Tag: politics

space

China and Space

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Ever since I read the “2001” series by Arthur C. Clarke, I’ve been thinking about China and its relationship to space. For those unfamiliar with the first book and/or the movie, the Chinese launch a space shuttle at the beginning of the story which takes everyone by surprise. I’ve always been fascinated by other societies and people that can date their history back a couple thousand years (maybe because I’m Jewish). I’ve always thought that for China, being a civilization that has been around for 5,000 years (give or take a millennia) and one that has over a billion people, conquering space has been only a matter of time. If the US doesn’t work harder to keep our lead, we’ll lose it altogether. It’s bad enough that China is holding trillions of dollars in T-bills and holds our economic future in their banks. Soon, they might control our military future as well. My overall fear is that China is like the slow, plodding turtle in the “Tortoise and the Hare” fable. While it lumbers and takes forever, in the end it’ll win.
To that end, I read in today’s NY Times about a secret Chinese missile test from this past week – they blew up one of their own satellites and proved they can shoot anything out of the sky. Check it out:
China’s Muscle Flex in Space
China spread alarm and consternation among space powers when it destroyed one of its own satellites last week with a missile fired from the ground, thus becoming the first nation in more than two decades to successfully test an anti-satellite weapon. This aggressive show of force puts a wide range of United States military and intelligence satellites at risk and holds the danger of starting an arms race in space. Too bad the Bush administration’s own bellicose attitudes — and adamant refusal to consider an arms control treaty for space — give it scant standing to chastise the Chinese. The administration needs to reverse course promptly and join in talks aimed at banning further tests or use of anti-satellite weapons.
The Chinese test, which Beijing has not acknowledged but was tracked by intelligence agencies, destroyed an aging communications satellite some 500 miles above the Earth. The missile smashed the satellite into hundreds of pieces large enough to pose a danger for a decade or more to spacecraft or satellites that pass through the debris.
The Chinese have now demonstrated that — should they ever choose — they could destroy essential American satellites used to conduct military reconnaissance, spot nuclear tests and direct smart weapons. A top intelligence official told reporters last August that China had used a ground-based laser to illuminate an American satellite. That could signal a nascent effort to develop a way to blind satellites or to guide a missile to a target in space
The Bush administration has been flexing its own muscles in space. A national space policy issued in October declared that “freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.” It asserted a need to deter others from interfering with America’s right to operate in space. The policy did not address whether Washington would place weapons in space — as some in the Pentagon have been urging — but the administration continues to oppose any restrictions.
Surely it would make military and diplomatic sense to pursue the opposite course and seek to ban all tests and any use of anti-satellite weapons.
The United States and the Soviet Union successfully tested such weapons decades ago and have no overriding need to develop better versions, although the United States is clearly trying. China’s success in matching the feat reportedly came after three earlier tests failed, so the Chinese could only benefit from additional testing. The United States, with many more satellites in orbit than any other power and a military that has become increasingly dependent on satellites, has the most to lose from an unbridled space arms race.
Some experts suggest that China’s latest test is intended to prod the United States to join serious negotiations. The way to counter China or any other potentially belligerent space power is through an arms control treaty, not a new arms race in space.

politics

More Hidden Military Costs

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On top of all the other nonsense that the failed Iraqi War has brought to our fair country and the world, we now have a less educated U.S. fighting force. While the Army met its recruiting goal of 80,000 soldiers last year, they needed to accept fewer high school graduates in order to do so. The Army prefers to have 90% of their recruits to have a high school diploma however last year only 73% met that requirement.
“When you have a lot of recruits who score lower on the exam or who don’t have a high school diploma, a much higher percentage with not complete ehtir first term of enlightment,” said Anita Dancs, research director for the National Prioriteis Project. “By not hitting those benchmarks, they’re increating recruiting and training costs.”
Sweet! Even more money wasted on the war!

ramblings

When Religion Meets Reality

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One thing about organized religion as a whole that always annoys me is the “my god is better than your god” debate, the certainty that each observant has in the fact that his or her religion is unique and special because it came “directly from God’s mouth” or something like that. Many times this line of reasoning does not hold up to evidence and one piece of evidence that always punches a huge hole in this train of thought is that there are over 175 different flood myths that exist in the world.
For Christian and Jews, we are talking about Noah’s Ark but every other religion has a starkling similar myth. The story goes that there was a time when the world was completely flooded (most often due to God’s wrath) and life was miraculously saved by either one or a few enterprising souls, possibly guided by the said deity that flooded the world in the first place.
The defining fact about these myths is that most of them grew up independently from each other. For instance, the Incas have a flood myth and so do the Jews. The myths are very similar to each other yet no Jew ever interacted with an Incan (or vice versa) when these myths were developed and recorded thousands of years ago. Long story short: it happened. A very real and cataclismic flood encompassed the world within the last 10,000 years and this disaster became the story of legend and myth, eventually entering in all the major religions and belief systems in the world.
In reading the NYT today, I found an article about how scientists are studying chevrons (in this case enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, not a badge or insignia consisting of stripes meeting at an angle, worn on the sleeve of a military or police uniform to indicate rank, merit, or length of service or a multinational energy company) to see if/when super tsunamis occurred in the past. It turns out that there may be evidence of one around 5000 BC, which happens to be the point where our history breaks down. We have knowledge of the Egyptians, Jews, Chinese up to around that year. Before that point, who knows what happend and maybe, just maybe, that date is significant because a cataclysmic flood wiped everything out. I love this stuff.
Ancient Crash, Epic Wave
by Sandra Blakeslee
At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.
On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.
The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.
Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean.
Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every few thousand years.
The researchers, who formed the working group after finding one another through an international conference, are based in the United States, Australia, Russia, France and Ireland. They are established experts in geology, geophysics, geomorphology, tsunamis, tree rings, soil science and archaeology, including the structural analysis of myth. Their efforts are just getting under way, but they will present some of their work at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December in San Francisco.
This year the group started using Google Earth, a free source of satellite images, to search around the globe for chevrons, which they interpret as evidence of past giant tsunamis. Scores of such sites have turned up in Australia, Africa, Europe and the United States, including the Hudson River Valley and Long Island.
When the chevrons all point in the same direction to open water, Dallas Abbott, an adjunct research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., uses a different satellite technology to look for oceanic craters. With increasing frequency, she finds them, including an especially large one dating back 4,800 years.
So far, astronomers are skeptical but are willing to look at the evidence, said David Morrison, a leading authority on asteroids and comets at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. Surveys show that as many as 185 large asteroids or comets hit the Earth in the far distant past, although most of the craters are on land. No one has spent much time looking for craters in the deep ocean, Dr. Morrison said, assuming young ones don’t exist and that old ones would be filled with sediment.
Astronomers monitor every small space object with an orbit close to the Earth. “We know what’s out there, when they return, how close they come,” Dr. Morrison said. Given their observations, “there is no reason to think we have had major hits in the last 10,000 years,” he continued, adding, “But if Dallas is right and they find 10 such events, we’ll have a real contradiction on our hands.”
Peter Bobrowski, a senior research scientist in natural hazards at the Geological Survey of Canada, said “chevrons are fantastic features” but do not prove that megatsunamis are real. There are other interpretations for how chevrons are formed, including erosion and glaciation. Dr. Bobrowski said. It is up to the working group to prove its claims, he said.
William Ryan, a marine geologist at the Lamont Observatory, compared Dr. Abbott’s work to that of other pioneering scientists who had to change the way their colleagues thought about a subject.
“Many of us think Dallas is really onto something,” Dr. Ryan said. “She is building a story just like Walter Alvarez did.” Dr. Alvarez, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, spent a decade convincing skeptics that a giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Ted Bryant, a geomorphologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, was the first person to recognize the palm prints of mega-tsunamis. Large tsunamis of 30 feet or more are caused by volcanoes, earthquakes and submarine landslides, he said, and their deposits have different features.
Deposits from mega-tsunamis contain unusual rocks with marine oyster shells, which cannot be explained by wind erosion, storm waves, volcanoes or other natural processes, Dr. Bryant said.
“We’re not talking about any tsunami you’re ever seen,” Dr. Bryant said. “Aceh was a dimple. No tsunami in the modern world could have made these features. End-of-the-world movies do not capture the size of these waves. Submarine landslides can cause major tsunamis, but they are localized. These are deposited along whole coastlines.”
For example, Dr. Bryant identified two chevrons found over four miles inland near Carpentaria in north central Australia. Both point north. When Dr. Abbott visited a year ago, he asked her to find the craters.
To locate craters, Dr. Abbott uses sea surface altimetry data. Satellites scan the ocean surface and log the exact height of it. Underwater mountain ranges, trenches and holes in the ground disturb the Earth’s gravitational field, causing sea surface heights to vary by fractions of an inch. Within 24 hours of searching the shallow water north of the two chevrons, Dr. Abbott found two craters.
Not all depressions in the ocean are impact craters, Dr. Abbott said. They can be sink holes, faults or remnant volcanoes. A check is needed. So she obtained samples from deep sea sediment cores taken in the area by the Australian Geological Survey.
The cores contain melted rocks and magnetic spheres with fractures and textures characteristic of a cosmic impact. “The rock was pulverized, like it was hit with a hammer,” Dr. Abbott said. “We found diatoms fused to tektites,” a glassy substance formed by meteors. The molten glass and shattered rocks could not be produced by anything other than an impact, she said.
“We think these two craters are 1,200 years old,” Dr. Abbott said. The chevrons are well preserved and date to about the same time.
Dr. Abbott and her colleagues have located chevrons in the Caribbean, Scotland, Vietnam and North Korea, and several in the North Sea.
Heather Hill State Park on Long Island has a chevron whose front edge points to a crater in Long Island Sound, Dr. Abbott said. There is another, very faint chevron in Connecticut, and it points in a different direction.
Marie-Agnès Courty, a soil scientist at the European Center for Prehistoric Research in Tautavel, France, is studying the worldwide distribution of cosmogenic particles from what she suspects was a major impact 4,800 years ago.
But Madagascar provides the smoking gun for geologically recent impacts. In August, Dr. Abbott, Dr. Bryant and Slava Gusiakov, from the Novosibirsk Tsunami Laboratory in Russia, visited the four huge chevrons to scoop up samples.
Last month, Dee Breger, director of microscopy at Drexel University in Philadelphia, looked at the samples under a scanning electron microscope and found benthic foraminifera, tiny fossils from the ocean floor, sprinkled throughout. Her close-ups revealed splashes of iron, nickel and chrome fused to the fossils.
When a chondritic meteor, the most common kind, vaporizes upon impact in the ocean, those three metals are formed in the same relative proportions as seen in the microfossils, Dr. Abbott said.
Ms. Breger said the microfossils appear to have melded with the condensing metals as both were lofted up out of the sea and carried long distances.
About 900 miles southeast from the Madagascar chevrons, in deep ocean, is Burckle crater, which Dr. Abbott discovered last year. Although its sediments have not been directly sampled, cores from the area contain high levels of nickel and magnetic components associated with impact ejecta.
Burckle crater has not been dated, but Dr. Abbott estimates that it is 4,500 to 5,000 years old.
It would be a great help to the cause if the National Science Foundation sent a ship equipped with modern acoustic equipment to take a closer look at Burckle, Dr. Ryan said. “If it had clear impact features, the nonbelievers would believe,” he said.
But they might have more trouble believing one of the scientists, Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He thinks he can say precisely when the comet fell: on the morning of May 10, 2807 B.C.
Dr. Masse analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. Among other evidence, he said, 14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C.
Half the myths talk of a torrential downpour, Dr. Masse said. A third talk of a tsunami. Worldwide they describe hurricane force winds and darkness during the storm. All of these could come from a mega-tsunami.
Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, Dr. Masse said, “and we’re not there yet.”

politics

The USA I Know Is Back

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It is a new day in America. The United States House of Representatives and the Senate are now controlled by moderate Democrats, my favorite kind of politicians, and America is finally on the road back from “the George W. Bush era, which will ultimately be seen as a fear-induced anomaly in American history” which is how NYT columnist Bob Herbert put it today. W’s got 2 years left. I wish he’d leave today.
While I am a liberal at heart, this country has shown by the incredibly close nature of all the races nationwide that there is a strong split in how people think and feel in this country. Our nation is not red and blue, its purple, and we should start behaving and passing laws that way. Having a strong moderate, centrist government is the way to go and I think that the Dems will behave that way. I hope. I pray.
I was watching Larry King Live of all programs last night waiting to see if Webb really won and Bill Mahr was on. He was making a lot of sense, as usual. To paraphrase what he said, “First, let the conservatives have their guns. Don’t even think about taking them. Yes, gun control is a problem but a lot of Americans love their guns and losing control over the country because of this one issue isn’t worth it. Second, let them have marriage. Most of them do not hate gays, we have to give them more credit than that, but they want to own that word. They don’t want Bob and Tim to get “married” and you know what, I’ll give them that too, as long as gays have equal rights. Its just a word and its not worth losing the country over either.”
You know what? I totally agree with him. If you are a true liberal, you won’t take no for an answer, you will stick to your guns and you’ll see the whole country go down the toilet. Ralph Nader refused to resign in 2000 because of ideology and Bush won – no Nader and Gore wins. Sometimes, you have to know when to fold them for the sake of the country. That is why I’m a centrist, a moderate and of course a reasonist.
In summation: America is back. Let everyone in the US and abroad cheer loud and clear. G-d damn, I’m actually optimistic again – who the hell did that happen?!

politics

Get Up Off Your Ass And Vote!

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We live in the (arguably) greatest democracy in the world. Part of what we receive by being a citizen of this democracy is the right to vote. While you need a license to drive or fish, you only need to be 18 years old and not a felon to vote. That’s it. You don’t have to do anything else except be alive and show up to pull a lever.
However, it seems that people just do not show up. In the 2004 elections, only 122,293,720 voted for President, which means that only about 60% of eligible citizens actually voted. As we have invaded soveign nations to give them this lovely right to vote, we Americans should take advantage of it ourselves every chance we get and no, texting IDOL7 to 58845 does not count! Plus, if you vote, you get carte blanche to complain about whichever local/state/federal law(s) you see fit.
Here is a great piece by the NY Times on who to vote for if you need help deciding (hint: its not a Republican):
The Difference Two Years Made
On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican Congressional candidates for the first time in our memory. Although Times editorials tend to agree with Democrats on national policy, we have proudly and consistently endorsed a long line of moderate Republicans, particularly for the House. Our only political loyalty is to making the two-party system as vital and responsible as possible.
That is why things are different this year.
To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House — and for the most part, the Senate — during President Bush’s tenure has done a terrible job on the basics. Its tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face up to global warming and done pathetically little about the country’s dependence on foreign oil.
Republican leaders, particularly in the House, have developed toxic symptoms of an overconfident majority that has been too long in power. They methodically shut the opposition — and even the more moderate members of their own party — out of any role in the legislative process. Their only mission seems to be self-perpetuation.
The current Republican majority managed to achieve that burned-out, brain-dead status in record time, and with a shocking disregard for the most minimal ethical standards. It was bad enough that a party that used to believe in fiscal austerity blew billions on pork-barrel projects. It is worse that many of the most expensive boondoggles were not even directed at their constituents, but at lobbyists who financed their campaigns and high-end lifestyles.
That was already the situation in 2004, and even then this page endorsed Republicans who had shown a high commitment to ethics reform and a willingness to buck their party on important issues like the environment, civil liberties and women’s rights.
For us, the breaking point came over the Republicans’ attempt to undermine the fundamental checks and balances that have safeguarded American democracy since its inception. The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution. But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president’s ability to do whatever he wants. To paraphrase Tom DeLay, the Republicans feel you don’t need to have oversight hearings if your party is in control of everything.
An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.
Congress, in particular the House, has failed to ask probing questions about the war in Iraq or hold the president accountable for his catastrophic bungling of the occupation. It also has allowed Mr. Bush to avoid answering any questions about whether his administration cooked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Then, it quietly agreed to close down the one agency that has been riding herd on crooked and inept American contractors who have botched everything from construction work to the security of weapons.
After the revelations about the abuse, torture and illegal detentions in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Congress shielded the Pentagon from any responsibility for the atrocities its policies allowed to happen. On the eve of the election, and without even a pretense at debate in the House, Congress granted the White House permission to hold hundreds of noncitizens in jail forever, without due process, even though many of them were clearly sent there in error.
In the Senate, the path for this bill was cleared by a handful of Republicans who used their personal prestige and reputation for moderation to paper over the fact that the bill violates the Constitution in fundamental ways. Having acquiesced in the president’s campaign to dilute their own authority, lawmakers used this bill to further Mr. Bush’s goal of stripping the powers of the only remaining independent branch, the judiciary.
This election is indeed about George W. Bush — and the Congressional majority’s insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and proceeded to govern as if he had an enormous mandate. After he actually beat his opponent in 2004, he announced he now had real political capital and intended to spend it. We have seen the results. It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct if he woke up next Wednesday and found that his party had maintained its hold on the House and Senate.

politics

Nice Job Kerry!

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Thanks go to John Kerry for inspiring the photo below:helpas2.jpg
Any former soldier knows loose lips sink ships and to never give ammo to his/her adversary. Kerry is a just a complete moron. I am just completely baffled by his idiocy this close to election day….I can say no more….

tech

You Are Not There Yet You Are There

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Linda Stone, the technologist who once labeled the disease of the Internet age “continuous partial attention” — two people doing six things, devoting only partial attention to each one — remarked:

“We’re so accessible, we’re inaccessible. We can’t find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. … We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere — except where we actually are physically.”

Thomas Friedman has more about this topc in his latest NYT op-ed piece which can be found after the jump.
November 1, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Taxi Driver
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Paris
I arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport the other night and was met by a driver sent by a French friend. The driver was carrying a sign with my name on it, but as I approached him I noticed that he was talking to himself, very animatedly. As I got closer, I realized he had one of those Bluetooth wireless phones clipped to his ear and was deep in conversation. I pointed at myself as the person he was supposed to meet. He nodded and went on talking to whomever was on the other end of his phone.
When my luggage arrived, I grabbed it off the belt; he pointed toward the exit and I followed, as he kept talking on his phone. When we got into the car, I said, “Do you know my hotel?” He said, “No.” I showed him the address, and he went back to talking on the phone.
After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in the dashboard — on the flat panel that usually displays the G.P.S. road map. I noticed this because between his talking on the phone and the movie, I could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a column on my laptop. When I wrote all that I could, I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album, while he went on talking, driving and watching the movie.
After I arrived at my hotel, I reflected on our trip: The driver and I had been together for an hour, and between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my laptop and listening to my iPod.
There was only one thing we never did: Talk to each other.
It’s a pity. He was a young, French-speaking African, who probably had a lot to tell me. When I related all this to my friend Alain Frachon, an editor at Le Monde, he quipped: “I guess the era of foreign correspondents quoting taxi drivers is over. The taxi driver is now too busy to give you a quote!”
Alain is right. You know the old story, “As my Parisian taxi driver said to me about the French elections … ” Well, you can forget about reading columns starting that way anymore. My driver was too busy to say hello, let alone opine on politics.
I relate all this because it illustrates something I’ve been feeling more and more lately — that technology is dividing us as much as uniting us. Yes, technology can make the far feel near. But it can also make the near feel very far. For all I know, my driver was talking to his parents in Africa. How wonderful! But that meant the two of us wouldn’t talk at all. And we were sitting two feet from each other.
When I shared this story with Linda Stone, the technologist who once labeled the disease of the Internet age “continuous partial attention” — two people doing six things, devoting only partial attention to each one — she remarked: “We’re so accessible, we’re inaccessible. We can’t find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. … We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere — except where we actually are physically.”
A month ago I was in San Francisco and went for a walk. I was standing at an intersection waiting to cross the street when a man jogging and wearing his iPod came up next to me. As soon as the light turned green he sprinted into the crosswalk. But a woman driving a car — running a yellow light — almost hit him before she hit the brakes. The woman was holding a cellphone in her right ear and driving with her left hand. I thought to myself, I’ve just witnessed the first postmodern local news story, and I crafted the lead in my head: “A woman driving her car while speaking on her cellphone ran over a man jogging across the street while listening to his iPod. See page 6.”
Hey, I love having lots of contacts and easy connectivity, but in an age when so many people you know — and even more you don’t know — can contact you by e-mail or cellphone, I’m finding this age of interruption overwhelming. I was much smarter when I could do only one thing at a time. I know I’m not alone.
A few weeks ago I was trying to find my friend Yaron Ezrahi in Jerusalem. I kept calling his cellphone and getting no answer. I eventually found him at home. “Yaron, what’s wrong with your cellphone?” I asked.
“It was stolen a few months ago,” he answered, adding that he decided not to replace it because its ringing was constantly breaking his concentration. “Since then, the first thing I do every morning is thank the thief and wish him a long life.”

politics

The Hole In The City's Heart

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The NY Times lets readers post comments to their articles. One man named John Chuckman wrote a very interesting opinion to “The Hole in the City’s Heart” which, while provocative, neatly encapsulates many of my opinions about what has happened over the past 5 years. The only thing his piece leaves out is a thought about our military response in regards to Afghanistan (which I believe was justified and almost effective, until we decided to focus on Iraq). Feel free to read John’s thoughts after the jump.
Hole in the heart of the city? Many in the world would ask, what heart?
America’s response to 9/11 has been dangerously unbalanced, about as crazed as Senator McCarthy’s drunken rants over non-existent lists of communists. Americans badly need to get a grip on reality.
The roughly 3,000 who died is far fewer than any number of earthquakes and other natural disasters since have killed in many other places. Yet we keep hearing about 9/11 as though it were pivotal in human history.
The fact is the average American’s chance of being killed by terrorism remains about on a par with slipping on a banana peel or being struck by lightning.
In the last five years, Americans themselves have murdered about 70,000 other Americans. Also in that five years, over 200,000 Americans were killed on the nation’s highways. Over 2,000,000 American children were seriously abused by Americans, usually family members, in that time. And about 2,000,000 Americans died from cancer.
What is almost never talked about is the fact that 9/11 was completely preventable without an insane, pointless war on terror. Just simple safety measures like secure cockpit doors and better inspections would have prevented it. But, no, despite all the hijackings that had become common in the previous decades, no new provisions for safety were made. The Congress of the U.S. is about as responsible as anyone for 9/11 through its failure to govern responsibly.
Then, after one freak event, all hell broke loose with hundreds of billions squandered. That wasted money could have built countless new schools and funded vital research and science.
America is now effectively trying to wall itself off in a globalized world. That’s absurd for the world’s largest economy.
We have idiotic, meaningless measures like no-fly lists. The truth is it wouldn’t matter if Osama himself flew over the US so long as good security measures were in place to prevent his doing anything inappropriate.
Americans have surrendered their own rights and freedoms to a shocking extent for no good reason to a leader whose capacities are best described as extremely meager.
Americans permit horrors like secret prisons and torture to go on in their name. This is a terrible shame for America that 9/11can never justify.
Even worse, Bush’s invasion of Iraq took 100,000 innocent lives, wreaked the economic lives of millions, left tons of vaporized uranium for children to breathe, vandalized one of humanity’s great archeological treasures, and reduced a once-advancing country to hopelessness. A total shame and the equivalent of having dropped a nuclear weapon on Iraq, it did absolutely nothing for American security.

politics

What We've Lost

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I think that the NY Times editorial from today is really on point. Please read it in full after the jump.
The feelings of sadness and loss with which we look back on Sept. 11, 2001, have shifted focus over the last five years. The attacks themselves have begun to acquire the aura of inevitability that comes with being part of history. We can argue about what one president or another might have done to head them off, but we cannot really imagine a world in which they never happened, any more than we can imagine what we would be like today if the Japanese had never attacked Pearl Harbor.
What we do revisit, over and over again, is the period that followed, when sorrow was merged with a sense of community and purpose. How, having lost so much on the day itself, did we also manage to lose that as well?
The time when we felt drawn together, changed by the shock of what had occurred, lasted long beyond the funerals, ceremonies and promises never to forget. It was a time when the nation was waiting to find out what it was supposed to do, to be called to the task that would give special lasting meaning to the tragedy that it had endured.
But the call never came. Without ever having asked to be exempt from the demands of this new post-9/11 war, we were cut out. Everything would be paid for with the blood of other people’s children, and with money earned by the next generation. Our role appeared to be confined to waiting in longer lines at the airport. President Bush, searching the other day for an example of post-9/11 sacrifice, pointed out that everybody pays taxes.
That pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn’t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft. With no call to work together on some effort greater than ourselves, we were free to relapse into a self- centeredness that became a second national tragedy. We have spent the last few years fighting each other with more avidity than we fight the enemy.
When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy. Homeland security is half-finished, the development at ground zero barely begun. The war against terror we meant to fight in Afghanistan is at best stuck in neutral, with the Taliban resurgent and the best economic news involving a bumper crop of opium. Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 when it was invaded, is now a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists.
Listing the sins of the Bush administration may help to clarify how we got here, but it will not get us out. The country still hungers for something better, for evidence that our leaders also believe in ideas larger than their own political advancement.
Today, every elected official in the country will stop and remember 9/11. The president will remind the country that he has spent most of his administration fighting terrorism, and his opponents will point out that Osama bin Laden is still at large. It would be miraculous if the best of our leaders did something larger — expressed grief and responsibility for the bad path down which we’ve gone, and promised to work together to turn us in a better direction.
Over the last week, the White House has been vigorously warning the country what awful things would happen in Iraq if American troops left, while his critics have pointed out how impossible the current situation is. They are almost certainly both right. But unless people on both sides are willing to come up with a plan that acknowledges both truths and accepts the risk of making real-world proposals, we will be stuck in the same place forever.
If that kind of coming together happened today, we could look back on Sept. 11, 2006, as more than a day for recalling bad memories and lost chances.
The path to this strategic defeat began with the failure to capture or kill bin Laden. Never mind the anti-Clinton hit piece, produced for ABC by a friend of Rush Limbaugh; there never was a clear shot at Osama before 9/11, let alone one rejected by Clinton officials. But there was a clear shot in December 2001, when Al Qaeda’s leader was trapped in the caves of Tora Bora. He made his escape because the Pentagon refused to use American ground troops to cut him off.
No matter, declared President Bush: “I truly am not that concerned about him,” he said about bin Laden in March 2002, and more or less stopped mentioning Osama for the next four years. By the time he made his what-me-worry remarks — just six months after 9/11 — the pursuit of Al Qaeda had already been relegated to second-class status. A long report in yesterday’s Washington Post adds detail to what has long been an open secret: early in 2002, the administration began pulling key resources, such as special forces units and unmanned aircraft, off the hunt for Al Qaeda’s leaders, in preparation for the invasion of Iraq.
At the same time, the administration balked at giving the new regime in Kabul the support it needed. As he often does, Mr. Bush said the right things: the history of conflict in Afghanistan, he declared in April 2002, has been “one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We’re not going to repeat that mistake.”
But he proceeded to do just that, neglecting Afghanistan in ways that foreshadowed the future calamity in Iraq. During the first 18 months after the Taliban were driven from power, the U.S.-led coalition provided no peacekeeping troops outside the capital city. Economic aid, in a destitute nation shattered by war, was minimal in the crucial first year, when the new government was trying to build legitimacy. And the result was the floundering and failure we see today.
How did it all go so wrong? The diversion of resources into a gratuitous war in Iraq is certainly a large part of the story. Although administration officials continue to insist that the invasion of Iraq somehow made sense as part of a broadly defined war on terror, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has just released a report confirming that Saddam Hussein regarded Al Qaeda as a threat, not an ally; he even made attempts to capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
But Iraq doesn’t explain it all. Even though the Bush administration was secretly planning another war in early 2002, it could still have spared some troops to provide security and allocated more money to help the Karzai government. As in the case of planning for postwar Iraq, however, Bush officials apparently refused even to consider the possibility that things wouldn’t go exactly the way they hoped.
These days most agonizing about the state of America’s foreign policy is focused, understandably, on the new enemies we’ve made in Iraq. But let’s not forget that the perpetrators of 9/11 are still at large, five years later, and that they have re-established a large safe haven.

television

30 Millions Americans Can Be Considered "Working Poor"

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The term “working poor” should be an oxymoron. If you work full time, you should not be poor, right? Unfortunately, more than 30 million Americans — one in four workers — are stuck in jobs that do not pay the basics for a decent life. Read that again. One in four – g-d damn! Then again, when the minimum wage hasn’t moved above $5.15 an hour since 1997, what do you expect..
A new POV special on PBS titled “Waging a Living” chronicles the day-to-day battles of four low-wage earners fighting to lift their families out of poverty. Its on PBS tonight at 10 PM. If you missed it, or can’t TiFaux it in time, I’m sure like other great PBS programming you’ll be able to watch it online. When I hear a hard working mother say, “I was brought up to believe in the “American Dream” that if you work hard you’ll be successful. I’ve worked hard my whole life and I’m still stuck. There’s no “American Dream” anymore.” I just want to cry.