By DOLPH HONICKER
What would happen in Iraq if American troops suddenly withdrew tomorrow and the Green Zone became a giant Motel 6 to house displaced Iraqis?
Chaos would erupt. But not necessarily in Iraq. That country already has its own brand of chaos which its own people must end, just as a minority of Americans overthrew the first King George in the 1700s.
If Sunnis and Shi’ites wake up tomorrow to find their streets free of roadblocks, troops kicking in doors, Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, tanks, jet fighters roaring overhead, and helicopters chopping up the desert air, the tribes might actually shout, “Praise Allah for delivering us from the infidels!” They’d probably exchange high-fives and move back into their formerly mixed neighborhoods.
The real chaos would break out in America.
Stocks in Halliburton, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon and other defense firms would plummet, with layoffs in the millions.
Silicon Valley would panic.
China, Japan and other foreign nations would demand payment of trillions of dollars in loans that the U.S. under Bush/Cheney has used to finance wars and deficits and prop up the economy.
The GOP accused the Democratic Party of being the one of “tax and spend.“ Is it worse than being a party that chews ever so lightly on the upper crust to borrow and spend?
If an Iraqi pullout occurred tomorrow, you’d have to dodge CEOs leaping off tall buildings.
Tiger Woods might have to sell his yacht and play tournaments with second-hand driving range balls.
Paris Hilton might shave her head and sell her hair to cancer victims.
THINK.
Think back to 1929 and the Great Depression. Millions in bread lines. Massive runs on banks.
By 1933, 26.6 percent of Americans were unemployed. Those still working were paid less. Factory workers were forced to work twice as hard for the same wages.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made noble efforts to bring the country to its feet with such alphabet agencies as the WPA (Works Progress Administration), the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), and the NRA (National Recovery Agency).
He declared a bank holiday to prevent devastating withdrawals.
FDR’s efforts made a dent in the Depression, but it took World War II with the U.S. serving as the Arsenal for Democracy to bring about full employment.
And we’ve been on a wartime economy ever since -- from the Cold War with the Soviet Union, to the Korean Conflict, to the Vietnam War, to our mighty victory in Grenada over a fifth-rate police force and a bunch of Cuban workers building a runway, to Bosnia, Somalia, Panama, Desert Storm, Afghanistan and now the quagmire in Iraq.
Did I leave out any?
Sadly, we’re a nation made up of intelligent people who can be fooled some of the time but seem to catch on only when it’s almost too late to play catch-up.
Barack Obama and John McCain spoke the truth -- before they tripped over themselves apologizing -- terming the loss of troops in Iraq a waste. True. Those in uniforms didn’t give up their lives for mom, the flag and apple pie. Their lives were ripped from them by sniper bullets, RPGs and stress-induced suicides. Wasted!
If is the biggest little word in the English language.
If Adolf Hitler had sent his Panzer divisions into Russia a month earlier, we’d be speaking German today. If Japan had followed up after its Pearl Harbor attack, we’d likely be bilingual -- speaking German and Japanese.
And if George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearle and the other neocons had not been so fixated on invading Iraq even before 9/11 and concentrated on taming the Taliban and capturing Osma bin Laden THINK of all the lives and money that would have been saved.
Should we leave Iraq tomorrow? Official numbers answer in the affirmative.
President Bush is sending 21,500 additional troops to Iraq. But, wait! He’s supplementing that with 4,700 support troops for a total of 26,200 troops, and maybe more. According to Pentagon assessments, Iraqi security forces now number 357,400.
That adds up to 383,600. That should be enough to start easing our forces out -- if not tomorrow, then by mid-summer.
All this is a dream, of course. Truth is, we’ll probably have boots on the ground there for 30 more years, long after my bones have turned to dust. How else would our economy survive?
And then there’s the oil, you know.
Pythian Press
Friday, May 18, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Red tape clogs way out for friends
By DOLPH HONICKER
Poker has two inviolate axioms: (1) know when to hold and when to fold and (2) never send good money after bad.
In Iraq, President George W. Bush and the president of vice, Dick Cheney, have run roughshod over both rules.
The time for folding has long since past. In fact, it was a hand that never should have been dealt. That brings us to No. 2. In Iraq, we’re not only spending like it was Monopoly money, we’re spending our most valuable assets, boots on the ground -- some 30,000 pairs of them.
They’re volunteers. But if you polled them, most probably would prefer going to Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists trained, so they could make a dent against a surging Taliban and al-Qaeda force .
Some of us, even though we were not military experts, saw the error of pulling troops from Afghanistan as we were zeroing in on Osama bin Laden and sending them to invade Iraq. It was stupid since allied forces controlled the air over Iraq and Saddam Hussein wasn’t going anywhere.
The world knows we cherry-picked faulty evidence from the likes of “Curveball,” Amad Chalibi and, my favorite, this from the archives of Newsweek, which said information about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. “I been a shaky alibi (?)”
Imagine the immediate days post-9/11. The world was with us. We could have had half a million U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. With that show of force, Pakistan would have thrown in her lot wholeheartedly. Saddam could have been held off with our left hand. How could he hit New York with Scuds that had a range of 100 miles?
But today Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sits on a powder keg, his will weakened. Time quotes a senior military official in Afghanistan as saying: “The bottom line is that the Taliban can do what they want in the tribal areas because the {Pakistani} army is not going after them.”
Taliban and al-Qaeda forces are settled in small groups in a heavily forested band of mountains that has virtually been conceded to them. It’s called Talibanistan. Digging them out will be like plucking fire ants one at a time.
Iraq presents a sorry tale of betrayal on our part as detailed in a lengthy New Yorker piece by George Packer. Hundreds of Iraqi translators and intelligence agents that served America, facing daily risks of having their heads chopped off, have been shafted. Many have died.
For instance, Ali spent his childhood in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma while his father completed graduate studies. Unfortunately, they returned home to Baghdad when he was 11 so his father could get his green card. The Iranian war prevented them from leaving.
Packer says Ali had to learn Arabic from scratch and “considered his American childhood a paradise lost.“ In 2003 he became an interpreter with the 82nd Airborne Division. He could not tell his family.
“Ali found that, although many soldiers were friendly, they often ignored information and advice from their Iraqi employees,” Packer writes. “Interpreters would give them names of insurgents, and nothing would happen. When Ali suggested that soldiers buy up locals’ rocket-propelled grenade launchers so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of insurgents, he was disregarded. ...“
Consider this vignette of Othman, a Sunni doctor, 29, and Laith, a Shia engineer, a few years younger, who shared a strong friendship based on a desire for the Americans to arrive and change their lives.
“Most of the people Othman and Laith knew had left Iraq,” says Packer. “House by house, Baghdad had been abandoned. Othman was considering his options: move his parents from their house (in an insurgent stronghold) to his sister’s house (in the midst of civil war); move his parents and brothers to Syria (where there was no work) and live with his friend in Jordan (going crazy with boredom while watching his savings dwindle); go to London and ask for asylum (and probably be sent back); stay in Baghdad for six more months until he could begin a scholarship that he had won to study journalism in America (or get killed waiting). Beneath his calm good humor, Othman was paralyzed -- he didn’t want to leave Baghdad and his family, but staying had become impossible. Every day, he changed his mind.”
As for Laith: “Sometimes I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”
Many of the young Iraqis who signed up with the U.S. military to become translators, or “terps” as the soldiers called them, “had learned English,” says Packer, “from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC.”
Otherwise, under Saddam, as one said, it “was a one-way road leading to nothing.”
Ironically, that’s where it stands today. Red tape and indifference clog their every step. Try to teach a soldier cultural dos and don’ts, he won’t listen. You’re an Iraqi and untrustworthy. Just translate for me, mother.
Iraqi “terps” received inferior or no body army, leading Baathists to make a persuasive case that Americans treat all Iraqis badly, even those who work for them.
L. Paul Bremer III, as the virtual dictator in Iraq for 14 months, ditched the entire Iraqi army, threw hundreds of thousands out of work and lit the fuse that has led to today’s chaos. He spoke no Arabic and knew nothing about the Middle East. By the time he was forced to fold his hand, it was too late.
As the banner across the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln the summer of 2003 so blithely put it: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Sooner or later -- a year, four years, twenty years -- we’ll be out. What happens then to all the Iraqi “terps” who served us at great risk but have been fingered by both Sunni and Shia insurgents as collaborators?
Many of them now seek safe flight ahead of the eventual exodus, before heads roll. They’re snarled in red tape.
It’s Catch-22. We can’t tell you when we’re leaving. It would tip off the enemy. Anyway, American personnel will leave first. You’re on your own. Catch a chopper out, if you can. With friends like us, who needs enemies
Pythian Press
Poker has two inviolate axioms: (1) know when to hold and when to fold and (2) never send good money after bad.
In Iraq, President George W. Bush and the president of vice, Dick Cheney, have run roughshod over both rules.
The time for folding has long since past. In fact, it was a hand that never should have been dealt. That brings us to No. 2. In Iraq, we’re not only spending like it was Monopoly money, we’re spending our most valuable assets, boots on the ground -- some 30,000 pairs of them.
They’re volunteers. But if you polled them, most probably would prefer going to Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists trained, so they could make a dent against a surging Taliban and al-Qaeda force .
Some of us, even though we were not military experts, saw the error of pulling troops from Afghanistan as we were zeroing in on Osama bin Laden and sending them to invade Iraq. It was stupid since allied forces controlled the air over Iraq and Saddam Hussein wasn’t going anywhere.
The world knows we cherry-picked faulty evidence from the likes of “Curveball,” Amad Chalibi and, my favorite, this from the archives of Newsweek, which said information about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. “I been a shaky alibi (?)”
Imagine the immediate days post-9/11. The world was with us. We could have had half a million U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. With that show of force, Pakistan would have thrown in her lot wholeheartedly. Saddam could have been held off with our left hand. How could he hit New York with Scuds that had a range of 100 miles?
But today Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sits on a powder keg, his will weakened. Time quotes a senior military official in Afghanistan as saying: “The bottom line is that the Taliban can do what they want in the tribal areas because the {Pakistani} army is not going after them.”
Taliban and al-Qaeda forces are settled in small groups in a heavily forested band of mountains that has virtually been conceded to them. It’s called Talibanistan. Digging them out will be like plucking fire ants one at a time.
Iraq presents a sorry tale of betrayal on our part as detailed in a lengthy New Yorker piece by George Packer. Hundreds of Iraqi translators and intelligence agents that served America, facing daily risks of having their heads chopped off, have been shafted. Many have died.
For instance, Ali spent his childhood in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma while his father completed graduate studies. Unfortunately, they returned home to Baghdad when he was 11 so his father could get his green card. The Iranian war prevented them from leaving.
Packer says Ali had to learn Arabic from scratch and “considered his American childhood a paradise lost.“ In 2003 he became an interpreter with the 82nd Airborne Division. He could not tell his family.
“Ali found that, although many soldiers were friendly, they often ignored information and advice from their Iraqi employees,” Packer writes. “Interpreters would give them names of insurgents, and nothing would happen. When Ali suggested that soldiers buy up locals’ rocket-propelled grenade launchers so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of insurgents, he was disregarded. ...“
Consider this vignette of Othman, a Sunni doctor, 29, and Laith, a Shia engineer, a few years younger, who shared a strong friendship based on a desire for the Americans to arrive and change their lives.
“Most of the people Othman and Laith knew had left Iraq,” says Packer. “House by house, Baghdad had been abandoned. Othman was considering his options: move his parents from their house (in an insurgent stronghold) to his sister’s house (in the midst of civil war); move his parents and brothers to Syria (where there was no work) and live with his friend in Jordan (going crazy with boredom while watching his savings dwindle); go to London and ask for asylum (and probably be sent back); stay in Baghdad for six more months until he could begin a scholarship that he had won to study journalism in America (or get killed waiting). Beneath his calm good humor, Othman was paralyzed -- he didn’t want to leave Baghdad and his family, but staying had become impossible. Every day, he changed his mind.”
As for Laith: “Sometimes I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”
Many of the young Iraqis who signed up with the U.S. military to become translators, or “terps” as the soldiers called them, “had learned English,” says Packer, “from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC.”
Otherwise, under Saddam, as one said, it “was a one-way road leading to nothing.”
Ironically, that’s where it stands today. Red tape and indifference clog their every step. Try to teach a soldier cultural dos and don’ts, he won’t listen. You’re an Iraqi and untrustworthy. Just translate for me, mother.
Iraqi “terps” received inferior or no body army, leading Baathists to make a persuasive case that Americans treat all Iraqis badly, even those who work for them.
L. Paul Bremer III, as the virtual dictator in Iraq for 14 months, ditched the entire Iraqi army, threw hundreds of thousands out of work and lit the fuse that has led to today’s chaos. He spoke no Arabic and knew nothing about the Middle East. By the time he was forced to fold his hand, it was too late.
As the banner across the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln the summer of 2003 so blithely put it: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Sooner or later -- a year, four years, twenty years -- we’ll be out. What happens then to all the Iraqi “terps” who served us at great risk but have been fingered by both Sunni and Shia insurgents as collaborators?
Many of them now seek safe flight ahead of the eventual exodus, before heads roll. They’re snarled in red tape.
It’s Catch-22. We can’t tell you when we’re leaving. It would tip off the enemy. Anyway, American personnel will leave first. You’re on your own. Catch a chopper out, if you can. With friends like us, who needs enemies
Pythian Press
Stay the course, slay the horse?
By DOLPH HONICKER
In a rapid advance to the rear in the bloody occupation of Iraq, George W. Bush and his fellow warriors have muzzled their impotent “stay-the-course” weapon and unleashed newly coined rhetorical artillery under the rubric of “progress moving forward.”
This new “strategy” is anchored upon a three-legged stool of (1) governance, (2) security and (3) economics.
At least it has a far better ring to it than the shock and awe
pre-preempted invasion labeled Operation Iraqi Liberation and changed as rapidly as you can spell OIL to Operation Enduring Freedom.
Democrats can never hold a candle to the way Republicans can shoot themselves in the foot and tap-dance away from “stay the course” to “a study of constant motion,” meaning that stay the course did not mean what it said.
Still, in a Salt Lake City address in August 2006, Bush said: “We will stay the course. We will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed.”
And July, in Milwaukee, according to the Washington Post: “We will win in Iraq so long as we stay the course.”
Earlier, in June, after returning from Baghdad, “I saw people wondering whether the United State would have the nerve to stay the course and help them succeed.”
But, just as he cut and ran from Afghanistan, Bush has cut and run from that phrase of steely resolve.
White House press secretary Tony Snow and the Bush team has tried to explain that “stay the course” does not actually mean stay the course but is a study in constant motion by the administration.
And what once was “we’ll stand down as soon as they stand up” is now we’ll “step back as they step forward and step up.” A little longer, perhaps, but it gets the point across.
In an Oct. 11 news conference, Bush became tangled over the original phrase, complaining, “The characterization of, you know, ‘it’s stay the course’ is about a quarter right. ‘Stay the course means keep doing what you’re doing. My attitude is: Don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working -- change. ‘Stay the course’ also means don’t leave before the job is done.“
In a later appearance with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, it was no longer a quarter right as Bush said: “We have been -- we will complete the mission, we will do our job and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting tactic. Constantly.“
It was painful to watch Marine Gen. Peter Pace, head of the Joint Chief of Staffs, blinking rapidly like a resurrected Richard Nixon as he tried to put a new face on a disintegrating policy.
Instead of a target date to withdraw from Iraq, we now have a timetable with windows of opportunity for the Iraqi leadership to meet. If they fail to meet our timetable for cleaning up corruption, protecting the population and rebuilding the infrastructure, then we’ll adjust the timetable and open the windows a little wider. To put a precise date on our leaving, Pace says, meekly echoing his boss, would result in chaos -- as though Iraqis today were living in Ronald Reagan’s peaceful city on a hill.
Anyway, as the commander-in-chief himself once announced -- in words meant to sound Churchillian -- the war against terrorism will be long hard, bloody and victory will be up to the next president(s).
Blame Bob Woodward for the recent Republican shift in “strategy” that’s merely a shift in rhetoric. In his book, State of Denial, Woodward peels away the framework from the false White House of cards to reveal the arrogance of the neocons, particularly former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney who led a willing Bush into the Iraq quagmire.
And remember, Rummy was Bush’s point man until the day after the election.
Pythian Press
In a rapid advance to the rear in the bloody occupation of Iraq, George W. Bush and his fellow warriors have muzzled their impotent “stay-the-course” weapon and unleashed newly coined rhetorical artillery under the rubric of “progress moving forward.”
This new “strategy” is anchored upon a three-legged stool of (1) governance, (2) security and (3) economics.
At least it has a far better ring to it than the shock and awe
pre-preempted invasion labeled Operation Iraqi Liberation and changed as rapidly as you can spell OIL to Operation Enduring Freedom.
Democrats can never hold a candle to the way Republicans can shoot themselves in the foot and tap-dance away from “stay the course” to “a study of constant motion,” meaning that stay the course did not mean what it said.
Still, in a Salt Lake City address in August 2006, Bush said: “We will stay the course. We will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed.”
And July, in Milwaukee, according to the Washington Post: “We will win in Iraq so long as we stay the course.”
Earlier, in June, after returning from Baghdad, “I saw people wondering whether the United State would have the nerve to stay the course and help them succeed.”
But, just as he cut and ran from Afghanistan, Bush has cut and run from that phrase of steely resolve.
White House press secretary Tony Snow and the Bush team has tried to explain that “stay the course” does not actually mean stay the course but is a study in constant motion by the administration.
And what once was “we’ll stand down as soon as they stand up” is now we’ll “step back as they step forward and step up.” A little longer, perhaps, but it gets the point across.
In an Oct. 11 news conference, Bush became tangled over the original phrase, complaining, “The characterization of, you know, ‘it’s stay the course’ is about a quarter right. ‘Stay the course means keep doing what you’re doing. My attitude is: Don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working -- change. ‘Stay the course’ also means don’t leave before the job is done.“
In a later appearance with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, it was no longer a quarter right as Bush said: “We have been -- we will complete the mission, we will do our job and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting tactic. Constantly.“
It was painful to watch Marine Gen. Peter Pace, head of the Joint Chief of Staffs, blinking rapidly like a resurrected Richard Nixon as he tried to put a new face on a disintegrating policy.
Instead of a target date to withdraw from Iraq, we now have a timetable with windows of opportunity for the Iraqi leadership to meet. If they fail to meet our timetable for cleaning up corruption, protecting the population and rebuilding the infrastructure, then we’ll adjust the timetable and open the windows a little wider. To put a precise date on our leaving, Pace says, meekly echoing his boss, would result in chaos -- as though Iraqis today were living in Ronald Reagan’s peaceful city on a hill.
Anyway, as the commander-in-chief himself once announced -- in words meant to sound Churchillian -- the war against terrorism will be long hard, bloody and victory will be up to the next president(s).
Blame Bob Woodward for the recent Republican shift in “strategy” that’s merely a shift in rhetoric. In his book, State of Denial, Woodward peels away the framework from the false White House of cards to reveal the arrogance of the neocons, particularly former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney who led a willing Bush into the Iraq quagmire.
And remember, Rummy was Bush’s point man until the day after the election.
Pythian Press
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Everything's just too damn small
By DOLPH HONICKER
My wife Jeannine and I own a cell phone (one). We share it. If she’s out, it’s attached to her purse, which means she has to drag her purse up to her ear if anyone calls. People stare when she’s at a restaurant and appears to be talking into her purse while leaning under the table.
If I’m out, she still has the cell phone with her. I haven’t quite got the hang of it. My fingers fumble.
It’s a remarkable device. Fits in the palm of your hand. It can take photos. It has a button that turns it into a video camera. I think it can add, subtract, divide and multiply (not like rabbits but with numbers). It may even have a timer and a button to get the latest stock market reports.
We use it to call people and receive calls from other people. That’s it. The luxury services remain unused.
If we had a flat tire on the highway or saw a traffic accident, our cell phone would come in handy. Unless we were in a dead zone, we could call 911 and tell them where we were -- if we had a global positioning system.
But, even if we saw a spectacular accident, worthy of CNN coverage, I wouldn’t know how to photograph with a digital camera which I usually leave at home.
Many years ago, I had a Rolliflex camera. I never used a flash. I learned to use available light. A light meter gave me settings for Tri-X film which I could juice up to an even higher speed.
Our digital camera fits in the palm of your hand. We ordered it over the internet. Yes, I’ve learned how to use the internet. Small as it is, the ad said the camera can turn out images of 10 pixels, which means it can cram a bunch of dots smaller than a period at the end of this sentence so tightly the photo would be almost as sharp as an old-fashioned darkroom photo -- so sharp you could blow up the image into a poster.
By the time I added a battery charger and lots of other stuff to my order, the bill came to $318.
We’ve had it for almost a year now. Every time I take it out and look at it the damned thing intimidates the hell out of me. It came with a manual. The manual also intimidates the hell out of me. It also came with a CD of instructions. But I’ve lost it.
With my Rolliflex all I had to do was look down, focus, set the shutter speed and snap. I could develop and print my own pictures. I was no Ed Weston or Ansel Adams, but some of my shots looked pretty good. Or, as Larry David would say: “Pretty, pretty good.”
Today everything technical seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Next year I may be able to watch Lawrence of Arabia on my thumbnail.
But do I?
Technology is passing me by. I have no idea what an iPod is. It sounds like one of those old black-and-white horror films where giant ants from outer space land in pods, hatch and then begin gobbling all the people in their path until a handsome young scientist develops a death ray that kills the ants.
Apple (not the edible type but the Silicon Valley version) is coming out with an iPhone that’ll sell for $500 to $600. What will you get for your money besides a mobile phone? Here are the other features: music player, camera, wireless e-mail, Web browser and video player.
For that money, it ought to have a device that will burn in CDs, although I have no idea how to burn in CDs. However, there’s a lot of rap music I’d like to burn. I come from an era of 78-rpm records with one song on one side and a second on the flip side.
Forget this high tech stuff. In my book, the greatest invention of the modern era was the flip-top can that replaced the ubiquitous “church key,” once a must at all beer busts.
And forget about making things smaller. Give me something Big like Sharp’s 108-inch flat panel television, the largest ever made. Of course, the only place we’d have to put it would be on our roof.
If we sat out chairs in the backyard and charged admission, it might be worth it.
Pythian Press
My wife Jeannine and I own a cell phone (one). We share it. If she’s out, it’s attached to her purse, which means she has to drag her purse up to her ear if anyone calls. People stare when she’s at a restaurant and appears to be talking into her purse while leaning under the table.
If I’m out, she still has the cell phone with her. I haven’t quite got the hang of it. My fingers fumble.
It’s a remarkable device. Fits in the palm of your hand. It can take photos. It has a button that turns it into a video camera. I think it can add, subtract, divide and multiply (not like rabbits but with numbers). It may even have a timer and a button to get the latest stock market reports.
We use it to call people and receive calls from other people. That’s it. The luxury services remain unused.
If we had a flat tire on the highway or saw a traffic accident, our cell phone would come in handy. Unless we were in a dead zone, we could call 911 and tell them where we were -- if we had a global positioning system.
But, even if we saw a spectacular accident, worthy of CNN coverage, I wouldn’t know how to photograph with a digital camera which I usually leave at home.
Many years ago, I had a Rolliflex camera. I never used a flash. I learned to use available light. A light meter gave me settings for Tri-X film which I could juice up to an even higher speed.
Our digital camera fits in the palm of your hand. We ordered it over the internet. Yes, I’ve learned how to use the internet. Small as it is, the ad said the camera can turn out images of 10 pixels, which means it can cram a bunch of dots smaller than a period at the end of this sentence so tightly the photo would be almost as sharp as an old-fashioned darkroom photo -- so sharp you could blow up the image into a poster.
By the time I added a battery charger and lots of other stuff to my order, the bill came to $318.
We’ve had it for almost a year now. Every time I take it out and look at it the damned thing intimidates the hell out of me. It came with a manual. The manual also intimidates the hell out of me. It also came with a CD of instructions. But I’ve lost it.
With my Rolliflex all I had to do was look down, focus, set the shutter speed and snap. I could develop and print my own pictures. I was no Ed Weston or Ansel Adams, but some of my shots looked pretty good. Or, as Larry David would say: “Pretty, pretty good.”
Today everything technical seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Next year I may be able to watch Lawrence of Arabia on my thumbnail.
But do I?
Technology is passing me by. I have no idea what an iPod is. It sounds like one of those old black-and-white horror films where giant ants from outer space land in pods, hatch and then begin gobbling all the people in their path until a handsome young scientist develops a death ray that kills the ants.
Apple (not the edible type but the Silicon Valley version) is coming out with an iPhone that’ll sell for $500 to $600. What will you get for your money besides a mobile phone? Here are the other features: music player, camera, wireless e-mail, Web browser and video player.
For that money, it ought to have a device that will burn in CDs, although I have no idea how to burn in CDs. However, there’s a lot of rap music I’d like to burn. I come from an era of 78-rpm records with one song on one side and a second on the flip side.
Forget this high tech stuff. In my book, the greatest invention of the modern era was the flip-top can that replaced the ubiquitous “church key,” once a must at all beer busts.
And forget about making things smaller. Give me something Big like Sharp’s 108-inch flat panel television, the largest ever made. Of course, the only place we’d have to put it would be on our roof.
If we sat out chairs in the backyard and charged admission, it might be worth it.
Pythian Press
Monday, May 14, 2007
Just a bunch of ‘lucky’ stiffs
By DOLPH HONICKER
A man can be rich, but only a nation can be wealthy. And if any person of any age suffers from poverty, then our whole country bears the shame.
--Walter Mosley in the Oct. 23 issue of The Nation.
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
--Warren Buffett
Who says the American economy is not booming? The cup not only is half full, it’s overflowing.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, especially if you are an investment banker. For instance, John Mack, chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley, was to be awarded a Christmas bonus in 2006 worth about $40 million in stock and options for 2006, according to the Washington Post.
That’s a nice hunk of change. But it gets better.
At Goldman Sachs, jaws dropped on Wall Street as the investment bank reported that profits soared 93 percent. As a result, its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, was in line to receive a record compensation exceeding $50 million in his Christmas stocking.
The New York Times quotes Michael Holland, chairman of Holland & Company, a New York-based investing firm, as saying: “Anyone at the bonus line at Goldman Sachs died and went to bonus heaven. It doesn’t get any better than this.”
But CEOs were not alone in being awash in greenbacks. Outside directors at hundreds of American companies received option grants that were likely to have been manipulated, says a new study printed in the Washington Post.
It reported that 9 percent of 29,000 option grants to outside directors from 1996 to 2005 were granted on a day the company stock hit a monthly low. “The likelihood of such a concentration of ‘lucky’ grants is so low as to be statistically impossible,” say the study’s authors.
Post writer Terence O’Hara quotes Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard University professor who co-authored the report -- “Lucky Directors” -- with Cornell University’s Yaniv Grinstein and Urs Peyer, a professor at the
French business school, as saying:
“It’s like going to Vegas thousands of times and betting on red every time and winning more than half the time. From a numerical standpoint, it can’t be random. There has to be some manipulation in the outcome.”
Of the more than 130 firms that have disclosed probes of their options-granting practices, only a handful of CEOs have been canned.
The latest study is the first focused solely on grants to directors. Oddly enough, another study, this one by the Corporate Library of 120 companies implicated in backdating, found a high incidence of interlocking directors who served on more than one company that backdated.
Ain’t America wonderful?
Retired teachers, police officers and firefighters and other public workers might differ.
As state governments cut benefits, set aside money to cover future costs and shift expenses to the federal Medicare program, USA Today says 43 state legislatures are set to convene in January to address a liability of more than $1 trillion to provide medical care promised to some 25 million current and future retired state and local civil servants.
The newspaper quotes state Rep. Dale Folwell (R-NC) as saying, “The numbers make your jaw drop.”
North Carolina, for instance has reported a $23.8 billion unfunded liability for retiree healthcare, more than three times what the state owes in ordinary debt.
Meanwhile, at Goldman Sachs, the bank earned nearly as much per share in 2006 as it had in the last two record years combined, and paid out $16.5 billion in compensation this year, or roughly $623,418 per employee.
No retirement worries for these guys.
And if by chance one of these bankers had to live from paycheck to paycheck, like millions of Americans who live in dread of receiving pink slips, it would be a long time before the wolves started to howl at the doors of the boys on Wall Street.
What hath Bush wrought?
By DOLPH HONICKER
A Presidential Prayer Team urges us to “pray for the President as he seeks the wisdom to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to biblical principles.” The prayer team’s first goal should be that marriage consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen. 29: 17-28).
Laban has two daughters, Leah the elder of “tender eyes,” and Rachel the younger, “beautiful and well favored.” Jacob, naturally, has eyes for Rachel and vows to serve Laban seven years.
But Laban, a sly old dog, throws a big party at the end of seven years, slips Leah into Jacob’s bed and he “went into her,” awakening the next morning to learn that Laban had “beguiled” him.
Teed off, Jacob asks why. Fulfill Leah for a week and Rachel is yours, says Laban. But, you have to serve me seven more years as well. After a week with Leah, Laban gives Jacob Rachel. And Jacob “went in also unto Rachael.”
The rest reads like an R-rated soap opera. Leah bears Jacob four sons. The barren Rachel, angry, offers her maid, Bilhah, to Jacob and he “went into her.” She bears three sons.
Leah, not to be outdone, offers up her maid, Zilpah, and the race is on.
To reinforce this theme: (II Sam. 5:13): “And David took him more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem after he was come from Hebron; and there were yet sons and daughters born to David.”
(II Chron. 11:21): “And Rehoboam loved Maachan the daughter of Absalom above all his wives and his concubines: for he took eighteen wives, and threescore concubines; and begat twenty and eight sons, and threescore daughters.”
If the wife isn’t a virgin she must be stoned to death unless her family brings “tokens of her virginity.” A Saudi ukase? No, (Deut 22:13-21).
Bush’s new law should forbid marriage between a believer and a nonbeliever (Gen. 24:3):
“And I will make thee swear by the Lord ... that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Cananites, among whom I dwell.”
Also, (Num. 25:1-9): “And Israel abode in Shittim, and the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab. ... And Israel joined himself unto Baalpeor; and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel.
“And the Lord said unto Moses, take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun, that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel.”
Knights of the Christian Crusades followed suit, catapulting severed heads of Muslims over the walls of fortresses; today’s Islamic fanatics practice beheadings on a smaller scale via TV.
“And Moses said unto the judges of Israel, Slay everyone of his men that were joined unto Baalpeor.”
Phinehas, thereupon, takes up a javelin and thrusts it through both Israel and the belly of his woman.
Goodness! No conservative compassion at all.
Also, if a married man dies sans kids, his brother must marry the widow. If he refuses or deliberately does not impregnate her, he should be fined one shoe and otherwise punished. (Gen. 38:6-10) and (Deut. 25:5-10).
In Deuteronomy we read: “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, her husband’s brother shall go in unto her.”
If not?
“... then let his brother’s wife go up to the gate unto the elders, and say ... he ... will not perform the duty of my husband’s brother. ... Then shall (she) come unto him in the presence of the elders, and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in his face, and shall answer and say, So shall it be done unto that man that will not build up his brother’s house.”
This is true Bush country.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Joan Baez, 66, puts fear in Army brass
By DOLPH HONICKER
Back in the 1970s, when Angel Records released a new vinyl long-playing record by Joan Baez, I’d rush out to buy it. She’s 66 now, but the melodious. bell tone quality of her voice has not diminished.
It’s a pity that wounded warriors at the Walter Reed Medical Center were not allowed to hear her. She could have sparked a revolution. Wounded vets might thrown their prosthesis's at orderlies serving them lukewarm coffee.
My wife Jeannine and I are the lucky ones. We attended her concert at Vanderbilt University when she was a raven-haired young beauty and again in Knoxville when she was entering her 60s, still beautiful.
Today we’ve captured her on CDs. I put one on, close my eyes, and she’s there beside me. You wounded vets don’t know what you missed.
`The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney White House shows no compunction in sending troops into the grinding maw of Iraq despite constant evidence that its Plans A, Plans B and C have not worked. But, like an elephant stomping an ant, the Pentagon fearfully squelches the voice of a slim, gray-haired lady who is famous the world over for her folk songs, her songs of protest against war, her tender ballads, pro-union ditties and yes, even her hymns.
Has there ever been a more delusional president, one who does not recognize reality when it slaps him in the face day after day?
Rocker John Mellencamp did perform for the recovering soldiers at Walter Reed. But he apparently caved in and the soldiers did not hear his typical blistering rhetoric against the war in Iraq. Also missing in action, of course, was Joan Baez who says she was disinvited from the event by Army officials.
She told the Washington Post in a letter that Mellencamp had wanted her to perform two songs with him and that she had agreed only to be told four days before the concert “I was not ‘approved‘ by the Army to take part.”
Brave old Army brass.
Secrecy being the watchword in the Bush White House, Walter Reed officials declined comment. But later, in an e-mail on Rollingstone.com, spokesman Steve Sanderson said the medical center received the requests for the Baez participation two days before the concert and that would have required a contract change.
Well, duh, change it.
Who would soldiers rather hear? A rock and roller forbidden to deliver his usual hard-hitting act, or Joan Baez?
In other words, as Bush might say, we screw up concerts the same way we screw up wars -- with red tape.
Or, most likely, this was just the latest lie and deception.
Baez’s manager, Mark Spector, said Mellencamp’s had invited Baez in March and that up to April 23, when she was turned down, everything was “still inching forward.”
Had she been allowed to perform, I would have hoped the wounded warriors could have heard Baez sing Finlanda, a song about Finland:
This is my song, Oh God of all the nations,/
A song of peace for lands afar and mine./
This is my home, the country where my heart is;/
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine./
But other hearts in other lands are beating,/
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine./
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,/
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine./
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,/
And skies everywhere as blue as mine./
Oh hear my song oh God of all the nations,/
A song of peace for their land and for mine.
No, that would never do. Luckily, the Army nipped one revolution in the bud. If peace broke out, what then?
Back in the 1970s, when Angel Records released a new vinyl long-playing record by Joan Baez, I’d rush out to buy it. She’s 66 now, but the melodious. bell tone quality of her voice has not diminished.
It’s a pity that wounded warriors at the Walter Reed Medical Center were not allowed to hear her. She could have sparked a revolution. Wounded vets might thrown their prosthesis's at orderlies serving them lukewarm coffee.
My wife Jeannine and I are the lucky ones. We attended her concert at Vanderbilt University when she was a raven-haired young beauty and again in Knoxville when she was entering her 60s, still beautiful.
Today we’ve captured her on CDs. I put one on, close my eyes, and she’s there beside me. You wounded vets don’t know what you missed.
`The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney White House shows no compunction in sending troops into the grinding maw of Iraq despite constant evidence that its Plans A, Plans B and C have not worked. But, like an elephant stomping an ant, the Pentagon fearfully squelches the voice of a slim, gray-haired lady who is famous the world over for her folk songs, her songs of protest against war, her tender ballads, pro-union ditties and yes, even her hymns.
Has there ever been a more delusional president, one who does not recognize reality when it slaps him in the face day after day?
Rocker John Mellencamp did perform for the recovering soldiers at Walter Reed. But he apparently caved in and the soldiers did not hear his typical blistering rhetoric against the war in Iraq. Also missing in action, of course, was Joan Baez who says she was disinvited from the event by Army officials.
She told the Washington Post in a letter that Mellencamp had wanted her to perform two songs with him and that she had agreed only to be told four days before the concert “I was not ‘approved‘ by the Army to take part.”
Brave old Army brass.
Secrecy being the watchword in the Bush White House, Walter Reed officials declined comment. But later, in an e-mail on Rollingstone.com, spokesman Steve Sanderson said the medical center received the requests for the Baez participation two days before the concert and that would have required a contract change.
Well, duh, change it.
Who would soldiers rather hear? A rock and roller forbidden to deliver his usual hard-hitting act, or Joan Baez?
In other words, as Bush might say, we screw up concerts the same way we screw up wars -- with red tape.
Or, most likely, this was just the latest lie and deception.
Baez’s manager, Mark Spector, said Mellencamp’s had invited Baez in March and that up to April 23, when she was turned down, everything was “still inching forward.”
Had she been allowed to perform, I would have hoped the wounded warriors could have heard Baez sing Finlanda, a song about Finland:
This is my song, Oh God of all the nations,/
A song of peace for lands afar and mine./
This is my home, the country where my heart is;/
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine./
But other hearts in other lands are beating,/
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine./
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,/
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine./
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,/
And skies everywhere as blue as mine./
Oh hear my song oh God of all the nations,/
A song of peace for their land and for mine.
No, that would never do. Luckily, the Army nipped one revolution in the bud. If peace broke out, what then?
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
It’s time we all knuckled down
MEMO TO:
President George W. Bush,
Vice President Dick Cheney
FROM:
Dolph Honicker
Gentlemen:
It has taken all these years for me to come over to your side. Yes, we are engaged today in a total global war on terror. It’s time that we ordinary Americans did something about it and made real sacrifices rather than carrying on business as usual, shopping at Wal-Mart, attending ball games, going on vacations.
During World War II, we kids collected aluminum pots and pans in the neighborhood to build warplanes. I always hoped that mine went into a P-38 Lightning or P-51 Mustang.
Our parents bought $25 defense bonds for something like $18.75. We kids bought defense stamps for a dime. There was a 20 per cent luxury tax.
Sugar was rationed. We added powdered red color to a stuff that resembled lard and called it Oleo.
Since the war in Iraq has lasted longer than the one we got into on Dec. 7, 1941, maybe it’s past time for us to tighten our belts. Gasoline and many other items were rationed then. My dad was a railroad man and drove a 1931 Model A Ford coupe he’d bought for fifty bucks and worked on until the engine purred. He received an “A” ration stamp for his windshield.
Others, who drove gas guzzlers or worked in nonessential jobs got “B” or “C” stamps.
I thought about this as my wife Jeannine and I drove our 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid to Birmingham the other day and got snarled in traffic spilling from the Talladega 500 Race Track. Those folks sure travel in style. There were literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of mobile homes clogging the highway. Some I swear were luxury motels on wheels as large as tractor trailers and must have averaged no more than 4 miles per gallon.
On the highway, our hybrid delivers 48 to 49.9 mpg. But these monsters in front and back reduced us to 45 mpg. Some of them were cute, though. They pulled a small car behind them or had a couple of bikes attached to their rear ends.
Since you, Mr. President, noted our addition to oil, the first thing to do is to declare a moratorium on NASCAR races where it’s not just the racecar drivers who burn up fuel, but those monster mobile homes. After we “win” in Iraq, it’s back to racing. I’m convinced this could save us from building a nuclear plant.
Gasoline ration stamps for cars and SUVs, rewarding the high mph vehicles and punishing the low mpg vehicles, could get us on the fast track to energy independence. People might try car pools or even mass transit. No more moms driving SUVs to the store for a loaf of bread and using up more gas than the bread itself cost.
Except for that little blip in 2003 on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln when you announced, under a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, that major fighting had ended in Iraq, you’ve been right on the money, telling us suckers that things will get worse in Iraq before they get better. And we buy it.
Just the other day, after the number of American deaths came in for the month at 104, the sixth highest figure for a single month since the war began -- eight fewer than the December toll of 112, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, warned that “there is a very real possibility” of intense combat in the coming months and “therefore, there could be more casualties.”
How can you guys be so accurate in casualty forecasts and so far off-base on the war costs now approaching half a trillion dollars? Since there’re about 16 more wounded troops for every one killed, please bite the bullet and use the extra $4 billion in the supplemental bill Congress passed and you vetoed and get VA hospitals up to snuff.
You put them there, give them the best treatment, especially those who’ve lost limbs, eyes, other organs or have been brain damaged.
I believe you err when you warn that if we leave Iraq, the Viet Cong, I mean al Qaeda, will follow us home.
I know you oppose abortion, but I urge you to abort any further ideas of tripping to the moon or Mars. Just concentrate on getting our astronauts home safely and use the remainder of the budget and brain power to monitor the orbiting information satellites and to tap into means to provide renewable energy.
We once had dollar-a-year men who went to Washington to serve. I don’t expect the heads of such companies as Halliburton and Lockheed to make such sacrifices, but it was a thought.
With our troops spread thin, serving in Iraq another 20 or 40 years to build democracy in a theocracy where tribes have fought one another for 1,400 years, please consider a draft. Mr. Bush, if your twin daughters are drafted, well, that’s the luck of the draw.
Remember, even Lucky Strike Green went to war during WWII.
Sincerely,
An American
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Bill Garner’s famous last words
By DOLPH HONICKER
When I heard President George W. Bush tout nuclear power plants as his No. 1 solution to global warming and our energy problems, I thought about the late Bill Garner and the piece I wrote about him and his late wife, Mary Tex, that appeared Jan. 31, 1979 on the editorial page of The Nashville Tennessean.
Bush won’t read this; I hope you will:
“A man’s last words ‘have an aura about them if not a halo,’ according to Edward S. Le Comte, editor of the Dictionary of Last Words.
“Not Bill Garner’s. His had just a whiff of fire and brimstone. They were vented at TVA, a federal utility that appropriated part of his family land to build the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant. One of the giant, almost completed cooling towers now casts a shadow across the Garner property.
“Bill’s 11-year-old son William shoots baskets in the yard behind their modest ranch-style home. From that distance the cooling tower resembles a beer can someone had squeezed in the middle and tossed out of a car. William’s mother, Mary Tex, can look out the kitchen window and see the squeezed beer can sitting there.
“Bill Garner, a Scottsboro, Ala., lawyer and former assistant attorney general for the state, declared war against the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1970.
“‘Bill and I had just built our house. I was in the yard planting grass,’ said Mary Tex, a lawyer in her own right and a former Alabama state auditor, treasurer and secretary of state.
“‘The TVA agent came by and nonchalantly said he would like for me to sign this form, that he wanted to look over our property for educational, economical and scientific reasons,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know why I didn’t sign except that I’d been working in the grass and my hands were dirty.’
“Bill was out of town and the TVA agent pestered Mary Tex day after day, she said. ‘One Saturday night -- I remember it very well because I happened to have on a bathrobe and the children were running around -- the agent knocked on the door and I invited him in,’ Mary Tex said.
“‘He looked at my fireplace and said it must be wonderful to have all these logs to burn and what a shame we’d built our house there. I looked at him like he was crazy or I was crazy and he said, “Well, I’ll tell you this, Mrs. Garner, if you don’t sign this form the federal marshal will be here in two or three days to serve you.” ‘Sure enough, this tremendously large man showed up ... and served me with the papers.’
“Said Bill later, ‘In the beginning the fight was just to hold onto the land. That was before I knew anything about nuclear energy. As we got further into it, I realized nuclear energy was evil no matter whose land they took.’
“A shining amalgam of liberalism and conservatism, Bill was called everything from environmentalist to radical to fanatic and cared not a tinker’s damn. ‘We anarchists,’ he joked, ‘don’t always throw bombs.’
“He saw true liberals and true conservatives as ‘brothers under the skin’ who could unite to halt the spread of nuclear energy, which he called the ‘greatest moral issue of our time.’
“In his 54th year, Bill knew he was dying. But he fought on, he said, not for himself but for his children.
“‘Bill not only was close to Clarence Darrow in his philosophical bent, he bore an uncanny physical resemblance as well,’ said Leroy Ellis III, a Nashville lawyer whom Garner aided in an intervention against the Hartsville nuclear plant, the world’s largest. ‘This past year, Bill seemed to be living beyond and outside himself.’
“This was noted by other friends who urged the stubborn, chain-smoking Garner to quit the great god Nicotine and take it easy for awhile. But no, last fall at a gathering of the Catfish Alliance at Vanderbilt University, he stood puffing on a cigarette, eyes hollow, cheekbones stretching skin, and gasped out words of Jeffersonian wisdom, for it was Thomas Jefferson he most admired.
“Bill put himself into the University of Alabama Hospital in Birmingham Jan. 4, gave the nurses fits for hiding his cigarettes, and fought three heart attacks before dying at 4 a.m. on Jan. 17.
“Lord Byron uttered his last words in Greek. Schiller in Latin, and the Arkansas poet Albert Pike in Hebrew. According to family friend Tom Paul of Huntsville, Bill spoke his in Anglo-Saxon vernacular.
“Last words fascinate. Marie Antoinette’s were: ‘Monsieur, I beg your pardon.’ (She had stepped on the executioner’s foot).
“Bill had a love-hate relation with TVA. The early work, the potential, the promise, he loved. He also had a professional prize fighter’s respect for one of his adversaries, TVA lawyer David Powell. But TVA was subsidizing a dying industry, he said. Mushrooming electric rates, a rural North Alabama still downtrodden after four decades of TVA progress, and that atomic beer can in his front yard led to Bill’s last recorded words:
“‘I only wish I could take a dozen of those TVA bastards with me.’”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
