan for food and fuel self sufficiency for every town in both of those continents. So that’s the local news, other than I have applied for another MA program (being ineligible to start a PhD in the fall) with the hope of taking some of those “cross-disciplinary” courses that will be credited toward future PhD degree criteria.

Now, back to the real topics of some import.  The two girls raped and killed in India we also hung up in public to display their bodies for all to see. Reportedly they were not just raped but “gang raped” by several men, before being killed, and hung up on display because these men had no fear of reprisals or even consequences of their actions because these girls were from the lowest “caste” of the ancient Indian caste system, the caste formerly known as “the untouchables”. According to the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/618508/untouchable the whole classification of “untouchable” was made illegal in India in 1949 (and in Pakistan in 1953), although several classes of the caste system are still officially designated as “Scheduled Classes”. But that ancient tradition still holds strong among much of India. Although the Britannica notes that in Southern India “untouchables” were, at one time, forced into living entirely after dark because even the sight of them was consider a form of pollution supposedly such is no longer the case today. But this instance of blatant rape and murder took place in the North of India, in India’s most populous province, and yet police initially refused to take any action, considering the girls to be of absolutely no consequence, and therefore it was not even possible to commit a crime against them. The “Dalit” a broad group that encompasses several of the former low classes including the former “untouchables” (ibid.) rose up in protest, not so much against the crime of rape but against the affront to their illegal treatment as untouchables under Indian law.

It now seems that this class (caste) system is a major contributor to the rash of gang rapes in particular, and to the overall crisis of rape of women in India. Unlike the problem in America of “date rape” (and “fraternity” rape) on college campuses, which is certainly something that is a major miscarriage of justice when sports team members are harder to convict than members of America’s “lower classes”, it seems like a major first step in quelling the rising tide of (publicity if not instances of) rapes in India is to force police  to enforce the existing laws.  America has been through this process, and remnants remain in the Southern states where a white man is highly privileged over black or brown skinned individuals with respect to many crimes, and especially rape, although non-white women being raped is also a lower priority for prosecution (and more readily a plea bargain) than for anyone to rape a white woman. But those deep roots and modern deep seated belief in the caste system in India, has got to be a priority or the rape problem will continue to be an insurmountable violation of basic human rights for a very, very long time. When one group of society does not even consider the other group to BE human, it is essentially impossible to convince them that they owe them respect, or that they have any more right to exist than cockroaches. This example is going to shock and dismay most readers, but I don’t want you to skip it because it conveys some of the horror that I feel in this situation.  You see, to the men involved in these cases, it is like comparing a case of gang raping a Dalit girl, or gang raping a sheep, the main difference being that you don’t have to kill the sheep.

Depending upon your point of view, the bloodless coup of Russia taking Crimea “back” may not be such a big deal. Strictly speaking it was the “Soviet Union of Socialist Republics” and specifically the hand of Premier Khrushchev that gave away the Crimean territory to the Ukraine as a sort of bribe or a dowry for continued friendly relations, much in the medieval tradition of marrying off a daughter to seal an alliance between countries. It was a dumb move, because it meant that that Russia’s only port on the Black Sea was now in a Ukrainian province. Theoretically during recent events it would have been more politically correct and polite to hold the referendum of the people to re-join Russia before strong-arm tactics of special forces of the Russian military effectively stage managed an “un-uniformed” commando coup, but it made very little difference in the world overall.

On the other hand, it was a little uncomfortably like Saddam Hussein annexing the oil-rich Kingdom of Kuwait. In general, however, seizing all that oil wealth was one thing, seizing a sleepy port province on the Black Sea (where the Russians already controlled the port anyway) was far less disturbing to the world at large and to the financial interests of any major multi-national corporations in particular. Bacj ub 1855 and 1856, both sides, or rather, all sides, including France, England, Russia, Austria and the Ottoman Turks, had learned that conducting a war in the Crimea was at best difficult, and ultimately futile anyway. Again, citing the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Crimean War was largely yet another religious war fought over “protecting” Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Muslim Ottoman Turkish empire which also included a dispute over the rights of Orthodox versus Catholic Christians in the Palestinian region. [ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/143040/Crimean-War ] Lord, Allah, Buddha and the rest, please spare us from any more wars over religion (a hopeless “prayer” if ever their was one, I fear). Meanwhile it is unlikely that Ukrainians will be treated any less fairly than Russians were prior to the change in administrations in Crimea. The sad part is the “separatism” in Eastern Ukraine.

It appears that Russian agitators (quite possibly Russian special operations troops, at least according to one set of photos that show what appears to be the same man appearing in pictures from Chechen uprisings and in Eastern Ukraine, and the Crimea) are bolstering fears of the new government in Kiev treating ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine as second class citizen (despite the economic value of both the manufacturing sector there, as well as oil wealth and other strengths of the country derived from the region).  At the same time the are promoting “separatist” feelings (and even declarations) for some regions in the area while also supplying weapons (clearly of Russian manufacture) (remember, I am commenting, not reporting based on any personal first hand knowledge, although even I can recognize the similarities to weapons carried by regular Russian soldiers). Russia’s position tends to be conciliatory outside of Russia, but internally, Putin is beating the drums against European interference in the Ukraine, as well as promoting an anti-gay campaign at home.

President Obama is getting nominal support from European allies and NATO members, but the practical matter is that much of Europe is dependent on Russia for supplies of natural gas to keep from freezing in the winter and has considerably more at stake with respect to spoiling trade established with Russia that is not insignificant to many European country’s economic well being, too. However, in theory, even the Crimean interference was a violation of treaties the US held/holds with the Ukraine to protect its sovereignty, which is what makes the special forces without uniforms such a clever strategy on the part of the Russians in their campaign to take control of the whole of Crimea.  The problem, however is that although they now have control of the province containing their military port on the Black Sea, they have no all-land route to get to it without passing through the Ukraine. It would, therefore be highly convenient for Russia to provoke separatists in Eastern Ukraine to break aways, and due to the ethnic background of those people (including speaking Russian on a day-to-day basis) to merge with their Russian neighbors.  Again this rings an historical bell repeating a particularly unsavory example from the past.

The “ethnic” origins and protecting their interests was Germany’s excuse for seizing the “Sudetenland” during the early part of the Second World War.  Frankly, the Germans gained less from that annexation than would the Russians if they were to create a land bridge to their currently remote and isolated Black Sea military base. (I may be wrong about that. I don’t know the geography well enough to know if Sudetenland controlled significant terrain of value to the Germans, like well established major river crossing points, or mountain passes, the value of which I am under qualified to evaluate in the first place.) My point, however is not just that there are ethnic excuses for Russia to want to “protect” those (Orthodox??) Russians in the Ukraine, but that like the seizing of Kuwait, or the seizing of Sudetenland, these are examples of what are now considered fairly “heinous” crimes as those sort of things go in the history of the world, at least from the Western Civilization’s point of view generally.

With respect (and I do mean some respect) to the EPA regulations on carbon dioxide emissions, like most regulations from a government elected according to billionaire’s best interests and corporate donations (by any means whatsoever since the “Citizens’ United” SCOTUS decision) these regulations are too little and too late, and too typically of the Obama administration, heavily watered down to the point where if there ever was any “vision” behind it all, it has long since disappeared in the mists of political compromise. As it happens a very pleasant and cordial member of the staff at Waste Management mentioned these regulations to me as “what Obama said yesterday,” to which my stunned reply was, “Oh, I must have missed that.”  Carbon dioxide emissions are, of course, of some direct concern to Waste Management, since much of its elimination of waste is by way of plain old incinerations, with minimal pollution abatement other than to satisfy the long standing EPA regulations with regard to SOx and NOx as well as heavy metal pollutant reaching the atmosphere. Regulation of carbon dioxide emissions will get to them eventually, but they are working on a number of strategies, everything from gasification to landfill “mining” operations.  In fact as my conversation(s) with these couple of gentlemen from local operations of Waste Management wore on, off and on, during a couple of hours the other evening, hardly anything I mentioned was not something they were already doing somewhere, either as a normal course of business in some locale or at least in experimental stages.  I did mention, however that it was a little over 40 years ago that I was telling my undergraduate classmates I was amazed that we (as a society) were not already mining the riches of landfill sites.  “After all, we know where all this stuff is, we’ve been putting it there for a hundred years.”  “We’re doing that,” was their reply, although from the description it was more like the “recovery” operations in India where the poorest Dalits are allowed to pick over the garbage dumps for salvageable, or recyclable goods from which they make their living, the same as happens throughout most of the world, rather  than the modern recycling equipment used in the Western countries that sort recyclables fresh off the collection trucks that arrive daily using automated equipment, conveyors, electromagnets, graduated sifting barrels, and ultimately product balers (which recycled commodities, by the way, the Waste Management guys bemoaned as being priced so cheaply on most goods that they couldn’t make a profit doing this kind of work).

Honestly it shocked me that these fellows who agreed that we were fully 40 years behind-the-times in getting these kinds of programs started were also seeing incineration as a key element in their ongoing corporate strategy (not that these particular people are involved in strategic planning, but you might hope that they had had a more visionary future conveyed to them by upper management). It might not be cheap to switch from incineration to gasification/pyrolysis everywhere immediately, but it virtually eliminates all atmospheric pollutants,and the residual can be either “glass” (slag) or “ash” which can be made into concrete blocks or depending on the content used as fertilizer.  What we all did agree upon because the examples were walking right by us as we chatted was that the failure of recycling programs is not the people who implement them, just the plain apathy of the public to think about recycling.  We watched as half a dozen people in a row tossed recyclable plastic cups and hors d’oeuvres plates into the “garbage” can which stood so close as to be touching the blue recycling bin with the recycle symbol plainly displayed for all to see. Worse yet, this was an event for alumni and recent graduated of the university. Everyone in the room had a least one university degree, and they still gave no thought to the recycling bin.  But I have carried on longer than I meant to, so let me move to my last subject for today.

I don’t understand all the religious “feudin’ and fightin'” of Muslim factions any more than I understand the silliness between protestants and Catholics in Ireland, the whole idea of “my religion is better than your religion” is patent nonsense as far as I am concerned, because, essentially, people are saying to one another, a broken mirror is far worse than walking under a ladder, while a third is shouting, “Watch out! Don’t let that black cat cross your path.” For that matter, none of those holds any more sway with me than those disputing whether it is “dark matter” that holds the universe together, or black holes that recycle matter from one segment of the universe to the other that maintains the balance against gravity that appears to be driving the universe further and further apart all the time.

But setting the religion itself aside for the moment, I don’t mind that some people want to live simpler lives that don’t involve modern mechanical and electrical or gas powered equipment, the Amish people being probably the best known example in North America. And I don’t think them being Christians makes them any better than Muslim, or Buddhists who feel a similar need to live life on simpler terms. But I will state here, without equivocation, that I object to anyone trying to impose such beliefs on me or anyone else. Even though they reportedly place quite strong social pressure on their young people to conform to the life in which they have been raised, they do give them the opportunity to opt out during their teen years.  Not so for the Taliban and some of the other more fanatical Islamist sects, they will cheerfully force their beliefs on others with the sword or the Kalishnikov.  The most prominently known example being the bullet put into the head of a girl whose only offense was going to school.

Still, I think that President Obama’s administration didn’t make any “mistake” by swapping prisoners from Guantanamo for the young soldier who spent 5 years in captivity in Afghanistan.  What he did do was significantly reduce the excuses for resistance to closing the illegal existence of Guantanamo as a “holding pen” for persons the US has “captured” but have no legal status or standing, or rather the “prison” at Guantanamo has no legal standing or status. President Barack Obama’s campaign promise to close Guantanamo (the prison, not the base) remains unfulfilled due to his inability to get it through congress, or more specifically to get congress to allocate the funds to accomplish the closure. What was a major mistake was not to ram it through congress during his first two years when the Democrats held both the House and the Senate.  It was far from President Obama’s radically liberal agenda that cost them the House majority in 2010, it was a lack of leadership that contained a clear and well enunciated vision for where the country was going.  That is not to say that healthcare reform was not a much needed direction for this country, though again, the weak positions taken by the administration and the absolutely excessive concessions made early in the process essentially eliminated any hope of a genuinely strong healthcare system for the country.  Only a single payer system like medicare (which operates with far lower overhead than any private medical system in the county, including HMO type operations). The whole health care system became a corporate welfare system for private insurance companies, those same insurance companies who hold so much cash reserves against possible liabilities of possible holders that they are more significant investors on Wall Street than are most mutual funds, indeed few banks hold more stocks in their portfolios than do the largest insurance companies. But as usual I digress …

My original point about no mistake in the prisoner swap starts with, as President Obama said recently, when it comes to prisoner swaps, “you don’t exchange prisoners with your friends.” With the Qatari’s acting as intermediaries, in theory at least, we were not dealing with “terrorists” or negotiating with terrorists, we were dealing with a friendly government as an “honest broker” regarding a party with whom we refused to establish relations. Those are the facts. Telling any other story is making up fabrications to fit your political agenda. This was not significantly different than dealing with a country like Libya when it was a dictatorship with whom we had no reason to want to have diplomatic relations. The Bush administration, in effect, labelled the Taliban as a terrorist organization because when they were the legitimate government of Afghanistan they allowed the al Qaeda organization to train and maintain camps in their country, and as a “state supporter of terrorists” the Bush administration blurred the lines and claimed that they too were terrorists, even though they were a legitimate government of an actual country.  Then we sent in a couple hundred special forces from the US army (Navy seals or others may have been involved, but of course, that’s “classified” information so we may never know) and rapidly deposed the entire government in a matter of a few weeks.  Chasing down Osama bin Laden took months more in Afghanistan, or rather years more, but essentially the “war” with Afghanistan had been won in the first few weeks.

Now the war is with the corruption in the government(s) in Afghanistan, and the fact that such a huge portion of the national budget is actually the Americans stationed there requiring supplies, so that the GDP of the country last year (I believe I remember the figure) it was about 40% American Aid and military spending. Negotiating a substantial “residual force” of Americans is about the only hope of the country not going into a severe economic depression when the last 10,000 soldier leave at the end of 2015. But meanwhile we have lost some 2000 lives in this longest American war of all time, almost half as many as in the whole of the Iraqi war. But the war is winding down, and as such there is no longer an excuse to hold “enemy combatants” for any reason, much less in an illegal situation where they have no rights, and on what is technically “American soil” since we have leased the land from Cuba. In my opinion, moving closer to closing Guantanamo is the more important of the two halves of the prisoner exchange, and in that respect, President Obama’s administration is the big winner.

My apologies for making this such a long entry. I had a pent up need to vent, it appears. I don’t expect everyone, or even anyone to completely agree with me, but I do hope I have prompted you to think, and perhaps even to discuss some of these aspect of the events that have been unfolding recently.

Thanks for visiting.

 

Sincerely,

Stafford “Doc” Williamson

 

 

One Good Thing

I have learned a lot of information over the past decades, though probably not as much as I learned in my first couple of decades.  Young people are (or at least they can be) information sponges.  They draw in knowledge (whether they like it or not) although squeezing it out of them is hardier than you might expect.  In my case, I was a leaky sponge, never reluctant to share the facts (as best I knew them, though often incomplete)(who, after all, remembers the exact Wednesday a treaty was signed in the eighteenth century, or even if it was a Wednesday? And even if it was a Wednesday in America, it was already Thursday in China, so whose clock are you going to use? For that matter in the eighteenth century, clocks all over America, and much of the world, had a local time based on “high noon” when the sun was at its zenith, and everyone else’s clock be damned!  It wasn’t until the railroads needed a coordinated system of time keeping that “time zones” were officially created [by Sir Sanford Fleming if I remember correctly, or at least he had something to do with it].)

Take that Stephen Hawking!  Now THAT was a BRIEF History of Time.  But, returning from my time travels…

One good thing I have learned in the past few years is that if you manage to do “one good thing” in a day, it was probably worth your effort to have done that one thing, and the rest doesn’t count.  Doesn’t count against you, doesn’t count for you, it just doesn’t matter all that much.what else you did or didn’t get done.  If you did one good thing in the course of your day, you’ve probably accomplished more than most people have in the same span of time.  (You see, time was not just an irrelevant side trip, after all.)  For that matter, time isn’t really “measured” in days.  Time is a continuous succession of moments, and of rushing forward events, usually mostly forgotten even by those involved in those events.

We have developed a system of sleeping once a day, in most cases and most places, so we think of a day as a significant unit of time.  That’s essentially not true, because while we slept soundly in our beds, folks in Australia, Hong Kong, and Madagascar went about their daily business on the same day that you won’t get around to until “tomorrow”, when in fact, tomorrow was happening all the time you were asleep.  You just weren’t yet awake to notice that it was happening.

Wherever you are, you are at the leading edge of time. You can never go backwards in time.  You can only go forward.  You can accomplish the illusion that you have traveled back in time.  You can leave Chicago, fly Westward and land in Denver before the time you left Chicago, according to local time in Denver.  Regardless of what they call the hour in Denver, however, back in Chicago, time has passed and it is later in the same day.  Another time travel illusion is to fly Eastward from Tokyo to Hawai’i such that you arrive on the day you left but much earlier in the same day (I’m not about to run off to an airline schedule to prove it to you, besides all you need is a military jet fighter [and maybe a refuel or two along the way] at super-sonic speeds, this trick/illusion is relatively easy to do.)  But it is only a trick.  Time “flows” ever forward.

As far as we know, this is shown every moment in the relative movement of the stars and planets.  They never take a little nap while you are asleep.  They are always right exactly where you would expect them to be based on where they were yesterday and the days before that.  The whole universe flows, and as far as we know, it is all powered by gravity, the relative attraction of any one body to any other.  But that’s worth a separate discussion some day.

Meanwhile, it’s one of my favorite sayings (and I do mean MY favorite sayings because I made it up myself), “Tomorrow has already happened, you just haven’t seen it yet.”