Below are the 9 most recent journal entries recorded in wallywood's LiveJournal:

Monday, March 3rd, 2008
2:00 pm	10,000 BC I’ve been seeing a lot of ads on TV recently for a new movie 10,000 BC. The movie looks to be very entertaining with lots of well made special effects. For entertainment value alone the movie looks to be well worth seeing. From the previews, though, this movie seems to be completely ignoring actual facts. In fact it seems to be so blatant in its misinformation that I can only conclude that it got its background and research from a comic book or a fantasy novel. It’s supposed to take place in 10,000 BC and concerns the efforts of the hero to get back his woman from a band of slave raiders. The raiders, by the way, look exactly like the band of raiders from Conan the Barbarian, right up to the pointy helmets and the silhouettes on horseback. From that point the movie diverges into complete fantasy. It seems that the raiders have gone all the way to Northern Europe at the end of the last Ice Age to get slaves to ship to Egypt to build the pyramids. Where to begin on all that’s wrong in this movie? To start with, the raiders seem to be riding on horses with saddles and stirrups, neither of which was invented until thousands of years later, not to mention that horses were not domesticated until 4,000 BC. The raiders apparently take the captives to ships which are anchored in a river. The ships are large twin mast sailing ships which look like oversized Viking ships. First off, no where in the world were there ships like that 12,000 years ago. The first ships in Egypt that in any way resembled those ships weren’t built until after 3,000 BC. Second, the ships are show as only sailing ships in a river that is only about three times as wide as the ships are long. As anyone who has ever sailed knows, most of the time the wind is not blowing the way one wants to go, so a sailor is forced to tack back and forth. In a ship that big and a river that small tacking would be next to impossible. But tacking is not the real problem. The real problem is that the ships seem to have no oars. All ancient ships that had to get anywhere in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time were propelled by oars. Partly because ancient ships couldn’t sail into the wind, but mostly because oars were reliable, easy, and worked regardless of the direction or absence of any wind. Plus oars could maneuver a ship easily in the tight and treacherous waters of a river or take evasive actions if the ship were being pursued. And finally, thought I couldn’t really see very well in the previews, the ships appeared to be made of plank siding. An amazing feat considering the best ships in the world at the time were dugout canoes. On the hero’s journey to get back his woman he runs across some amazing creatures. First off he meets a saber tooth tiger. This tiger is amazing in two regards. First, its size. Even though people of 10,000 BC were smaller than modern humans, they weren’t that much smaller. Men averaged a little less than 5 ft tall and women a few inches shorter. When our hero was face to face with this saber tooth tiger, the tiger’s shoulder was about even with the top of our hero’s head. That would make this the biggest tiger of all time. Normal saber tooth tigers of this time period were about 800 to 900 lbs. The biggest member of the tiger family, the Liger, a cross breed of a female tiger and a male lion, have been know to get up to 1,200 lbs, but they were less than four feet at the shoulder. The saber tooth tiger in the movie, if he weighed anything proportional to his size, would be well over 2,000 lbs, more than twice the weight of the biggest saber tooth tiger ever found. The second amazing thing is that the saber tooth tiger couldn’t even be there in the first place. All the large saber tooth tigers had died out in Europe and Asia tens of thousands of years before 10,000 BC. The only place in the world where large saber tooth tigers could still be found is North and South America, and the biggest of them, the Smilodon, still only weighed less than 1,000 lbs. Another interesting creature our hero encounters is a giant flightless bird with a huge beak. This bird looks to stand over eight feet tall and has a penchant for killing and eating animals. These birds did actually exist. They are called Terror Birds and they were almost exactly as depicted in the movie. The only problem is that they only existed in South America and were all extinct by 10,000 BC. Barring that small failing they were well portrayed in the movie. When our hero does get to Egypt we find the slaves being rounded up by the raiders are being used to build the pyramids, assisted by teams of Mammoths. This is wrong in so many ways. First, there is no evidence that Mammoths, or even elephants, were ever used in the construction of the pyramids or of any other Egyptian buildings, or even that the Egyptians of 10,000 BC even used elephants at all for anything. Second, there is no reasonable way to get a Mammoth to Egypt. Mammoths were cold weather animals of Northern Europe and Northern Asia. To get a Mammoth to Egypt it would have to walk all the way around the Mediterranean and Black Seas, across the Anatolian mountains, and across the deserts of the Near East and the Sinai just to get to the Nile. Since Hannibal lost over half his elephants just crossing the Alps over 9,000 years later, it would be very doubtful if any Mammoth could survive even part of the way from Northern Europe to Egypt. A third point is that there is no evidence that slave labor was used in the construction of the pyramids, Hollywood movies to the contrary. All the best evidence is that the pyramids were built by volunteers who wanted to share in the immortality of the Pharaoh by helping in the construction of his tomb. The building work was done in between the planting and the harvest or during the annual flood when nothing else was going on and, since the Pharaoh fed, clothed, and housed his workers, it was good work during an otherwise idle season. For those who might say the Israelis were slave labor who built the pyramids, the time of the Exodus was around 1250 BC, a thousand years after the construction of the pyramids. Which brings up another point, 10,000 BC is called the Stone Age for good reason. There is no evidence that anyone was using metal tools 12,000 years ago. The oldest evidence of any metal tools in Europe is about 3,300 BC and this is only one example. The Ice Man discovered in the Alps has been dated to about 3,300 BC and he had an axe with a copper head with him. This is the oldest by several hundred years of any example of metal tools in Europe. It’s thought that copper smelting originated in the Middle East several hundred years before this, but certainly not earlier than 5,000 BC. The Bronze Age didn’t get started until around 3,000 BC at the earliest and iron tools weren’t invented until 1,200 BC. Yet in Egypt in this movie we can see lots of metal tools and weapons and in one scene a character drops a dagger that hits the floor with a metallic clang that can only be bronze or brass. If this were a fantasy about Atlantis, I could see making all these mistakes and simply saying the Atlantians had far better technology than anybody else at the time, but this is definitely about Egypt and the building of the pyramids. If there is any doubt about this it’s easy to see from the previews of the movie the three Great Pyramids arraigned in the proper orientation to each other, the three small Queen’s Pyramids next to them, and the mastabas around the bases of the Great Pyramids. A little harder to see, but still there, are the ceremonial procession way and the River Temples of the tombs. It looks just like Giza today, except separated by several thousand years. Which brings up my most important point, the date. This movie is called 10,000 BC, saying rather obviously that the Great Pyramids of Egypt were built 12,000 years ago. This is just flat out wrong, no matter what New Age revisionist historians might say. All the evidence, both historical and archaeological, and from the records of the ancient Egyptians themselves, give the date of the construction of the pyramids at around 2500 BC. The King’s list tells who built them, who there fathers and children were, and how long each Pharaoh reigned. The wood associated with their building can and has been carbon dated. The intact boat buried in a chamber next to the Great Pyramid has been dated and was buried at the same time the Great Pyramid was built. There is a clear history of steady progression from the normal mastabas used as burial tombs to the Step Pyramid of Zoser to the Bent Pyramid to the three Great Pyramids of Giza. All of these have been dated in a steady progression up to the construction of the Great Pyramids in about 2500 BC. I have to say about because the three Great Pyramids were built in succession by three different Pharaohs each taking around 20 years to build. It’s not possible to say that the cornerstone of the first Great Pyramid was laid in 2589 BC and the third Great Pyramid was topped out in 2504 BC, but the start to completion of all three took less than 100 years and was completed around 2500 BC. Egyptology has gotten the dates narrowed down so well that about the most they might be off these days is well under a century. The chance of being a thousand years off is ludicrous, and to say they were built 7500 years earlier is beyond any possibility. One thing that isn’t seen in any of the previews of the movie is the one thing that might actually have existed in 10,000 BC, the Sphinx. Though most Egyptologists generally agree that the Sphinx was built at the same time as the second Great Pyramid by the Pharaoh Khafre, there are certain peculiarities about it that suggest it might be much older. The first is the weathering of the Sphinx and its enclosure. The walls of the Sphinx enclosure show the normal kind of wind blown sand weathering that would be expected. This is shown by the sand blasting away over the eons against the soft and hard bands of rock in the enclosure wall, giving the typical horizontal banding one would expect of deeper and shallower horizontal grooves. What one wouldn’t expect are the deep vertical channels cut into the enclosure walls from top to bottom. These kinds of vertical cuts can only be caused by centuries of water pouring over the walls into the enclosure floor below, slowly wearing away the rock like a stream bed. There is no known type of wind erosion that can cause these types of vertical cuts. In addition, the climate that existed when these cuts were made must have been very different from the one that exists at Giza today. Today the Pyramid plateau sits next to a desert. If left uncleaned, the Sphinx enclosure, which sets well below the surrounding terrain, would soon fill up with sand to the level of the Sphinx’s neck, as it has on many occasions in recorded history. In order for the water to have eroded away the vertical cuts in the enclosure wall, the climate must have been very wet and rainy with little or no sand blowing into the enclosure to fill it up. And the climate must have stayed this way for centuries after the Sphinx was built. The last time Egypt had this type of climate was just after the end of the last Ice Age, about 8,000 BC. When the Ice Age ended the climate around North Africa became much hotter and drier and Egypt had very little rainfall each year, right up till the present time. The desert moved in from the West and the Sphinx enclosure was promptly buried in sand, stopping all erosion, wind or water. Since the vertical cuts couldn’t have been made when the enclosure was full of sand and there’s been no major amounts of rain falling on the Giza plateau for well over 8,000 years, the only time those vertical cuts could have been made ended over 8,000 years ago, which means the Sphinx is well over 8,000 years old and probably, given the level of erosion, over 12,000 years old. The second peculiarity about the Sphinx and its enclosure is the weathering of the Sphinx itself. Anyone who has seen the Sphinx can easily notice that the body of the Sphinx is far more weathered than the head of the Sphinx. The body has the same sandblasted look as the walls of the Sphinx enclosure, while the head is almost intact. This is usually explained away by saying the head is made of a much harder stone than the rest of the body. Maybe so, but not so much harder that it should show so little weathering compared to the body. And remember, if left alone, the Sphinx enclosure soon fills up with sand all the way up to the neck of the Sphinx, stopping all weathering on the body of the Sphinx. If anything, the head of the Sphinx should show far more weathering than the body since the head is always stuck up in the unobstructed sandblasting of the wind. Another thing about the Sphinx is that its head is too small for its body. The Egyptians made lots of sphinx statues, and in all of them the head is correctly proportioned to the body size. The only exception to this is the Great Sphinx. The only logical conclusion to draw from the size of the Sphinx’s head and the noticeable lack of weathering on the head compared to the body is that the head it has now is not the original head it was carved with. When the Sphinx was originally carved it had a different larger head, probably that of a lion to match the rest of its body. When the Egyptian Pharaohs started building the Great Pyramids at Giza one of them had the head re-carved to look like him. The amount of rock needed to be carved away to change the head into that of the Pharaoh was so great that the resulting head was too small for the body. It also explains the marked difference in weathering since the Sphinx body is up to 12,000 years old while the head is only 4,500 years old. Why the producers and writers of 10,000 BC decided to make an obviously fictitious story about the building of the Pyramids is beyond comprehension. They could have made a much more original story about our hero traveling across the Stone Age world to get his woman back from an unknown civilization in Egypt that build the Sphinx and then faded away, probably because of his heroism in saving his woman and overthrowing their tyranny. It would be just as exciting, historically more accurate, and totally original. Instead we have this action flick that ranks right up there with Conan the Barbarian in historical accuracy. It might be an entertaining movie, but history it ain’t. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
9:05 am	Out of Iraq by Christmas I watched General Petraeus give his testimony before Congress last week and I watched President Bush give his talk to the nation later in the week. All I can say is that I have not seen that much fantasy talked about on TV since the last Harry Potter book came out. Gen. Petraeus enter the Congress room looking very impressive in his tailored uniform with his badges and campaign ribbons lined up on his chest practically to his epaulets, his 101st Airborne patch on his shoulder, and his four stars gleaming in the photo flashes. By his side was Ambassador Crocker. That by itself should have given some hesitation to the general’s testimony. In the past, when the Commanding General in Iraq gave testimony to Congress, he was accompanied by the Chief of U.S. Central Command, his superior in the chain of command. In this case it was apparent that Pres. Bush didn’t want the Chief of Cent. Com. anywhere near the general’s testimony. It had been roundly reported that Admiral William Fallon, the Chief of Central Command, had a distinctly different opinion of how the war in Iraq was going and intended to present his own official statement to the Pentagon. It was also reported that Adm. Fallon had called Gen Petraeus an “ass kissing little chicken-shit” based on Fallon’s previous meetings with Petraeus. One can surmise their relationship is probably less than cordial. General Petraeus spoke at length about the rise and fall of U.S. and Iraqi casualties, trend lines in the conflict, sectarian violence, successes of the troop surge, planned and possible troop withdrawals, and long term U.S. commitments in Iraq. All very impressive and, like most testimonies given with lots of statistics and visual aides, all very misleading. Nearly all of his testimony was full of half-truths, misleading statements, and glaring omissions. I’ll try to address each of these. He stated sectarian violence was down in Iraq. Literally true but totally misleading. Since the start of the Iraqi War well over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed. The exact number is not know and may be much higher. The great majority of these deaths have been Sunni and Shiite killing each other in mixed neighborhoods and some Sunni and Kurds killing each other in ethnic border areas. In addition to the killings, about 2.2 million Iraqis have fled their homes in mixed neighborhoods to live in areas of their own ethnicity, Sunnis to Sunni neighborhoods and Shiites to Shiite neighborhoods. Also over two million Iraqis have fled the country completely. The result of this mass killing and migration is to create ethnic cleansing over a great part of the country. An ethnic cleansing, though not sanction or promoted by the U.S. government, but one which was carried out in the presence of U.S. forces who did nothing to stop it. The U.S. government does not officially endorse a partitioning of Iraq, but it’s slowly allowing a de-facto partitioning. The end result is that Gen. Petraeus’ statement is true, but not because peace is breaking out, but because the sectarian killers are running out of sectarians to kill. The only place where Sunni and Shiites still live in close proximity to each other is in Baghdad, and even there they are literally walled off from each other and rely on U.S. troops to keep a semblance of peace. A peace aided greatly now by the sending of almost all of the surge troops to Baghdad. Gen. Petraeus pointed to Al Anbar province as an example of American military success in Iraq and intimated that the success was due in part to the surge. This is completely misleading. Just last Fall the U.S. command in Iraq had written off Al Anbar as a lost cause. The Sunnis there were in complete opposition to both the U.S. and the nominal Iraqi government and were actively fighting the U.S. occupation. The Al Qaeda in Iraq forces had found a home and were training there and enlarging their influence. Now, less than a year later, the Al Qaeda forces are on the run and the Sunnis are actively helping the U.S. forces. What happened? Did the surge forces roll in and crush Al Qaeda and conquer the hearts and minds of the Sunnis? No, in fact very little of the surge forces even went to Al Anbar. Instead the U.S. did what they should have done four years ago. They recognized the influence and authority of the local Sheiks, they provided arms and ammunition to the Sheiks and their men with minimal oversight, and they kept the U.S. forces confined mostly to the areas of their own bases. Even this would not have been enough to placate the Sunnis except for what Al Qaeda had been doing the last few years. The Al Qaeda forces were mostly non-Iraqis, they tried to impose a Taliban style government on the Sunnis, and they were there mostly to cause as much death and destruction on everyone concerned, including the Sunnis. The Sunnis soon tired of this treatment by Al Qaeda and only permitted it because Al Qaeda was also fighting the U.S. occupiers. Once the U.S. made peace overtures to the Sunni Sheiks with honorable deals they could accept, the Sunnis of Al Anbar jumped at the chance to kick out Al Qaeda and re-establish their own rule. None of this had anything to do with the surge or any military action by the U.S. If the U.S. had adopted this diplomatic approach at the start of the war there might not even be an Al Qaeda in Iraq today since there was none there before the invasion. Gen. Petraeus also teased the American people with promises of present and future troop reductions in Iraq. He said he was removing a Marine Expeditionary Unit from Iraq without replacement this month and would remove a brigade from Iraq in the November/December time frame, also without replacement. He also said that, if the situation continued as expected, he would remove an additional 21,500 troops by the end of Summer of ’08. This, of course, is all dependant on both Presidential approval and favorable developments on the ground in Iraq. And, Lo and Behold! The President then makes a speech to the nation agreeing to all the recommendations made by Petraeus about troop withdrawals. A speech the President had been writing since before Petraeus ever even gave his testimony. Gen. Petraeus said he had not cleared his statement to Congress with anyone, not the White House or the Pentagon, before he gave it. He didn’t say that no one had told him what to say before he wrote it. The White House may not have cleared Gen. Petraeus’ statement, but Pres. Bush may have certainly told Petraeus what he expected him to say and then allowed Petraeus to say it in his own way. Again, Gen. Petraeus’ statement can be literally true but totally misleading. This, of course, is just speculation on my part, but I doubt the general would perjure himself before Congress or that Pres. Bush would allow Petraeus to go before Congress and just say any old thing he wanted to. The President is the Commander In Chief and can order the General to do anything he wants him to do as long as it isn’t actually perjury. It’s already been proven that the Bush Whitehouse can be very selective of the facts when it wants to be, just look at their performance during the run up to the Iraq War. Not one of the justifications for the war turned out to be true, even though they were touted as such. In this vein of true but misleading, let’s look at the general’s troop counts. He said he is removing the MEU from Iraq this month without replacement. True, but it was already scheduled to leave before his statement. What he didn’t say is that another MEU is being sent to Kuwait where it will be stationed unless it is needed in Iraq at some future date. So far ever MEU sent to Kuwait has been needed in Iraq and has ended up being sent there. There’s no reason to expect this one will be treated any differently. So far that means no troop reduction from the 169,000 troops stationed there. He also said he is removing a brigade without replacement in the Nov./Dec. timeframe. What he didn’t say is that another brigade is scheduled to arrive in Iraq in the Mar./Apr. ’08 timeframe on what’s called delayed deployment. Take a brigade out; send a brigade in four months later. A net loss of zero troops. We’ve still got the same 169,000 troops in Iraq. He also said he would remove 21,500 troops by the end of Summer of ’08 if the situation allowed. Well, that’s a year away and situations can certainly change in that length of time. By Summer of ’08 we may have a new general, a new policy, an entirely new number of troops, but the same old President. President Bush has changed his strategy and his generals several times during this war, there’s no reason to think he won’t again. But let’s assume Gen. Petraeus is correct and he does withdraw 21,500 troops by Summer of ’08. With the various adding’s and removing’s of troops over the year, that would still leave between 145,000 and 148,000 troops in Iraq. Before the surge we had 130,000 troops in Iraq. That means that when all is said and done, there will not only be no troop reduction in Iraq, but instead an overall increase of more than 15,000 troops. Petraeus’ troop reductions are just an illusion, a slight of hand trick played with American lives. There are also facts that Gen. Petraeus omitted from his testimony that directly pertain to the troop levels. The first is tour of duty time. The President extended tour of duty time from 12 months to 15 months to keep a high number of troops in Iraq as long as possible. He also reduced the time out of combat from one month rest for each month in combat to no more than 12 months rest, meaning troops will now serve 15 months in combat and 12 months stateside. In addition it’s now being considered reducing stateside rest to less than 12 months regardless of combat months and increasing combat tours to greater than 15 months. Also National Guard and Reserve units are now being rotated in and out of Iraq on the same schedule as regular army troops, putting an increased strain on both the Guard and their families. And the National Guard equipment, needed at home during disasters, is, for the most part, permanently stationed in Iraq for use by the guard. Even if the guard were called home permanently, most of their equipment would have to be written off as a loss and billions of dollars would be needed to replace it stateside. A cost not included in the over $900 billion spent so far on the war. General Petraeus spent several days giving testimony, going over all manner of details about the war. Various members of Congress spent days asking him questions or just reading long statements into the record about the war. President Bush went on national television to give a speech about his aims and plans for the war. The general, the ambassador, senators, representatives, members of the executive branch, and others all went on talk shows to tell their views on the war and future troop withdrawals. The one thing these statements, by Gen. Petraeus, the ambassador, Pres. Bush, presidential candidates of both parties, Senators, Representatives, political pundits, commentators, and random people on the street all had in common is the idea that we’re stuck in Iraq and can’t pull our troops out any time soon and maybe not for years to come. The reasons people give for our staying there are, if we withdrew our troops, the country would collapse into civil war, Iran might take over the country by proxy, Al Qaeda might establish a power center and training base, the country might break up into three separate countries, Turkey might invade to crush an independent Kurdistan, oil revenues might be used to finance terrorism, the Sunni Shiite clash might spread to the entire region, a regional war would endanger the oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz, if we leave Iraq the terrorists would just follow us home and attack us here, and if we leave now our troops would have died in vain. In hindsight the best course would have been to not invade Iraq at all. The U.S. has gotten nothing out of it but death and expense. The Iraqi people have gotten rid of Hussein but, all things considered, they’re worse off now than when he was in power. The world lost an effective buffer against Iran. Sectarian violence of Sunni against Shiite, not present in any large degree before the war, has a potential for getting worse and spreading beyond Iraq. And the Iraqi oil production, one of the unmentioned reasons for the war, is only about a third of what it was under Saddam. We have no one but President Bush to thank for all of this. Short of a time machine, what is the answer to Iraq? In my opinion it’s simple. Pull our troops out. Pull out all of them and pull them out now. Lots of people are saying it physically can’t be done in less than a year, maybe more. We’ve got too many troops and too much equipment and if we tried to pull them out the last few thousand would be killed fighting a withdrawing action. Our only course is to stay until we can hand off the country to an Iraqi Army competent to stabilize the country and take over its defenses. That’s both wrong and a recipe for staying there indefinitely. We can leave, we can leave now, we can take our equipment with us, and we can leave safely. How, you might ask, and what would happen to Iraq and the Iraqis after we leave? I’ll explain. When we invaded Iraq we brought everything we needed with us. We fought an Iraqi army much larger than our own and we fought across hundreds of miles of inhospitable terrain and conquered the entire country in two weeks. Now we have a bigger army, much more equipment, and no organized army to stand against us. Does anyone seriously doubt that anytime we wanted to we could just mount up and fight our way to the borders, crushing any opposition with cannon fire and air strikes? The best any opposition could hope for would be to take out a very few vehicles with IEDs. The reality is that, if we left, we’d get no opposition at all since nearly everybody would be glad to see us go. There is the matter of all the equipment we have in the country. What about it? We brought it in, we can bring it out, what little there is that is actually worth bringing out. One thing the military can do fast is pack. Anything non-self mobile can be loaded into crates and containers. Sensitive or valuable items can be air lifted out. General supplies can be trucked out. Consumables will simply be consumed without replacement. A lot of the equipment brought into the country, though, either can’t be brought out or isn’t worth bringing out. There are hundreds of destroyed Humvees that have already been striped for usable parts. Except for scrap metal they have no value and could easily be left behind. Likewise many other vehicles and equipment that have either been expended or damaged so badly that the shipping cost is greater than the value could be left in Iraq. We’ve shipped thousands of tons of ammunition to Iraq and fired it. None of that is coming back. We’ve shipped thousands of tons of building supplies to Iraq and bought many thousands locally for construction projects. Everything from barracks to blast walls have been built and none of those constructions will be coming back. A lot of stuff was built for the Iraqis, from water pumps to generators to bridges and highways to air traffic control towers. That all stays behind. When it comes right down to it, the only things worth bringing back from Iraq are the troops and their fighting and support equipment. It only took the U.S. two weeks to invade and conquer the whole country, it shouldn’t take more than three months to pack up and leave, less if we’re not too picky about taking everything that isn’t nail down. Bringing the troops home by Christmas is not only a nice slogan, it’s a very doable solution. What about the Iraqis? What happens to them if we just up and leave? Can we just stand back and watch the civil war that will inevitably start up with its thousands of causalities? The answer is yes, we can. It’s not our country, it’s not our people, and we have no real business interfering in someone else’s civil war. We tried it in Viet Nam and we got over 54,000 dead and over a half million wounded and after over ten years of involvement we had to just walk away and let the Viet Nam people settle the civil war for themselves. It doesn’t do any good if you win every battle but can’t win the war. Iraq isn’t Viet Nam; there are lots of differences in the countries, the peoples, and the wars, but one thing is the same, it’s not ours. We interfered in Bosnia and Kosovo to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing, but we can’t use that excuse in Iraq. We’ve stood by while the Sunni and the Shiite have done ethnic cleansing on a country wide scale and done nothing to stop it. In fact, by arming and supporting the Sunni Sheiks in Al Anbar province it can be argued we’re encouraging it since those guns won’t be aimed at just the Al Qaeda fighters. Likewise by propping up an essentially Shiite central government we’re alienating the Sunnis and Kurds and hastening a three part division of the country. In fact just last week the Kurds signed an oil development deal with Hunt Oil, bypassing the central government and destroying the proposed oil revenue sharing deal that was meant to help tie the country together. This would come as no surprise to the Bush administration since the president of Hunt Oil is a friend and contributor to Pres. Bush. It may not be Bush policy to partition the country, but everything he’s done lately seems to be encouraging it. And what of outside interference? Everyone seems to think that, without the U.S. to keep them out, the Iranians will move right in. This is unlikely. The only thing the Iraqis and the Iranians have in common is that they both have majority Shiite populations. From a simplistic view of a Westerner that seems enough, but history shows otherwise. The Iraqi Shiites are Arabs and speak Arabic; the Iranian Shiites are Persian and speak Farsi. They’ve been fighting wars with each other for thousands of years and a shared branch of the same religion has never been a reason for reconciliation. The Iraqi Shiites may or may not want a more Iranian style government, but either way they won’t want the Iranians running it. The Iraqi Shiites have far more in common with the Iraqi Sunnis than they do with the Iranian Shiites. In a more Western Europe analogy easier for the U.S. to understand, it would be similar to the Reformation in England during the 16th Century. The English Catholics and the English Protestants were busy killing each other, but they could still fight together to defeat either the Protestant Scots or the Spanish Catholics. The Iraqis are busy killing each other now, but they’ve had no trouble in the past joining together to defeat the Iranians. And what about the other excuses I listed above for staying in Iraq? Oil revenue being used to finance terrorism? It already is, it’s just that it comes from Saudi Arabia and not Iraq. Ben Laden was, after all, a Saudi as were most of the 9/11 hijackers. Between Ben Laden’s personal fortune and the various Saudi “charities” that funnel money to terrorist organizations all over the world, any extra money from Iraq would be miniscule. Oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz endangered? Very unlikely. Iran controls the Strait right now. If they wanted it shut down it would be, regardless of what may or may not happen in Iraq. Al Qaeda establishing bases in Iraq? Very unlikely. As already shown the Iraqis regard Al Qaeda as foreign troublemakers and are already chasing them out of the country. Turkey might invade to crush an independent Kurdistan? Possible, especially depending on how independent Kurdistan might be and how much Kurdistan helps the Kurdish rebels in Turkey. Ethnically Kurdistan takes in Northern Iraq, North Western Iran, and South Eastern Turkey. It’s in no ones interests except the Kurds to see an independent Kurdistan. It’s also in everybody’s interests to see that no one else gets control of Iraqi Kurdistan since there are large deposits of oil in it. The most likely result will be that Turkey keeps sending temporary punitive missions into Kurdistan to repress the Kurds but leaving no permanent presence behind. If we leave Iraq the terrorist will just follow us home and attack us in the U.S.? This is an argument that puts the cart before the horse. Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the U.S. twice before we invaded Iraq. Our invasion of Iraq created Al Qaeda in Iraq and our occupation and continued presence has been Al Qaeda’s best recruitment tool. The longer we act like we are going to occupy Islamic countries the more Al Qaeda can work up a hatred for the New Crusaders. This is an argument that can only be countered by deeds not words. No matter what we say, as long as we are in Iraq we lose this argument. Only by leaving Iraq can we show the Islamic World that we are not out for world conquest. As for Al Qaeda terrorist in the U.S., they’re already here. The bombing of the World Trade Center and later the 9/11 hijackings have shown that anyone who wants to get into the country to do harm can do it quite easily and legitimately. And even if we went to the extreme measure of barring all Muslims from entering the country, we could still find out as Britain did that even natural born citizens can become Al Qaeda terrorists if motivated. And finally there are those that say if we leave Iraq now then our soldiers have died in vain. I have no answer for this. The soldiers never die in vain if they are fighting a war they were sent to fight. They did their best and gave their all. Their lives were precious to their families and friends and should never have been lost needlessly. But their lost lives are not on the hands of their mission, but on the hands of their commander who sent them into battle. A life is a one time commodity; there are no do-overs in death. Before expending even one American life, the Commander in Chief needs to be sure that there is no other way to resolve an issue. In the case of Iraq Pres. Bush did not exhaust all other options. In fact he ignored valid peaceful options in his haste to jump straight to the military option. The soldiers did not die in vain; Pres. Bush sent them to their deaths in a vain attempt to accomplish something that was poorly conceived, poorly planed, poorly executed, and poorly run. Presidents are always responsible for deaths, but there are nearly 4,000 that did not have to die on his watch. The case now is that having decided the troops should come home and can come home, how do we get them home? Pres. Bush has no intentions of bringing home the troops at any time during his Presidency. If he brings them home without a clear cut victory in Iraq then history will have judged him to have lost the Iraq war and needlessly killed almost 4,000 Americans. Since there is no possibility of any kind of victory in Iraq, Pres. Bush’s strategy is to simply prolong the war until he is out of office. That way he can claim to not have been the President to have lost the Iraq war and that if he had stayed in office longer he would have won it, but he had to leave due to term limits. The Democrats won control of Congress on an End the War Now strategy, but now that they are in office they are doing nothing to end it. A cynic might say that they have no intention of ending the war because, if they did, Pres. Bush will quickly blame them for losing the war he could have won if he’d only had enough time and support from Congress. The Democrats are more afraid of being blamed for losing the war than they are hopeful about being praised for ending the war. An even bigger cynic might say that the Democrats are purposefully not ending the war so that they can use it as a campaign platform in the ’08 elections with the intent of getting even more Democrats elected to office including the Presidency. Either because of Pres. Bush or the Democrats, if the war is not ended until the next President takes office in January of ’09, that will be another 16 months of fighting in Iraq and another 1,000 or more Americans dead just so some politician won’t be blamed for losing the Iraq war. The war is already lost as far as any American victory is concerned. The only option is to get out as soon as possible. Since Pres. Bush won’t get us out, it’s up to the Democrats to do it, no matter what the presidents tries to blame on them. The Democrats complaint so far has been that they don’t have the votes to end the war. Any bill they pass ending the war will just be vetoed by the President and the Democrats don’t have the two thirds majority to over ride his veto. Additionally in the Senate the Democrats say they can’t even get a bill passed because they don’t have the 60 votes needed to stop a filibuster by the Republicans. These are excuses, not reasons. The war is so unpopular now that, if they tried, the Senate Democrats could probably find enough Rep. Senators to stop a filibuster and possible the 67 total needed to over ride a veto. But even if they don’t, they don’t need to; they can still get done what needs to be accomplished with a simple majority. The first thing they can do is to use the same “nuclear option” the Republicans threatened to use when they had a simple majority and the Democrats threatened to filibuster court nominees. The Republican “nuclear option” was to change the Senate rules, which they could do with a simple majority, and abolish the filibuster. This way every vote was a simple majority vote and the Republicans could pass any court nominee they wanted. If the Republicans were willing to do this just to appoint court judges, how much more important is it for the Democrats to use it to save 1,000 or more American lives. The Democrats backed down when threatened; it’s time for the Republicans to do so over a much more important issue. The Democrats also said that if they attached an end the war rider to any spending bill the President would veto it and part or all of the government would shut down if the spending bills are not passed. This is true, but only half true. The Congress needs to pass about 19 spending bills each year to fund the actions of the government. Only one of these is the spending bill for the Pentagon. Congress can easily pass by a simple majority the 18 other spending bills with no riders and the President can easily sign them. The Pentagon spending bill can be passed with one simple rider: no money in this bill can be used to support any military activities in Iraq. The entire military is funded except for the Iraq operations. The Congress can then pass a supplementary bill with money for Iraq with the condition that the money can only be used to shut down operations in Iraq and bring the troops home by mid December. The President can sign or veto the Pentagon spending bill as he chooses. Most likely he’ll sign it since it does fund the rest of the military. He’ll almost certainly veto the Iraq bill with a statement to the effect that Congress is abandoning the troops in Iraq and leaving them defenseless in the presence of their enemies. Congress can counter that they are not only funding the troops but saving them from death in a war with no hope of victory. Congress can then try to over ride the veto. The Democrats vote in favor of over riding the veto. If the Republicans vote against over riding the veto they are seen as siding with the President and leaving the troops with not only no funding but forced to stay in Iraq even longer. If the Republicans vote to over ride the veto they can take credit with the Democrats for ending the war and removing a potentially bad campaign issue that could be used against them in the ’08 elections. The President’s veto is then over ridden and the President will get money for Iraq but only to shut down operations and bring the troops home. Even then the President has other options. He can try to find some foreign source of $2 billion a week to fund Iraq operations. This, in essence, though, would make American troops mercenaries and invoke a constitutional crisis about the President’s use of American troops outside of constitutional guidelines. The first President Bush actually did this with the American invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf war when he got the Saudis and the Kuwaitis to fund most of the American expense of the war, but this was with Congressional approval. The use of American troops funded by a third party without Congressional approval would in effect make the military the Presidents own private army subject to no other authority. One can see a new War Powers Act rushed through Congress at lightening speed. Another option the President has is to take the money and spend it as he chooses with some sort of signing statement saying in effect Congress can give him the money or not for the Iraq war but they can’t direct how he spends it. This would also invoke a constitutional crisis. Pres. Bush has been using signing statements to effectively rewrite bills passed by Congress that he only partially agreed with. When there was a Republican Congress this didn’t matter since Pres. Bush signed almost every bill sent him. With a Democratic Congress a signing statement, especially one as contrary as this one might be, would be met with immediate repudiation by Congress and a one way trip to the Supreme Court. The most likely outcome of that Supreme Court hearing would be either the end of signing statements and strict adherence to bills as passed or a swift vote in the house on impeachment. Either way this is a battle that Pres. Bush can’t win. Well, I’ve spent over 5,000 words explaining just how to get our troops out of Iraq and back home by Christmas, how we can do it, and why we have to do it. This is just my opinion, of course, and I could be wrong, but in a matter of such great importance I sincerely hope I’m not. Feel free to pass this address along to anyone you feel might profit by reading it. Wallace (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 28th, 2007
12:54 pm	Last Harry Potter Book Everybody seems to be speculating on how the last Harry Potter book ends and so I thought I’d give it a try as well. Rowling said that even as she wrote the first book she knew how the series would end. She even wrote an outline for book seven at the time and kept it locked up, safe until the series was over and she could publish the seventh book. The reason there are seven books is because of the English school system that takes seven years from the start of secondary school till graduation. This same journey from childhood to adulthood is taken by Harry in his seven years at Hogwarts. We should be glad she wasn’t writing in America and we only got six books from Middle School through High School, though at least we’d know how it ends by now. Rowling knew the end of the series when she wrote the first book. She hadn’t written books two through six then and, in any event, whatever they contained would only be filler of sorts. Filler that allowed Harry to grow and mature, gain friends, develop his magical powers, and to gain enemies to oppose him as he traveled along his Quest. The reason I say Quest is because that is what Harry is on, just like any Hero Quest from mythology. Harry starts off, literally, as a baby with no friends, no family, and no abilities. Along his Quest he gets a best friend, a girlfriend, followers and admirers, ever greater powers, and objects he can use to further his Quest. The question, though, is what is the quest he is on? Rowling said she knew the ending of the series when she wrote the first book, so all we need to know about the Quest must be contained in that first book. The Quest can’t be for a best friend, Ron is that from the beginning. It can’t be for a love interest, Hermione fills that job nicely. It can’t be for fame, Harry is famous before the first book even begins. And it can’t be for power, even in the first book Harry is thought to be potentially one of the greatest wizards ever. So what is Harry’s Quest? Traditionally, a hero’s quest is to fulfill his greatest desire, and what is Harry’s greatest desire? We see that in the very first book when Harry sits in front of the Mirror of Erised, conveniently desire spelled backwards, and longs for his parents. For Harry to fulfill his Quest, he must somehow find his parents. But how can he do this short of going to Hades like a Greek hero? The answer, like everything that matters, is in the first book. The common belief about Harry’s survival is that Voldemort came to Harry’s parents’ house and killed them by magic, but when he tried to kill Harry the spell somehow was reflected back at Voldemort and killed him instead. The only sign of the spell on Harry was the scar on his forehead. This story of the death of Harry’s parents and Harry’s survival is maintained throughout the series of books. But what if it’s not true? There were no witnesses except Harry and he was too young to remember or even know what’s going on. All anybody knew is that Voldemort went into the Potter’s house and only Harry came out alive. The exact details of the events are just later speculations to fill the known facts, but let’s look at those facts. Everyone thought that Harry somehow stopped the greatest wizard of the Dark Arts ever known. That just doesn’t make sense. Harry was a baby. He didn’t have any powers and, even if he would be the greatest wizard ever know, the only thing he had then was potential. No training, no spells, no wand, not even the ability to speak. To think that a baby Harry could stop Voldemort is absurd. It’s the same as saying a baby could defeat a world class martial arts master just because the baby would grow up to be the greatest martial arts master of all time. So if Harry didn’t defeat Voldemort, who did? The answer to that is also the answer to Harry’s Quest. When Voldemort came to kill Harry’s parents he didn’t find two Muggles he could easily kill, instead he found a powerful wizard and witch. It had even been mentioned that Harry’s Father was a powerful wizard, not that much less powerful than Voldemort himself, and his Mother a strong witch in her own right. What made Voldemort stronger and more dangerous was that Voldemort practiced the Dark Arts while Harry’s parents did not. Since Harry could not have fought Voldemort, it must have been his parents who did the fighting. When Voldemort cast his spell to kill them, they blocked his spell and cast a counter spell to disembody Voldemort. Not being evil, they didn’t try to kill Voldemort, just dissolve away his physical body so he couldn’t hurt anyone else, but leave his spirit alive. But, because of the energy needed to block Voldemort’s death spell and cast their own counter spell, they were drained of energy so much that they were caught in the counter spell as well and, like Voldemort, became disembodied. I say disembodied because, like Voldemort, they were not dead. If they were dead their ghosts would have shown up now and then like the ghosts of other people that suffered violent deaths, but they don’t. Voldemort, through his own power and force of will, slowly brought himself back from a disembodied state to a physical body, but what about Harry’s parents? Where have they been all this time? The answer to that is back in the Potter’s house when Harry’s parents faced and defeated Voldemort. Since Harry took no part in the magical fight with Voldemort, and Voldemort was gone before he could harm Harry, how did Harry get that scar on his forehead? The answer is his parents put it there. When they cast their counter spell to disembody Voldemort, they knew they were going to be horribly weakened and might succumb to the counter spell as well. They also knew enough about the Dark Arts from their own time in Hogwarts studying Defense Against The Dark Arts that there might be a way to save themselves from permanent disembodiment. The scar on Harry’s forehead was their anchor to the physical world. In later books Rowling calls it a Horcrux, but that’s just a name added later and the name isn’t needed in the first book. Knowing they might succumb to the counter spell, Harry’s parents divided their spirits and put the scar on Harry’s forehead so that their spirits would be with Harry always and, if they succumbed, then sometime in the future, when Harry had grown into a powerful wizard of his own, he could undo the counter spell they cast and return them to their physical bodies. The Horcrux is the reason Harry is so quickly and easily able to do even complicated magic since he is literally imbued with the spirits of a powerful wizard and witch. It’s also the reason the scar reacts so strongly around Voldemort since it was put there by the same spell that disembodied Voldemort. Which brings us back to Harry’s Quest. As long as Voldemort’s spirit and now his body are around, Harry’s parents are stuck in their disembodied state because of the spell that ties the three of them together. Harry’s only hope to accomplish his Quest and bring back his parents, though he doesn’t realize it, is to destroy all of Voldemort’s Horcruxs and kill Voldemort both physically and spiritually. That is what Harry does in the seventh book and, after Voldemort’s death, the spell cast by Harry’s parents is broken and they return to the physical world. Harry has accomplished his Quest and fulfilled his greatest desire, to have his parents back with him again. Rowling even gives us a hint that this is what will happen in the title of the seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Hallows is an old form of holy and is used only these days in the form All Hallows Eve or, as its contracted, Halloween. All Hallows Eve is the eve of All Saints Day and in this context Hallows refers to Saints, that is the spirits of the dearly departed. What could be a better expression to Harry about his parents than saints or spirits of the dear departed. She also uses the word deathly, not deadly which would imply killing, but deathly which implies like unto death but not really dead. And that is exactly what Harry’s parents are, like unto death but not really dead. To rephrase the title then, it would be Harry Potter and the Like-Unto-Death Spirits-Of-His-Parents. Deathly Hallows rolls off the tongue much easier. I think this neatly ties all the loose ends together. All we need to know comes from the first book, just as Rowling intended when she wrote the first book and the outline for the seventh book at the same time. It explains Harry’s Quest and how he fulfills it and gets his parents back. It explains how Voldemort was defeated the first time and how Harry got his scar and the significance of that scar. And it explains the significance of the title of the seventh book which is all about Harry’s Quest for his parents. This, of course, is just my opinion, but it ties everything together so nicely I would be surprised to see that Rowling ended the series any other way than the happy ending I’ve described. I guess we’ll see in 23 days though. Wallace in Wallywood (21 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
5:23 am	Tomorrow's Election Since tomorrow is Election Day, I thought now would be a good time to post another entry on my journal. I would like to urge all of you to go vote tomorrow, but not just vote in general, but to vote for the Democrats. If you think the country is going in the wrong direction and you want change, then voting for the Democrats is the only way to effect that change. I’m sure you’ve heard all the news about Republicans taking bribes and kickbacks, under arrest or indictment for various crimes, even forced to resign from Congress because of dubious emails to underage pages, but, you say, that wasn’t my Senator or Representative. My Congressman is a Republican and he hasn’t been arrested or disgraced. Why should I vote for a Democrat? The reason is that every Republican caucuses with the Republican Party. They control the House, the Senate, all the committees, the Presidency, and even the Supreme Court. Because of this they control all the legislation from passage to signing to judicial review. As long as the Republicans control Congress nothing will change. Right now many of them are distancing themselves from the President because of the Iraq war, but they are the same Congressmen who have supported the President’s position and keep the funds flowing into the black hole Iraq has become. You may also have seen commercials on TV saying the Democratic candidate voted for some bill that goes against everything you believe. Don’t be fooled by that. The Republicans control all the committees in both the House and Senate and control what bills get to the floor and what amendments those bills get. Because of this they can make it appear that any Democrat has voted for something totally against the wishes of the people. As an example, a Republican controlled committee can send out a bill praising Motherhood and apple pie. When it gets to the floor for a vote, though, the majority Republicans can add any number of “poison pill” amendments that make it impossible for any Democrat to vote for the bill. When the Democrats vote against the bill, the Republicans can then say in their campaign ads that their Democratic opponent voted against Motherhood and apple pie and site the specific bill’s number to “prove” how bad their opponent is, without ever mentioning the poison pill amendments. Right now the Republicans are using many divisive wedge issues to appeal to their Conservative base in as many states as they can. The foremost of these are the State bans on Gay Marriage, State restrictions on abortion, and State bans on stem cell research. The Republicans have added these and other similar State propositions in an effort to motivate religious conservatives to go to the polls to support these measures and, while they’re there, vote the Republican ticket. This is nothing more than a cynical effort on the Republicans part to use the religious conservatives for their vote with no real concern about their beliefs. If the Republicans really cared about these issues, they could easily and quickly pass bills in Washington that would ban Gay Marriage, abortion, and all stem cell research nationwide any time they wanted to. Remember, they control both houses of Congress, the Presidency, and have a very conservative Supreme Court to uphold their bans. The reason they don’t is that, if they did, they could no longer use these issues to motivate the religious conservatives to go to the polls every two years and support the Republican candidates. They’d much rather keep trotting these issues out ever two years than actually serve the conservative base they claim to represent. Another thing the Republicans claim is that if the Democrats gain control of Congress, they’ll raise everyone’s taxes. This is just not true because the Republicans have raised everyone’s taxes already. But, you say, the Republicans lowered the tax rate, how can you say they raised the taxes? The simple answer is that, if you lower the taxes, you have to also lower the spending to make up for the reduced income to the government. The Republicans didn’t lower spending, they increased it, dramatically. Since they control Congress and the White House, the Republicans have passed bills spending money on every little pet project and pork barrel plan they can think of. The national debt has gone from a surplus under Clinton to the biggest consecutive deficits year after year under the Republicans that this nation has ever seen. And since the government can’t spend money it doesn’t have, they have to borrow the money in the form of billions of dollars of Treasury bonds. These bonds obligate the government, that is, you and me, to pay back all the money the government borrows plus the interest on those bonds. On a personal level, this would be the same as if you got a raise in your income each month by taking out a cash advance on your credit card each month and saying you had more money to spend while ignoring the fact that you have to someday pay back the cash you got along with the interest the bank is charging. Sooner or later you’re going to reach your credit limit and you won’t be able to borrow any more money. Then your income will plunge when most of your money is going to pay off the principle and interest you owe. This is exactly what the Republicans have done to the Country. Sooner or later those bonds will have to be paid off and then everyone’s taxes will go much higher than they ever were before, reflecting the true tax hike the Republicans imposed on the American people. The Republicans are also saying that the Democrats are weak on defense and will cut and run from Iraq, thereby creating a safe harbor for terrorists. The truth is that the Democrats are not weak on defense, but strong in the defense of America while not engaging in risky foreign adventures that do nothing for the defense of America while creating countless enemies for no gain to American safety. Every reason that the Bush administration used for going to war in Iraq proved to be false. There is substantial evidence that the Bush administration knew those reasons were false before they ever invaded Iraq, but as long as the Republicans control Congress there will never be any investigations into the matter. It’s only if the Democrats take control of Congress will we ever know the truth of why the U. S. invaded Iraq. There have been numerous Generals and Intelligence officials who have come forward to say the war was not necessary, it was ill planned, it was understaffed from the start, and the U. S. had no plan of what to do after the shooting stopped. The Iraqis have long since stopped seeing the U. S. as liberators and, after more than three years, as occupiers of their nation. There was no Al Qaeda there before the invasion, but there certainly is now, and its numbers are growing every day. The occupation has become a rallying cry throughout the Islamic world and has made us far more likely of a terrorist attack than before. Before the invasion only Al Qaeda and a few other extreme Islamic groups espoused attacks on America. Now the number of anti-American groups has grown into uncounted numbers throughout the world. America is certainly not safer now under the Republicans than we were before. The Republicans originally tried to say that Saddam had some hand in the 9/11 attacks and attacking him was payback for his actions. It now has been long know that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, though the Republicans still try to occasionally make the case. What is obvious now, though, is the comparison between 9/11 and the Iraq war. The number of Americans killed in Iraq has now exceeded the number killed on 9/11. Over 2800 Americans have died in Iraq, more than were killed on all three sites on 9/11. The latest projects from the U. S. military and the President of Iraq state that the U. S. will have to keep troops in Iraq for another three years before the Iraqi army is capable of defending the country. Three more years, provided the Iraqi army shapes up, which it shows no sign of doing. Three more years, provided Iraq doesn’t descend into civil war, which it shows every sign of doing. Three more years, costing another two to three thousand American lives, provided the situation doesn’t get any worse there, which it shows every sign of doing. If the entire nation and the whole world was shocked and horrified about the loss of 2800 American lives on 9/11, why aren’t we shocked and horrified about the loss of 2800 American lives in Iraq? Why aren’t we shocked and horrified about the likelihood of another 2800 American lives lost in the next three years in the war in Iraq? What are we going to do about it? What can we do about it? The Republicans seem quite ready to accept whatever Bush wants to do about Iraq. As long as the Republicans control Congress, nothing will be done. If we want something done about Iraq, the only option is to elect the Democrats to Congress. If you think the Country is going in the wrong direction and want change, then go to the polls tomorrow and vote for the Democrats. If you like things as they are and want to keep the Country going in the same direction, then stay home tomorrow, you’ll only make things worse. These are, of course, my own opinions and I could be wrong, though I don’t see how. If you disagree with me, then feel free to write your own journal; just don’t bother writing on mine. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 8th, 2004
9:13 pm	Slipping into the past I have been wondering how Bush and Cheyne, ex-oilmen that they are, let the price of oil and, by extension, the price of U.S. pump gas, get so out of hand right before an election. And, having asked the question, I think I have an answer. In a true throwback to Cold War days that I'm sure Cheyne will appreciate, I blame the Commies, ehh, I mean the Russians. With the head of the Yukos(spelling? I don't know Cyrillic) oil company actually showing some political backbone and challenging Putin, Putin reverts to KGB form and has the CEO arrested and charged with tax fraud and the company forced to the edge of bankruptcy. The proposed fine of $900 million is, strangely, the exact amount of the companies net worth, leaving it with no operating capital to pay it's workers and keep the Ruskie oil flowing. Well, you don't have to be a commodities broker to see that a sudden loss of around 1.5 million barrels a day from the world market will promptly drive up the price of oil, a record $44+ as of today. Putin seems to have never cared much for Bush the Younger and this might be just the kind of move he'd do to put the screws to Bush, metaphorically speaking, though I'd guess he'd also be as proficient without the metaphor. I have noticed something strange, though. When the World price of oil hit $35 a barrel a few months ago, the price of gas shot up to around $1.95/gl here and much more in other parts of the country. When the price of oil declined, the price of gas declined as well, to around $1.75/gl here. Strangely, as we get closer to the election and the price of oil has shot pass the $35/bl up to the $44/bl, the price of gas has continued to decline, to about $1.68/gl. Humm, could there be an outside influence working to keep the price of gas artificially low so as not to anger the voters in about three months? Do we know anybody in the government with strong enough ties to the oil industry to get this kind of co-operation? I'm guessing there might be. It seems like the bad old days are back again with the Russians doing economic chaos to try to dethrone an Imperial President while the Military-Industrial complex works to draw the wool over our eyes and keep the CEO-in-Chief's hand firmly on the reins of that horse in the middle of the creek. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 22nd, 2004
6:48 am	Picture Of Me Everybody else seems to have a picture with their Live Journal, so I added a recent one of me. Well, maybe not so recent, but it does show I had ambition even as a child. OK, next entry will be a little more on topic, this one is just to amuse my daughter. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 12th, 2004
4:32 am	MOVEON.ORG Haven't forgotten the live journal, just got distracted with some other stuff. I've been reading the stuff on moveon.org. Very good. Every liberal should log on and join the site. Good news and opinion, it mostly agrees with me. Big surprise there. More to come later. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 16th, 2004
11:12 pm	Right wing propaganda I recently got the email at the bottom from a friend, who got it from a friend, who… Well, you get the idea. I get this stuff all the time and usually ignore them. This time I thought I’d reply. I sent the reply to my friend and all the people on the recipient list. Since I spent the time to write the reply, I thought I might as well use it for my first journal entry. My reply is directly below and the original email is at the bottom. Enjoy. Wally Subject: RE: Message from a Marine Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 4:59 AM Hi, I think you have been deceived by some subtle Bush for President propaganda. Everything below is aimed at making the Democrats and non-right wing media look bad. The writer specifically talks about Clinton saying his administration equipped Islamic terrorists. In fact, it was the Reagan and later Bush administration that equipped the Mujahideen in Afghanistan with weapons, communications gear, and the notorious Stinger missiles in their fight with the Soviets. By the time Clinton took office in 1993, the war in Afghanistan was over and Bin Laden was well trained and equipped to carry out his war. In fact Clinton on at least two occasions tried to bomb Bin Laden to take him out as a terrorist. It didn't work, but it was a lot more anti-terrorist than Bush's actions on 9-11-01. Bush grounded all air traffic in the US except military and one special flight that went across the country, gathering up all of Bin Laden's relatives and flying them safely back to Saudi Arabia. Bush has yet to explain why he helped all of the relatives of the architect of the 9-11 attacks to escape from the country without answering any questions about what they knew of Bin Laden's plans. The bit about "civilized people" not fathoming evil is nonsense. Who hasn't seen films of the Nazi death camps, the killings by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia where they stacked up skulls like bricks, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo where people were killed and the bodies mass buried by the thousands for being the wrong religion, or the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda where over a million people were killed for just being in the wrong tribe? Right now on TV you can see thousands of people in Sudan being ethnically cleansed for being the wrong race. You don't have to fathom it, you can see it all around us all the time. His part about the people on the 9-11 flights allowing themselves to be overpowered is just plain wrong. Plenty of aircraft had been hijacked in the past. Invariably the hijackers had the plane flown to some isolated spot, usually Cuba or such, where the passengers and crew were usually freed, either voluntarily or by attacking ground forces. There was no reason for the crew and passengers of the flights in New York and Washington to suspect that these hijackers intended anything different. When they realized these hijackers had different intentions, it was too late for them to do anything. When the crew and passengers on the flight in Pennsylvania heard what had happened to the other hijacked flights, they uniformly rose up and fought the hijackers for control of the plane. They certainly realized the depth of hatred of the hijackers and died fighting against it. To say they did any less is to defame their memory and their actions. As to his movie references, they're wrong too. Why didn't the Jews fight back? They did, ever hear of the Warsaw ghetto uprising where the Jews with hardly more than sticks and rocks took on the German army. Ever hear of the Resistance fought by Jews and others all across Europe during the war? The Jews did fight back, it's just when a soldier is holding a gun on you and you're standing next to your family and children, it's better to go along and hope to live another day and maybe save your family than to try to fight on the spot and see all your family shot dead on the spot. As to Pearl Harbor, we were prepared. Roosevelt had started up the Arsenal of Democracy back in 1939 when it became obvious the Germans and Japanese were headed to war with the U.S. We were already heavily supplying the British and Chinese and had started sanctions against the Germans and Japanese. Pearl Harbor was a single attack, well planned, well executed, and never repeated. By a series of good luck, good timing, and good weather the attack got carried out. The Japanese planes were even picked up by military RADAR. Had the Japanese arrival not coincided with the expected arrival of a flight of U.S. planes, the military would have even been able to muster a good defense. Roosevelt had already started the gearing up of the U.S. military. We lost one battle, we'd lose some more, but we wouldn't lose the war. Saying we weren't prepared because we lost one battle is just nonsense. As we just saw during the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, Eisenhower executed a "trial" invasion of the English coast that was an unmitigated failure, yet Eisenhower was probably the best planner during the entire war and successfully carried out the Normandy invasion. Anyone can be caught out by luck, timing, weather, coincidence, and other variable factors. If there is any failure to be given out for 9-11, though, it is to the Bush administration. The Clinton administration had the focus on terrorism where it should have been; on Bin Laden, the terror organizations in Afghanistan, and the Al Qaeda reach throughout the world. The guy below makes fun of "quick retaliatory strikes" by the Clinton administration, but at least they were against the real enemy, Bin Laden. As soon as Bush took office, he ignored warnings from the Clinton officials and instead spent all his time planning to attack Iraq, which even Bush's Father knew enough to not try to crush and take over. Bush's fixation on Saddam and Iraq meant he wasn't paying attention where he should have, the real terrorists who carried out the attacks on the USS Cole and the U.S. embassies in Africa. Without real spies in the Al Qaeda organization, it's unlikely we could have prevented the 9-11 attacks, but if Bush had spent more time on Al Qaeda and less on Saddam, we might at least have had a better chance. The guy who wrote the letter below says he watched "Private Ryan" and wondered where they found the courage. He then signs the letter as MGySgt. That's Master Gunnery Sergeant, an E-9 position, the second highest enlisted rank in the Marines. It takes 25 to 30 years to get that rank, and he says he's retired, so he got it most likely over 30 years ago. That's the Viet Nam time period. If a guy who probably fought in Viet Nam has to see a movie to wonder about courage, I would seriously doubt the authenticity of the letter. If you don't see courage in your buddy in a firefight, how can you possible see it in a movie? To me this whole letter smacks of political propaganda by Bush sympathizers to try to discredit both the media and the Democrats and make it seem that anybody that disagrees with the Bush "optional war", as it's been called by many ex-generals, is both unpatriotic and anti-American. I've seen quite a bit of this jingoistic, wrapped in the flag, right wing propaganda of late and I suspect it will only get worse as we get closer to the election. The only thing this one lacks is a declaration that "God wills it so" and that we are soldiers in His war. I was going to send this reply to just you, but in the spirit of free speech the writer cites in his first paragraph, I’ll send it to all the addressees in the hope that propaganda such as this gets the proper treatment it deserves. Wally Subject: Message from a Marine Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 17:47:06 -0400 This was sent to me by a friend who serves our country in the US Air Force. It was sent to her, by a Marine friend of hers. Feel free to forward it on to others or disregard it. I know that not everyone I send this too will agree with it, but if I only send it to those who will like what it says, I am being a hypocrite. And if we live in a country where freedom of speech is important, then we have to listen to points of view that we disagree with too. Some powerful thoughts to reflect and ponder over from a true friend of mine (even though he is marine). I think he really has a handle on recent events. I sat in a movie theater watching "Schindler's List," asked myself, "Why didn't the Jews fight back?" Now I know why. I sat in a movie theater, watching "Pearl Harbor" and asked myself, "Why weren't we prepared?" Now I know why. Civilized people cannot fathom, much less predict, the actions of evil people. On September 11, dozens of capable airplane passengers allowed themselves to be overpowered by a handful of poorly armed terrorists because they did not comprehend the depth of hatred that motivated their captors. On September 11, thousands of innocent people were murdered because too many Americans naively reject the reality that some nations are dedicated to the dominance of others. Many political pundits, pacifists and media personnel want us to forget the carnage. They say we must focus on the bravery of the rescuers and ignore the cowardice of the killers. They implore us to understand the motivation of the perpetrators. Major television stations have announced they will assist the healing process by not replaying devastating footage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. I will not be manipulated. I will not pretend to understand. I will not forget. I will not forget the liberal media who abused freedom of the press to kick our country when it was vulnerable and hurting. I will not forget that CBS anchor Dan Rather preceded President Bush's address to the nation with the snide remark, "No matter how you feel about him, he is still our president." I will not forget that ABC TV anchor Peter Jennings questioned President Bush's motives for not returning immediately to Washington, DC and commented, "We're all pretty skeptical and cynical about Washington." And I will not forget that ABC's Mark Halperin warned if reporters weren't informed of every little detail of this war, they aren't "likely -- nor should they be expected -- to show deference." I will not isolate myself from my fellow Americans by pretending an attack on the USS Cole in Yemen was not an attack on the United States of America. I will not forget the Clinton administration equipped Islamic terrorists and their supporters with the world's most sophisticated telecommunications equipment and encryption technology, thereby compromising America's ability to trace terrorist radio, cell phone, land lines, faxes and modem communications. I will not be appeased with pointless, quick retaliatory strikes like those perfected by the previous administration. I will not be comforted by "feel-good, do nothing" regulations like the silly, "Have your bags been under your control?" question at the airport. I will not be influenced by so called,"antiwar demonstrators" who exploit the right of __expression to chant anti-American obscenities. I will not forget the moral victory handed the North Vietnamese by American war protesters who reviled and spat upon the returning soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines. I will not be softened by the wishful thinking of pacifists who chose reassurance over reality. I will embrace the wise words of Prime Minister Tony Blair who told the Labor Party conference, "They have no moral inhibition on the slaughter of the innocent. If they could have murdered not 7,000 but 70,000, does anyone doubt they would have done so and rejoiced in it? There is no compromise possible with such people, no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must!" I will force myself to: -hear the weeping -feel the helplessness -imagine the terror -sense the panic -smell the burning flesh - experience the loss - Remember the hatred. I sat in a movie theater, watching "Private Ryan" and asked myself, "Where did they find the courage?" Now I know. We have no choice. Living without liberty is not living. -- Ed Evans, MGySgt., USMC (Ret.) Not as lean, Not as mean, But still a Marine. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 15th, 2004
9:58 pm	New Journal This is the first entry for my journal. Just starting out so I'll do a little thinking before I make a real post. At least the journal is not empty now. (Comment on this)