May 11th ~ Casablanca, Morocco Well, we were down to the last leg of our trip which included the bus ride from Essaouira to Casablanca. We were sorry to not have had more time in Essaouira as it was so charming and our free day got partly eaten away with lousy weather.
via Casablanca is More Than the Title of a Classic Movie — A Note From Abroad
I am from a small logging and cattle town in central Idaho. It was a wonderful place to grow up, no one was rich, but no one lived on the streets or was starving either. The population in the fifties and sixties was almost entirely conservative and Republican. When I graduated high school and headed off to college I was a dyed in the wool conservative also. 
No, college did not cause me to change my attitude or become a liberal. I was the guest of the town doctor, lived in his home when I graduated high school. His eldest son and I were both co-captains of an undefeated football team, best friends, and Doc was a fan. During my first year of college I started running low on funds, although the Doc later told me he had every intention of paying my way through college, I was too proud to ask and joined the Marine Corps under a guaranteed electronic aviation school agreement. This was in 1968, the draft was active, Vietnam was raging, and I knew the minute I dropped out of school I would be drafted, in which case no guarantee of anything except cannon fodder eligibility! Click here for look at my hometown webpage!
(on your left standing)
So I went to boot camp and the Infantry Training Regiment. From there I went to the Naval Air Station Jacksonville in Florida and attended the Aviation Electronic School provided by the Navy. I then went to a Marine training squadron at Cherry Point in North Carolina briefly before being sent to West Pac for over two and half years. Spent 10 months in Japan, with side trips to South Korea and Taiwan to train their troops in electronic countermeasures. After ten months I got a two-hour window to report aboard a C130 Hercules for duty a tad farther South. Although we were officially labeled as a detachment in and around Cubi Point in the Philippines, we were actually running daily missions to the north out of Danang! For political reasons we were not allowed to admit that at the time. I was an E2 or Pfc a month before we left Japan, so was a rookie L/Cpl when I started my first combat tour. Three months later I was an E5 Sgt and was the NCOIC of one shift of the Avionics Electric Shop supporting the Grumman Intruder EA6EA computer warfare bird for VMCJ-1. There were two of us. I got out of the Marines after four years, worked for the same employer for 30 years. No union, so no retirement or work sponsored 401k. A little late, then went to work for another eight years for a company that had at least a co-pay 401k and insurance, profit sharing, so managed to put some cash away the last few years. Click here for a link to info on VMCJ-1, my combat squadron! 
(again, on your left and 30 years)
I give you this background because I was covering a lot of ground and being introduced to many different cultures, and I wanted to demonstrate that I was never a taker, ever! It became clear to me that I needed to rethink some of my conservative ideas. Some of these countries were doing fine as far as big business was concerned, but none of that well-being was trickling down to the masses. Japan was the only country in the orient that even appeared to be trying to develop a middle class. For the most part, there were the rich, the filthy poor, and the crooks in between. Without unions child labor was rampant, and older workers still lived in poverty. The only people getting ahead beside the ruling class who owned the industry, were the whores, pimps, gambling and drinking establishments, and criminals in general!
I was a good student in high school, loved school, and knew it was my way out. I had run away from a broken home at the ripe old age of eleven, never wanted to go back that life ever again. So I started to remember my history classes. I signed up for more college classes through the Corps, and tried to see what was what. According to history, before unions, children worked and died in mines and other industry, yes right here in America. The adult workers, especially in mining, were tied to and required to buy all of their goods from a company store. They were not paid enough to live on, but were allowed to charge, so they were basically slaves, as they were not allowed to leave employment unless they were square with the company store, which they never were. There are many more examples, but I think you see where I am going. Unions changed all that; all big business ever did was assassinate union organizers! Then I started to notice our education in America was not all it was cracked up to be. I started hanging out with foreign students at coffee shops and other venues when on leave, or when I would have any time after travelling to foreign soil to fix an aircraft that had been forced to land and seek repair. As almost every square inch of our aircraft required a secret clearance, techs who could work on it had to be flown in, I was in that lucky few. Anyway, the people from Europe, Australia, the Orient, or the Mediterranean on average knew way more about American history and politics than American students did! Believe me, I checked! As our education started to get more and more expensive, countries like Germany who were becoming very successful in the technological age, and had a very savvy and educated work force, offered absolutely free college education. So my notions of how things need to be started to shift.
In the fifties we had strong unions, we were building an ever-larger middle class by leaps and bounds! We built huge amounts of infrastructure, for example practically all of the interstate freeways, bridges, and overpasses that went with them all started in 1955! Our national debt was manageable, certain social acts to protect seniors were enacted and worked just fine until politicians robbed Peter to pay Paul, Paul being another word for pet project, or another would be pork belly. So there was my attitude being adjusted again. Every state that has large populations that are convinced government is to big and we just need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, well those states without exception take the biggest chunks of help from the big bad government to survive, ever single one, my home state included. I now live in California, and it takes a bad rap all the time, but it is not a major taker, like say Idaho for example, or almost any state in the geographic south, so go figure! Click here for more information on the history of unions.
Then in the eighties we were told unions were bad, just leave big business to thrive and the money will trickle back down to the middle class and others. So unions were weakened, nothing trickled anywhere, and now we make less per hour across the board adjusted for inflation than we did forty years ago. It trickled all right, but not in the direction we had hoped! So my attitude was further adjusted. Right now the bottom 80 percent of Americans own a meager 7 percent of the wealth, or, to look at it another way, the wealthiest 400 Americans have the same combined wealth of all the nation’s poorest – more than 150 million people, which is almost half the population. So, no matter how you slice it, when it comes to income and wealth, the rich get most of the pie and the rest get the crumbs.
Now you could argue that these are not true facts, however they are really not being disputed by anyone, on the right or the left. Of course the blame game is rampant and ongoing. You know those taker states that I talked about? Well if you take a poll and ask people questions about what they want, leave out party or ideology, the answers invariably align with a more liberal democratic view, yet every one of these people from these states will vote a conservative ticket, voting away the things they just said they wanted, if they bother to vote at all. So this kind of thinking made me adjust my attitude even further.
So now we are back to a basic change we need to make before we can start to make this any better. We have to get the money out of politics. We have to quit allowing money and the influence it buys tell us what is good for us, what we can have, and telling us how we should vote. We need each politician to be limited by term, money, and no cushy job offer after his or her term is over for a set period of time. I would like that to be a decade, but that is just me!
So are there problems with government handouts, you bet. Some people use a helping hand to do just that, use it as a way to get out and back into a productive life! But others, sadly, begin to depend on these handouts as a way of life and think they are entitled to them without any effort to get up and out of their particular predicament. In these instances the conservative adage is correct, get up and help yourself as soon and as often as you can!
Now I am going to tell you something you are not going to like, I am going to give you a link so you can see the pretty graphs and colorful maps, but suffice it to say the numbers, for decades now, have been quite clear: With some exceptions, what we regard as red states are sent a whole lot more of your hard-earned tax dollars than the traditional blue states. In effect, supposedly indolent, “tax and spend” liberals actually subsidize the individualistic, pure, and hard-working lifestyle of our conservative countrymen. Did you get that, my conservative friends and classmates, you are the takers, you are the ones sucking at the teat of big government, while we liberals pay for it! That is the hard truth! Click here for a link to the pretty graphs and maps. Pretty illuminating!
Climate Change for Idiots
Certain sections based on writings by Nonny Mouse in 2009
Posted on Crooks and Liars
This blog is not an exact repost, it has been edited, added to, and rethought by yours truly, but it has some extremely important points you need to consider, so I will illiterate them for you! But first lets look at some attitudes which are part and parcel to the problem. We have members of congress who believe the planet is only 6,000 years old, plus or minus 2,000 years! Now these are good Christians who believe in their bible, that it was written by God, and accurate in every detail. So Leviticus 18:22 says it is ok to own slaves as long as they come from neighboring nations, I guess turning your neighbor, who you dislike, into a slave was frowned on. Exodus 21:7 sanctions selling your daughter into slavery. Sounds to me like the sex trade was alive and well! Leviticus 15:19-24, well I won’t get into it, but it means I have to leave the house every 28 days and pitch a tent in the back yard. Exodus 35:2 clearly states that anyone working on the Sabbath should be put to death. I guess that means we automatically kill any politician during a reelection cycle! Leviticus 11:10 states it is an abomination to eat shellfish, 21; 20 says I cannot worship if I have any physical defects, like needing glasses or a cane to walk. It goes on and on, stoning people for planting two crops in one field, wearing two different kinds of thread, your cotton/polyester blend for example, gets you stoned, and not in a good way! I bring this up, not to make fun of, or belittle religion, but to point out you have to understand superstitious people wrote the bible, and superstitious people try to run the government based on what they think it says! It may well be the word of God, I personally do not think so, but man has always thought he knew best, even when it was God talking, so what God said is not necessarily what the “man” wrote down. Especially if he did not have the capacity to understand what it was that had just been imparted to him. I mean they also thought the earth was the center of the universe and that it was flat! I know, you are saying the person was directed by God and wrote as if he were God. But the scholars who later translated what was written were not possessed of God. The scholars who worked for King James, for example, who translated the version most of us have in our possession, were not guided by divine intervention. Oh, and this is way off point, but when you talk using thee and thou, verily, beseech, and other speech found in the bible you are not talking like a Christian or Christ, but like a really old Englishman, so knock it off.
So I do not want my politician making policy based on the examples I just gave, or anything else but actual science. I mean we have elected politicians in the GOP that say we do not have to worry about global warming because God is up there and he will take care of it! We have trees older than the bible says the whole universe is. We recently discovered a whole civilization in what is now Turkey that is at least 12000 years old. We can carbon date artifacts that are millions upon millions of years old! We can see fossil records going back billions of years! So when a politician denies science, and therefore climate change, based on who put the most money in his wallet that is neither good for me or for you! Pay really close attention to what follows in this blog, please!
So… a bit of Climate Change for Idiots to aid those of us who feel like we’re beating heads against the wall arguing with friends and relatives frantically denying The End is Nigh, all while driving their SUVs through the nearest McDonald’s drive-in, those poor benighted souls too obtuse to realize the causes of global warming are myriad, and that while – yes, they are correct, Big Biz and First World greed are busily maneuvering and dodging and scheming over who gets to profit the most from climate change – that doesn’t mean it’s not real. We’re too focused on the looters to realize that the city is burning down around us. Climate change is complicated, but not impossible to understand. Anyone with a driver’s license for that SUV isn’t required to know that d = V /(2g(f + G)); drivers instinctively know enough physics to apply the brakes long before the car needs to stop. The reaction time for a driver to start applying the brakes is 1.5 seconds. In terms of climate change, we’re in that reaction phase – and we’d better start thinking about stomping on the brakes pretty damned soon. A driver who doesn’t care about braking before they crash is stupid, suicidal, or crazy.
Let’s break this down into more easily digested morsels so that even those suffering from the current deficit of basic science in American school systems that their grasp of geological history is closer to The Flintstones than Charles Darwin can get a grip. Dick and Jane are in a jet, flying over Kansas. Look, Jane, look! The jet is leaving a contrail behind us. See the contrail form cirrus clouds. Contrails last up to eight hours, says Jane, and only half a dozen of them are needed to grow and form a cloud the size of the entire state of Massachusetts. That’s really big, says Dick. Woof, says Spot, shivering down in the baggage hold. Now for some basic math, something else that seems to be lacking in our classrooms these days: Five thousand planes, give or take a few, are in flight over the United States at any given moment. In a single day, more than 87,000 are leaving contrails all over those friendly skies. On average, 64 million jet planes take off and land somewhere in the States, leaving behind contrails. Divide six cirrus clouds the size of Massachusetts into 64 million contrails, and that’s a lot of clouds. All this cloud cover is bouncing the sun’s energy back into space, keeping our planet cool in what’s been called ‘global dimming,’ which should be a good thing, right? Um, not really. Now we need some chemistry… yeah, yeah, I know. They don’t teach much of that in schools anymore, either. But let’s give it a shot, anyway. What exactly are contrails? Contrails and clouds are similar, made up of condensed water vapor freezing around small particles. Clouds form from ice crystals and other natural particles, like dust blown into the atmosphere by wind. Ice crystals melt into water, while dust, being generally inert, falls back to earth where it came from. Contrails, on the other hand, form around aircraft exhaust, including carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxides, and hydrocarbons such as methane, sulfates, soot and metal particles. The clouds formed by these exhaust particulates has another difference to ordinary clouds; ice crystals and natural dust is larger than hydrocarbon particulates, which form much smaller water droplets. Smaller water droplets reflect back more sunlight, but don’t grow heavy enough to precipitate as rain. Pollution-derived clouds actually decrease rain, adding to drought conditions. Now add this in to what is known as the Asian Brown Cloud, a thick layer of smog covering a huge area of southern Asia and the Indian Ocean formed by combustion pollution, wood fires, garbage fires, burning fossil fuels in cars, industrial factory emissions, the usual culprits. In the monsoon months, rain washes this massive toxic cloud out of the air – and into the soil. But while this lethal crap is floating around in the atmosphere and causing droughts, floods, and killing two million people a year, it also is contributing to ‘global dimming’, masking its own impact on atmospheric warming. And before anyone gets too smug that the so-called ‘Asian’ Brown Cloud is all India and China’s fault and therefore their problem, it’s not unique to Asia; hotspots popping up in Europe, South Africa, South America, and North America – in other words, everywhere. In September of 2001, we got our first real glimpse of what happens if we aren’t pumping vast quantities of particulate crap into the air alongside all the carbon dioxide waste. Current climate change forecasts only take into consideration CO2 emissions, which predict a maximum warming of 5 degrees by the end of the century, plenty of time to ‘do something’, everyone can relax, sit back, wait for scientists and politicians to come up with the answers all in the nick of time, don’t worry, be happy! But climate change forecasts haven’t been factoring in global dimming. We don’t have a hundred years to come up with a solution – we’ve got about twenty to apply those brakes before it’s too late. Cooling particle pollution is already dropping off while the CO2 warming pollution is continuing to rise, which means a doubled accelerated warming – reducing cooling and increased heating at the same time. With the dual effect of global warming/global dimming, temperatures could rise twice as fast as previously thought, global warming exceeding two degrees by around 2030, at which point the Greenland ice sheet would melt, causing irreversible damage. Once the Greenland ice cap begins to melt, nothing will stop it. After Greenland, the world’s tropical rain forests will start to die off in the heat. By 2040, with only a four degree rise in global temperature, the Amazon Basin rain forest becomes unsustainable, subjected to devastating fires (think – Australia right now), all of South America turns into one vast savannah and ultimately desert. As rain forests die and burn, those fires will release even more CO2 into the atmosphere, driving global warming still further and faster. In just a century, rather than five degrees hotter, the world could easily be twice that, which would be a warming more rapid than any other at any time ever in Earth’s history, bar none. Most European and northern plant species will not survive in a North African climate. But while a ten-degree warming in Europe in a hundred years is merely catastrophic, a ten-degree warming in an already hot country makes it completely uninhabitable. Life on earth begins to starve and die, which includes us.
And now for the coup de grace at the end of this chain of effect: a ten degree warming will lead to the release of a vast natural store of greenhouse gas bigger than all the oil and coal reserves of the planet. Methane hydrates store ten thousand billion tons of methane, a greenhouse gas eight times stronger than carbon dioxide, at the bottom of the ocean in a kind of frozen form, known to be destabilized by warming. Once these gasses start to be released, no matter what was done at that point to curb emissions, it would be too late. Ten thousand billion tons of methane, which would have twenty-five times the impact on temperature than a carbon dioxide emission of the same mass over the following 100 years, would be released into the atmosphere, the Earth’s climate heading towards temperatures unseen in four billion years, with no way to stop it. All life on earth would become extinct. It’s the end of the world. And we’re only talking two hundred years, tops. But, yeah, those deniers are completely correct about one thing – the earth has been here before. Back when the only life capable of surviving in such an atmosphere and climate was precursors of bacteria. Totally natural, ya betcha. If we’re really lucky, the earth will recover on its own, just like it did the first time around… in another four billion years.
Welcome to Venus, folks…
Postscript: Climate change, global warming, whatever the hell you want to call it exists. There are basically no scientists denying climate change anymore. I am not talking about the guy who used to be a weatherman in a white coat who was hired by some conglomerate or other to spew out whatever they told him to spew. Saying your not a scientist, so you don’t know is not an excuse! GOP deniers that say they have seen no science to back it up are, for lack of a better word, liars. So vote the ticket just like you were told to, hell you will probably die before the crap hits the proverbial fan, but your kin might wish you had done something about it as they starve to death in a world gone mad!
This is story has three parts, but I am only going to cover one for now. All of my information is gleaned from and investigation by Reuters. I would just send out a link, but it is basically a report the size of a small novel, so hardly anyone I know will wade through it. So I am going to try and just cover some key points in the first section of the investigation. I believe this is probably the most important blog I will have done to date. Any of you who are retired or receiving any benefits stemming from your military career could be directly affected at any time. So you should read this blog, and I will of course include the link to the original article, which all of you should read. Any political leanings, voting habits, or any other well meaning action taken hoping to effect our economics cannot be accurate without understanding the problems these three parts lay out. As I said only one section for now, the rest may come later.
The first segment deals with the Pentagons payroll quagmire that inflicts punishing errors on America’s warriors. There were and are a huge population of military to choose from that have been ruined by this bureaucracy with no recourse, but I will just give you two examples. The article lists names, but I will refrain. You can examine the original at your leisure for this type of info.
A 30 year old wounded vet, on active duty still, mind you, was in his second month of physical and psychological reconstruction at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, after two tours of combat duty had left him shattered. His war-related afflictions included traumatic brain injury, severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), abnormal eye movements due to nerve damage, chronic pain, and a hip injury. But the problem that loomed largest was different. He had no money. The Defense Department was withholding big chunks of his pay. It had started that October, when he received $2,337.56, instead of his normal monthly take-home pay of about $3,300. He quickly raised the issue with staff. It only got worse. For all of December, his pay came to $117.99.
Now this all started when he was wounded and wound up in Germany for treatment. The problem was he did not arrive to the hospital on a plane. His unit had transferred back to Germany and had taken him with them. So he arrived for treatment via bus. So because they only met planes and took names to change status to wounded warrior, he was not. So now they wanted to be paid back for meals he might have in the hospital, etc. It is not clear, because he could never get them to tell him why he owed them money. He had to sell or hock everything his family owned, take out an emergency loan, just to keep food on the table. Even after admitting they had made an accounting mistake, they would not refund any monies, and it took months for his pay to rise to where it was supposed to be. After Reuters got involved, some, but not all, of the money was returned.
Another man, in the national guard, was posted in a combat area. He was the victim of a rocket attack. He was taken, unconscious to the hospital and survived. After he returned to the states and got a job, his wages were garnished by the military for all the equipment he had on and with him because he did not turn it back in. Again, only after Reuters got involved did they drop it. However he never got all the money back they took. Now this happens again, and again, with no recourse by servicemen. Most are never given any reason, their replies are not answered, the money just keeps getting held out of their pay. Now sometimes this is because they were overpaid because they did not drop pay when service was no longer in a war zone, etc. However, they would pull almost entire paychecks with no explanation. But a majority is accounting errors, from an outdated, archaic accounting system that is out of control.
The defense department is still using the original software Cobal, which is forty years old. It cannot communicate with new systems, it did not work well when it was new, and now it is a disaster. At last count there were 167 manual work arounds because the system has whole sections corrupted and no one knows how to service it. The manuals are actually lost, and they do not deny this. So for example, if you need to pass information form one area to another, computer-to-computer does not work. A huge cohort of manual typists has to come in, type up or sometimes transcribe huge amounts of data, and then hand carry it to the entity needing the info. Again having to be reentered into those offices computers. You begin to see how information gets garbled. The pentagon has 2,200 computers to handle finances, which cannot communicate, most of which each section has made their own program changes so the are not compatible in any way. It is a disaster.
One last example, a three star that was retired was asked to come back on active duty to serve in Iraq. Accounting correctly stopped his retirement pay, but because the programming said that if that happened it meant the individual was deceased, he and his family got nothing, not a single dime in pay. To add insult to injury, they generated a message that was sent to the family saying how sorry they were that he had died. This while in a war zone. So if they treat a three stars this way, what chance does private Jones have. This costs us, just for this wonderful finance system for our armed services, 17.3 billion annually. Most of which is waste dealing with this outdated archaic system. All efforts to change this have been slapped down by the bureaucracy that is Washington, even though in the long run it would save money, a lot of money.
The other two sections are “Faking It”, and “Broken Fixes”. The first explains that because defense department cannot ever match up with the budgeted money, they add or subtract what they call plugs. They just make up numbers so they do match, and don’t even hide that this is what they are doing. Well from us they do! It goes on to discuss billions in waste. The second, “Broken Fixes” describes attempts by politicians and military personnel to update, which has been expensive and then dropped. We all know how good the feds are with setting up computer systems.
I would like to add that all military services use this antiquated system except one, the Marine Corp. I have no idea how they escaped this disaster, or whether they have one of their own, but I would like to believe that my Marine Corps has it “stuff” together!
P.S.
There is a law on the books that each section of the government must go through an audit every year. The pentagon has never, ever, complied with this law. They say that they cannot comply because they do not have the capability to know where the money is or how it is being used. I don’t understand why that seems to be ok, but obviously it seems to satisfy our politicians as they are still not complying to this day! The link that will take you to the original articles is below.
Our nations independence was July 4, 1776. Eight out of ten people on the street could not tell me the year, and almost half could not tell me the damn day! Which means they have no idea what July 4th is all about. The ones that did mostly referenced the movie Independence Day. When asked about why, most said it was over tea. After the successful conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, the British government decided to make its North American colonies pay more of the costs of governing and defending them. Over the next 12 years Britain imposed a series of new taxes and other revenue-raising measures on the colonies that aroused heated opposition. The American colonists resented the trade regulations by which Britain utilized American economic resources to its own advantage, and they likewise resented their lack of representation in the British Parliament. British intransigence to these grievances spurred a growing desire for independence on the Americans’ part. When was the civil war? The civil war was fought from 1861 to 1865. Not one single person was able to tell me the correct answer to that question. Most thought Washington was president during that conflict! They also thought the war was about political and economic issues not connected to slavery and that the only reason Lincoln freed the slaves was to help win the war and for no other reason. The truth is in the 1860 presidential election campaign led by Abraham Lincoln, he opposed the expansion of slavery into United States’ territories. Lincoln won, but before his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. The first six to secede had the highest proportions of slaves in their populations, a total of 48.8% for the six.[5] Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln’s inaugural address declared his administration would not initiate civil war. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession. Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. A peace conference failed to find a compromise, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates assumed that European countries were so dependent on “King Cotton” that they would intervene; none did and none recognized the new Confederate States of America. Watch the movie that came out a year or so ago about Lincoln. It is historically accurate and a good history lesson.
The history of WWI and WWII, well I might as well have been asking questions about molecular biology. No one knew when, why, or how we got into each. WWI began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. The great powers in Europe had been at each others throats, so to speak, for about 4 decades. The defining moment that started WWI was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip, an ethnic Serb and Yugoslav nationalist from the group Young Bosnia, which was supported by the Black Hand, a nationalist organization in Serbia. The more immediate cause for the war was tensions over territory in the Balkans. Austria-Hungary competed with Serbia and Russia for territory and influence in the region and they pulled the rest of the Great Powers into the conflict through their various alliances and treaties. WWII was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, though some related conflicts in Asia began before 1939. It involved the vast majority of the world’s nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people, from more than 30 different countries. In a state of “total war”, the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust, the Three Alls Policy, the strategic bombing of enemy industrial and/or population centers, and the first use of nuclear weapons in combat, it resulted in an estimated 50 million to 85 million fatalities. This made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history. The Alls Policy was something I was not familiar with. It was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three “alls” being kill all, loot all, destroy all! I will stop there, as my conversations with individuals about Nam and current or recent conflicts is something I am still studying. The history of the world in general gets into the age of the earth, evolution, religion, and would take volumes, plus is not a popular subject where I come from. So I may tackle that, as I have some strong opinions based on facts, science, and yes, the bible, but does not need to be discussed to prove my current point. My point is, people I talk to have never taken courses in local, state, and federal forms of government. They have no accurate sense of our history, or how we came into being. This includes people who are proud to cite parts of the constitution, especially certain amendments, but have no idea of how or what was going on when they were drafted. They think they do, and are sure they have the straight of it, but when pressed, actually have no clue. These, I believe, represent the majority of our voters. It is also why we follow whoever inundates us with the most information prior to our elections, and couches this information in a way that catches our imagination, but is neither factual nor true in even a minor way in most cases. Yet we follow like lemmings with no true idea of why we are running off of a cliff by the millions.
I have no problem with rich people; I think the fact that you can become rich is part and parcel of what America is about. But it cannot happen at the expense of the vast majority of the American public, the poor, or the middle class! Their spending power is what makes the economy work, now, in the past, and in the future. If they don’t have extra coin in their jeans to spend, our economy will not grow. Plain and simple folks, it is how it is. So basing a company on profit only at the expense of the worker will cause economic failure. Shipping jobs overseas, hiding money offshore to keep from paying taxes here at home, this all has to stop, must stop. Most people do not even understand the difference between the national debt and deficit, they think it is one and the same. They also do not understand that the deficit comes first before the debt even comes into consideration, and the middle class pays the bill, not big business, and it never has except to create a growing prosperous middle class, not disassembling it. Understanding this means you have to also be a student of history, a student of the local, state, and federal governments and how it is supposed to work. Without both you cannot understand economics. And listening to a powerful rich person is also a mistake. Study after study shows most know nothing outside the realm of the business they are succeeding in. This means they should not be advising you, so you need to advise yourself. So take a careful look, if you cannot see the majority of the population thriving, not just existing, then the policies that make that scenario a reality are absolutely wrong.
There is a dumbing down of America. We have dropped to the bottom of the pile of industrialized nations in education. We are not one of the countries where the population is happy with its countries policies, and we are fast sliding down that list like an out of control bobsled on the Matterhorn. If you are a conservative, you need to round off the sharp corners, if you are a liberal, you may need to accept some realities that are harsher than you would like. But if you look at things with no preconceived notions, and try to improve the basic education I think is necessary, I firmly believe your decisions will be different, and better, regardless if your political beliefs are conservative, liberal, or other leanings that proliferate out there.
A blog I follow written by Joyce’s “Edwards” daughter. She and her husband are currently in Chengdu China. Michelle writes one of my favorite blogs about her adventures and daily life as the wife of a foreign service diplomat. She also works coordinating finding schools, helping out new arrivals to get their bearings. planning parties, outings, the real stuff that makes a place work. I encourage you to take a look.
I got up this morning with high hopes. (I may not have been bright-eyed and bushy tailed, but wrapped in a fluffy pink robe and shuffling through to the kitchen to get Cheerios still counts as being “up,” even if not fully functional.) Why high hopes on this random day in February? Because I could see across the river, and seeing across the river means that the air pollution is down, which means, hope against all hope, we might see a ray or two of sunshine at some point today.
It may sound a bit ridiculous to be cheered by the sight of a river that is less than 100 yards from my apartment, but we’ve been weeks with a steady haze in Chengdu. For those of you who follow air quality indexes (two years ago I would have asked who in their right mind does that, but after a…
View original post 557 more words
Why Government is no longer
By the People or for the People
The blog you are hopefully about to read is inspired by a man whose articles and blogs are a favorite of mine. His writings mirror my own thoughts, but he has a much more educated background to draw from, so I am going to encapsulate several articles he wrote, culling the thoughts I wish to convey. His name is Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century.
Before January 2009, the filibuster was used only for measures and nominations on which the minority party in the Senate had their strongest objections. Since then, Senate Republicans have filibustered almost everything, betting that voters will blame Democrats for the dysfunction in Congress as much as they blame the GOP. So far the bet is paying off because the press has failed to call out the GOP – which is now preventing votes on three D.C. Circuit Court nominees, the Labor Department and the EPA, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and the National Labor Relations Board. The GOP has blocked all labor board nominees. They have also violated hundreds of years of Senate precedent by filibustering the nomination of a Cabinet secretary, Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, and using the filibuster to delay John Brennan’s nomination as CIA Director. I am not saying that all of these nominations and measures should not have been challenged, but when almost everything is held up stagnating the congress and it’s ability to perform, then I am saying we must look to the source. This congress has done less work than any in history. I am also not laying all the blame for the lack of product on the GOP, I am after all a Republican. But the entrenched GOP is not looking after my interest, or yours right now, and we need to see the truth of this, as it is as plain as the giant locust that just smashed into your windshield!
What happened to the Republican senators, such as Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, who were willing to compromise, and who cared more about preserving the institutions of government than getting their way? Even Orren Hatch and John McCain in those days were more concerned about the institutional integrity of the U.S. government than about any particular policy difference they may have had with the other side. But the new breed – Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Sam Brownback, Jeff Sessions, David Vitter, to name a few – don’t give a rat’s ass about how or whether our government functions. In fact, they give every indication that they’d rather it didn’t. Economics, and much of public policy and political strategy, assume that people are motivated by self-interest, that the definition of acting rationally is to maximize what you want for yourself, and that other values – service, duty, allegiance to others, morality, and shared ideals – are either irrelevant or negligible
Ayn Rand, the philosophical guru of the modern Republican Party, popularized this view of human nature. In her world, selfishness is the only honest and justifiable motive. By looking out for Number One, we accomplish everything that’s necessary. Economist Milton Friedman extended the logic: The magic of the marketplace can be relied on to allocate resources to their highest and best uses. Anything “public” is suspect.
The titans of Wall Street and the CEOs of our major corporations have put this narrow principle into everyday practice. In their view, the aggregation of great wealth and maximization of profit is the only justifiable motive. Greed is good. Eight-figure compensation packages are their due. People are paid according to their economic worth. This crimped perspective misses what’s most important. Shared values are the essence of a society. They fuel not only acts of valor, but they also motivate people to become teachers and social workers, police officers and soldiers, librarians and city councilors.
So why do our politician act as they do, because big banking, and entities of big business like the Koch brothers –have long been intent on blocking any legislation that does not benefit their deep pockets, at the expense of you and me. All politicians, but it is epidemic in Washington, pander to the people who have the influence and the cheddar to get them reelected and offer them high paying employment for doing next to nothing when their political careers have run their course.
One last example of to illustrate me point. Earlier this year the Republican-led House passed a bill pegging student-loan interest rates to the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, plus 2.5 percentage points. Republicans estimate this will bring in around $3.7 billion of extra revenue, which will help pay down the federal debt.
In other words, it’s a tax — and one that hits lower-income students and their families.
Meanwhile, a growing number of Republicans have signed a pledge – sponsored by the multi-billionaire Koch brothers — to oppose any climate-change legislation that might raise government revenues by taxing polluters. It is called the No Climate Tax Pledge.
Why are Republicans willing to impose a tax on students and not on polluters? Don’t look for high principle. Big private banks stand to make a bundle on student loans if rates on government loans are raised. They have thrown their money at both parties but been particularly generous to the GOP. Meanwhile, the Koch brothers, again – whose companies are among America’s 20 worst air-polluters –have long been intent on blocking a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. And they, too, have been donating generously to Republicans to do their bidding.
We should be taxing polluters and not taxing students. The GOP has it backwards because its patrons want it that way. Remember this is being said by a long time Republican, but we need to see that our party needs to change, along with the Democrats, to return to a government by the people and for the people. I mean all of the people, not 1% of the people, who just maybe will share to a lesser degree with a lucky 10% of the people.
The following paragraph is the most important statement I will be making, so pay attention. The modern GOP is based on an unlikely coalition of wealthy business executives, small business owners, and struggling whites. Its durability depends on the latter two categories believing that the economic stresses they’ve experienced for decades have a lot to do with the government taking their money and giving it to the poor, who are disproportionately black and Latino. The real reason why small business owners and struggling whites haven’t done better is the same reason most of the rest of America hasn’t done better: Although the output of Americans has continued to rise, almost all the gains have gone to the very top. If we were still doing things the way we did four decades ago a typical household’s income rose in tandem with output. But since the late 1970s, as we allowed big business, wall street, and banking to slowly weaken unions and lower taxes on corporate America, allowed out-sourcing of our wealth so they would not have to pay taxes in America, which slowly caused most Americans’ incomes to flatten. Had the real median household income continued to keep pace with economic growth it would now average $92,000 instead of $50,000.
I know my views do not make me popular with some of my dearest friends, but I will always keep you close to my heart, while still trying to convince you to see what I think is so obvious. If I did not, I feel that not only would I be letting myself down, but you as well. So I have to keep on trying. We need to get rid of the political parties as they are now. They do not work, just look at the mess we are in for evidence. I have written about that subject before so will not grind on you about that today. I hope, if nothing else, I have gotten at least one person thinking with a little more of an open mind. No one is trying to become the King of America or any other such claptrap. If we want things to be better, we have to not be lazy, and we have to be able to look at both sides of a problem, not make up slogans full of half truths and outright lies to convince ourselves that we are right, but debate with one outcome in mind, to make America work, for everyone, not just those you happen to agree with. Also, in closing, the people who can afford to influence you the most, or almost without exception your enemy, not your friend. So it all boils down to on simple fact, our politicians no longer represent you and me, but the 1%, or maybe the 10%, but that still leaves 90% of us hanging in the proverbial breeze! We now work harder, longer, for less money than most of our European neighbors, a far cry from just 40 years ago, and getting increasingly worse year by year.
A VIETNAM EXPERIENCE
I found some declassified documents, which gives a snapshot of our missions and just how busy we were during Linebacker 2&3. We were deployed to Cubi Point in the Philippines from Iwakuni Japan, our home base. We flew all missions out of Da Nang, but for two reasons we kept our main base of operations in the Philippines. Reason one; President Nixon had made the statement that all combat Marines had been pulled out of the Da Nang area of Viet Nam. So we were told to grow our hair and mustaches long, basically a loose form of Navy regs. We could wear any combination of Army and Marine jungles we could lay our hands on. No dog tags, no insignia, ID card in boot, no covers. Reason two; the NVA had put a sizable bounty on our jets because besides electronically protecting all the fighters and B52 bombers going up north to wreak havoc on their ability to wage war, we were also very good at finding SAM missile sites and directing strikes to within yards of where they were sitting. So every black pajama clad lad around Da Nang was lobbing rockets at our flight line. As a result we were not popular with our neighbors! We were not allowed liberty in Nam; we were required to stay in our operational area, no gabbing with strangers. We could go to chow in the Army Mess once a day, our choice. We could not have any barracks, chow hall, or supply, because we were not actually there! The rest of the time we ate whatever we could scrounge. If we were asked by anyone who we were we instructed to tell them we were Army truck drivers. This did not fool anyone, but the basic reason we dressed and looked like we did is so a photographer could not take a picture and slap it on the cover of Life Magazine showing Marines were indeed in Da Nang. Our jets did have Marine in big bold letters down the side, but hey, it was the military, what can I say! Once the jets had run all the missions and hours they could handle without falling apart, we took them back to Cubi, and a new crew with fresh jets headed for Da Nang. The crew coming back stayed on the flight line in the PI and repaired the jets they had brought back until they were ready to roll, after a good meal of course in the Navy chow hall. Then 12 hours off, then repeat. We usually had worked a 48 hour shift or better, but it was a 3 hour flight to and from Da Nang, and I would be asleep as soon as wheels up on the C130 both ways.
These jets were EA6A Grumman intruders. There were several versions of the A6, the EA version was an electronic warfare bird, very advanced back then. Everything on it was Final Secret, the other Sgt. from Avionics, Sgt. Regan, was the only other person I know of beside myself to have this clearance. We both were Sgts working out of Avionics electric shop. Except for countermeasures, radar, and the radio, we were responsible for everything else that had electrons running through it in the aircraft. All of the wiring, flight instruments, fuel systems, flight computers, visual display consoles, engine wiring, landing gear, anything that had a wire or an electric actuator or switch, and on and on. This aircraft carried no conventional weapons. Where other versions of this jet would carry extra fuel to act as an emergency refuel stations, on ours this was a computer room. All of the skin on the top of the fuselage came off and was full of computers, huge wire looms, and signal feeds. Basically we were the first ones to check out any gripe on the aircraft, and then once we determined it was not our equipment, or the wiring or power supply going to someone else’s equipment, we could tell them to pull their equipment and repair or replace it. I had also been trained in how to test and repair the ASN-66 flight computer, but I hated sitting in an air-conditioned van with no windows fixing the same thing all day. So I was never so happy as the day I got transferred to Avionics. Much harder and more technical, but never boring, I loved my job! By the time I was a L/Cpl I had a license for everything in the squadron with wheels. Trucks, jeeps, tractors, support equipment of all kinds, you name it I was licensed to drive it. Then I got the only one I really cared about, a seat license for the EA6A. This meant I could climb in, fire it up, and test engines, cockpit equipment, and the like. I could go to the compass rose and set the remote compass and transmitters to spec, the compass rose was a big huge plate that you took the jet to out and away form any metal buildings or other aircraft that could possible disturb the electromagnetic fields. It turned and was incremented and set for magnetic north at it’s starting point. All compass settings had to be done with all systems on and engines running to be accurate, as both the cockpit compass and flight computer used a signal from a remote compass transmitter located in the top of the tail section. I loved this part of my job. Anytime anyone fixed anything in the cockpit or anything that required the jet to be fired up to test, I got the call. I was the only tech who went to Nam and the PI to have a seat license, so I got to play a lot.
When we first got there and started combat missions, we had no support systems in place. We did however have, what was called fleet marine force priority one. This basically meant that if any other A6 squadron on a carrier or anything that landed either in Nam or the PI, if it had anything on it that we could use, we were allowed to take it, as long as we gave them the broken piece of equipment so they could have it repaired. All A6 aircraft shared a lot of the same cockpit instrumentation. Both times the carrier Enterprise came into port on a liberty run we stripped both the aircraft and their supply depot down to the bone. The second time they came into port they refused to give me or the marines I had brought with me access to the liberty boat so that we would not be able to come aboard and wreak havoc. The result was that they received an order from the Admiral in charge of fleet marine forces in Westpac that I was to be treated as though I were he. It turned out that since we had started our electronic protection of the flights going to Haiphong harbor and other strategic places in North Vietnam they had not lost a single aircraft to SAM missiles. The month prior they had lost 21 aircraft, or so I heard. Anyway, I got all my broken junk carried on board; all the new stuff carried off and loaded in my 6×6 and the way we went! The two officers were yes sir, and no sir, and packing and carrying and yes, saluting me. I never did anything but stand by. I had on my rain hat with a Sgt. chevron in plain site on the front panel, so I was sure they knew my rank. Of course I did not know what orders they had been given, actually did not find out for months, but that was about as scared as I have ever been. You would have to be in the Corps to know why. I would rather have had to dodge rockets.
We stayed busy for months on end. I was nearing the end of my tour in Westpac when I went on the Cubi detachment and on to Da Nang. I had just picked up L/Cpl just before we left Japan, so as an incentive to extend they gave me and Regan both a meritorious promotion to Cpl. They needed us to run avionics but we had to be an NCO in order to do that. When we started getting short again, they gave us both meritorious promotions to Sgt., of course with the proviso that we extend again. So in a about a six month period I went from PFC to Sgt., a bump of three ranks! A few months after that, or maybe less, I never knew what month it was and did not care, but the CO, Major Carlton, got orders from Command to send us home before we became unstable from being overseas so long. To late for that! We had both got in trouble, which I won’t go into, but the CO knew about it, so he just gave us open orders and we took off for Japan. Since we had open orders we did not have to report anywhere at any specified time, so we just went to dispersing, drew pay, and went out in Iwakuni and partied for a month, then we checked in, checked out, went home and took 30 days leave before checking in to our last duty stations.
Now some of this had been told in other articles I have written, but I was on a roll, so you got what you got. I am going to try to paste some pages I downloaded from the Internet, secret documents about our missions that have recently been declassified. I will try and highlight anything I think may be of importance, but they are historically interesting, at least to me.
Keep in mind as you read the parts documenting our lost pilots that we knew our pilots intimately. In the air wing the pilots want to know who it is that will be keeping their aircraft in the sky. So they talked to us willingly and wanted to get to know our capabilities and us. So I knew both pilots who went down off the coast of North Vietnam. Because I had licenses to drive so many kinds of vehicles on base, I qualified to go to school and get a license to drive in Japan off base, which was very hard to get. As a result I was the only person, enlisted or officer, who had a car. So I was asked to pick up a lot of officers wives at the Hiroshima airport, some who had places not far from my place out in town. So I had a good cry when no one was looking.
The first two pages are our orders to Vietnam, describes our first combat missions in which I was the ranking NCO in Nam the first day of strikes. Further on down you will see mention of our MIA, our mission sorties, hours of operation and missions. Please pay specific attention to the last page of documents where I have put the brackets. When they are talking about maintenance and how well we performed, the supervision was primarily Sgt Regan and myself, however that is probably not who they meant. If you could take a snapshot of the flight line in the PI or Da Nang on any given day the highest rank you will ever see is Sgt, except for pilots of course, and the only two of those you will ever see is Regan or myself. The other Sgts rarely went in country, and in PI were too busy drinking coffee and hanging out in the Avionics hut polishing their chevrons. The support squadron that joined had Sgts that outranked both of us as we had just been made Sgts, but we were the official Sgts in charge, which pissed some of them off. However two of the Avionics techs that came with the support squadron turned out to be two of the best men we had. 
Foreign Students Afraid
John Kerry recently stated that foreign students are afraid of gun violence in the U.S. and so are coming in fewer numbers as a result. The article I read was not very good at nailing down any point he was trying to make, but as he is aligned with president Obama, you can predict with a certain amount of certainty that he is talking about the need for gun legislation. Legislation aimed at curtailing certain firearms and their accessories. I will examine a couple of subjects today. One will be about my opinions on gun control, and secondly, the real reason behind fears of foreign students who are considering an American education, which has several parts, the least of which is the actual guns themselves!
First I firmly believe that the second amendment does in actuality guaranty our right to possess and bear arms. I think that all states should adopt gun regulations similar to Idaho. In Idaho, for example, if you apply for a license to carry, you are guaranteed the permit within 90 days. Now this is of course if you are not a convicted felon. You do not have to prove special circumstances however. Even so, as long as you carry in the open, and adhere to local statutes, such as weapons not being loaded inside city limits, you do not have to even have a permit.
I also do believe however, that anyone buying a gun, or wanting a carry permit, should be required to go through a mandated background check for criminal record, mental status, and the like. Sure, career criminals will find ways to acquire guns and bypass this process, but that does not mean it is not invaluable in keeping documented loonies from getting a gun. It has been argued that most guns used in mass killings have been purchased legally. I am sure that is true, but why all the fuss over registering your weapon or submitting to background checks. I have relatives that will tell you that is the first step to the government taking them away from you. I do not believe this is even possible. Say they show up, you tell them you were crossing a stream up in Hell Bent for Leather country, lost your footing and had to ditch all you weapons in order not to drown! There is squat they can do as long as you use your brain housing group for more than a hat rack! There are so many weapons all ready out there, that the gov’t getting them is not going to happen.
Second argument is so we can fight back if the gov’t goes south and we need to protect ourselves. Well, if the gov’t ever went so far over the deep end that we need to start an armed conflict, I don’t care how many assault weapons, fully automatic machine guns and the like you own, you will lose against a drone attack, or maybe a heavily armed F18, or even a few missiles coming your way, and you haven’t even had an enemy you could shoot at yet, and your just an ash heap. We do need to keep our right to bear and own arms, but to register and be checked out to see who and what we might be in relation to our mental health or our criminal record before we can buy, no problem with that. I believe every citizen should have the right to carry, and my next section will tell you why.
The second point I would like to make is the real reason that not only foreigners but also we at home fear violence in our country. It has nothing to do with our gun ownership or our rights under the 2nd amendment. Gun violence has gone up in countries like the United Kingdom after it deprived the public of most of their gun rights. The criminal element had no problems getting them however, thus the populace was made even more vulnerable, and there are statistics to back that up! The real reason is that gangs in America are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun violence. They are actively engaged in prostitution, slavery, illegal gun trade, drugs, illegal gambling, and are even organized across state lines and borders! They should be classified as terrorists and hunted and prosecuted as such. This is the prime reason we are not safe in America. If I, a white man, was to walk the streets, day or night, but especially at night in certain areas of Compton or Watts, my chances of being alive would not be good. At the very least robbed and or hospitalized. This is not politically correct, but it is accurate. I have personally been in these areas and barely survived. I was lost at the time; I was not looking for trouble. I will not admit to anything in this blog, but there was a reason I escaped unharmed, and damn lucky I was armed with that reason.
Now I used the examples I did because I had personal experiences there. But I am not picking on any particular race. Gangs exist in all ethnicities. Yep whites are an ethnicity and not exempt. Some of the most heinous and worst examples of gang violence and organized crime come from white gangs. So again I reiterate, gangs should classified as terrorists and pursued as such.
Just one last thought, who and why did gangs become so prevalent. The reasons are as diverse as the gangs themselves. But one overriding reason does come to mind, the American public! Yes, you, me, everyone! If you look back to the not so distant past, where the gangs are most prevalent there used to be Spartan neighborhoods, the inhabitants wanting nothing more than education and career opportunities. But affluent America did not want certain segments to live in their neighborhoods, or go to their schools, or even work alongside them. So gradually neighborhoods of people began to emerge that had disillusioned populations about any chance or change. This in turn caused an increase in alcohol and drug use as an escape from the depression this caused. Naturally crime became a way to earn a living when nothing else seemed available except as an underpaid menial laborer or other subservient job. These gangs became more sophisticated, more violent, and more daring as they discovered that a lot of what they did would be overlooked as long as they had the sense to stay out of affluent neighborhoods except to supply them with the fruits of their endeavor, drugs and prostitution being the most prevalent. As I stated gangs are as varied as the makeup of the American citizens themselves. Some gangs actually immigrated here, already fully functioning and organized from abroad! Some are more vicious than our homegrown versions and some are as well organized as any well-oiled business organization. This is why they have to be recognized as terrorist organizations and the federal govt. needs to back up local law enforcement in cleaning up these terrorist cells. I think we as a nation are starting to understand that racial diversity is our strength, and not a reason to segregate. We still have a long way to go, regardless of what laws are on the books; we still have rampant racial prejudice in this country that we need to deal with. All of it tied together with a poorly administered welfare system. Education, real education of every child is the answer. Just like in Iran and Afghanistan, the biggest reason for the attitudes and abiding terrorism is the uneducated masses. Well it is no different here. Until we stop using our schools as a way to house students during the day instead of educating them, we will never get ahead of this problem. Schools have to be our biggest weapon against welfare, gangs, unemployment, and poverty. Education cannot be the first thing you cut because big business told you not to bother them or no contribution will be forthcoming and you will not be reelected. Education, education, education, in case you didn’t get it, education not gun control! We need to get our priorities straight, and forthwith, if I might use a Middle English terminology.
The Love Chronicles 