Category: General

[Oh the times. Oh the manners!–Cicero]
Yes, it’s come to this, but not a moment too soon.
The NYTimes Business Section today includes a lengthy piece on how corporate executives can survive in prison, “White-Collar Criminal? Pack Lightly for Prison.” I suppose the customary articles on earnings ratios and the usual investment analyses just don’t pack the journalistic punch they used to.

The most common advice for staying out of trouble is universal: do your own time. In other words, mind your own business, avoid confrontation. [David Novak, who spent nine months at the prison camp in Eglin, Fla., in 1997 for purposely crashing his aircraft and filing a false insurance claim] has assembled a list of basic rules of prison etiquette that he’s published in a 200-page manual called “Downtime: A Guide to Federal Incarceration,” for which he charges $39.95. The list includes: Don’t rat. Don’t cut in line. Don’t ask. Don’t touch. Pay your debts. Flush often. Don’t whine.

Oh yes, for those who are interested, the article also gives us some insight into what kind of sexual threats or opportunities may await the white-collar criminal these days.

If prison camps are not “Club Fed,” neither are they arenas for violence. Newcomers often are terrified by the possibility of forced sex, but former inmates and prison officials agree that sexual assault in federal prisons is rare, even at the highest security levels, and practically unheard of in prison camps. Former inmates say that while officially forbidden, consensual sex is common and available.

Hmm. On either count, it seems that at least as far as sex is concerned, the outside world just might actually be less attractive for a middle-aged suit, especially if the Times account includes what awaits women as well.

[This is not a call for war of any kind. Far from it. I have no doubts that we aren’t going to fix what’s wrong with ourselves or anyone else in the world by slugging it out. The observation which follows is only an attempt to help us realize that we are not doing what we say or think we are doing, and that any truly appropriate remedy isn’t even being discussed by most of us.]
In spite of what we are being told by virtually every media source, the U.S. is really not interested in war. We are interested in wiping-out people and countries and evil-doers, but not if it involves any risk to ourselves. A magic ray gun or the equivalent high-tech toy is what we are interested in, not sending our boys to fight anything like a battle, a war.
[We’ve already shown the world that the most powerful nation on earth is even afraid of being its police force, let alone its military defense. There are 45,000 thousand peacekeepers stationed around the world at this moment. Only 700 of them are Americans. We don’t want to risk injury or death. Of course we also know now that we don’t want to risk being tried for genocide while on such police duty, although apparently the brave little countries risking the 44,300 remaining soldiers don’t seem to have the same concern.]
Obliterating cities and countries from thirty thousand feet is not war. It’s playing god.
I’ve written before about the cowardice of a nation which is so afraid of its shadow that, after a single horrendous act of free-lance terror, it closes-down its mind and its democratic culture in favor of investing a nincompoop and his handlers with divine powers and a divine aura. We are now willing to give up everything for what is only the illusion of safety. We have ceased to have a backbone; we have ceased to think for ourselves; we have ceased to be Americans.
The condition may still be reversible, but at this time we are demonstrably a nation of cowards.

The best discussion (and the scariest) I’ve seen yet of the issues raised by what appears to be the administration’s insanely stupid determination to start a real war, one which might mean the end of the world as we know it.

“Is Preemption a Nuclear Schlieffen Plan?” asks a veteran defense analyst, who writes under the nom de plume “Dr. Werther” for the Defense and the National Interest Web site, which is widely read in defense circles. The article takes aim at the “vainglory, worship of force, and threat-mongering” that has characterized U.S. foreign policy rhetoric in the wake of the Cold War and which has been “pumped to epidemic levels” since September 11. Likening the “preemptive strike” policy toward Iraq to “Germany’s neurotic obsession with hostile encirclement” by France in the early 20th century, Werther notes that Kaiser Wilhelm II did away with the careful foreign policy of Bismarck’s era, taking instead as Germany’s central military tenet the dubious idea that France would have no hesitation about violating Belgian neutrality. In the event of war, Germany would then implement the general staff chief Alfred von Schlieffen’s plan, which meant first taking over Belgium and immediately knocking out the French.
Alas, it didn’t quite work out that way. In fact, the Schlieffen plan “guaranteed that Germany would create enemies faster than it could kill them.” (Unhappy with the Belgian invasion, in came the British, along with the French, who weren’t knocked out after all.) And this, despite the fact that Germany “then possessed the most efficient, if not the largest, killing machine in the world.”

I can’t stay away from this one, for its effrontery and for almost perfectly representing the government and media’s Big Lie. The oversized (but not for this tabloid) headline on the cover of the New York Daily News this morning reads, “UNDER SEIGE,” referring to the latest deadly atacks in Palestine.

Every day, The Daily News’ eye-catching front and back covers are the talk of the town. [this is the daily’s own online description of its covers]

So a state which monopolizes all military and police power, which is equipped with just about the most sophisticated weapons available on the market today, which illegally occupies and controls every inch of Palestinian territory and which has effectively put every Palestinian under house arrest by closing street, roads and even fields, is described as “under siege” by the popular, yellow press.
We shouldn’t have to take this stupidity or malignancy. It will ultimately destroy us and the world, if left unchallenged.
I’ve written to the offenders.

This litany of common charges made by the Israeli war party and their calm refutation by an Israeli peace activist may be almost two years old now, but remain key to an understanding of what has transpired both before and after October, 2000.

I’ve had my disagreements with the Post Office, and with Columbia University for that matter, but if both can somehow persevere through the worst environments nature and man can devise, I have a new respect for both institutions, and some hope we will survive this week’s heat and even our current government.

The letters, from Columbia University in New York, have also been a sometimes tenuous thread between two worlds for more than half a century during which time this once cosmopolitan city was largely cut off from the West. Their uninterrupted delivery is one of the many small marvels of the mail, a testament to the reliability of the postal services on both sides of the Pacific.

The wonders of the internet brings us still more from one of the people who might yet save the country, if not the world.

[Miss Scarlet must have been told that a lady does not sweat in the summer. She glows. How were us northern folk supposed to know that? It would’a made all the difference for a lot of us, surely.]
The NYTimes editors like to regularly wax poetical about our more natural seasonal pleasures, and pains, sometimes actually adding something worthy to what we normally enjoy or suffer privately. Today’s notes are sort of a tribute to the fullness of summer in New York,

The thickness of the weather is most obvious just at dusk, when the heat tapers off a bit but the humidity comes into its own. Darkness seems to arrive from no place in particular. It condenses into a vapor that lies low over the hills north of the city and obscures the river edge of New Jersey. The damp air blunts every outline and blurs the distinction between colors until finally only darkness is left, but a darkness you can taste in your mouth and feel on your skin.

and yet they offer some sensible help in dealing with its discomforts.

Southerners know that the trick of living in damp heat is getting used to being sticky all the time. Northerners prefer to feel as though they’d just dried off after a long shower, their skin slick, except that in weather like this that effect quickly vanishes. For all the clarity of azure autumn days and the softness of the best weeks of spring, a few days of shirt-drenching weather in late July or early August are every bit as truly New York.

[I guess winter just doesn’t count anymore. I think we did away with it a little while back.]

Our policy throughout the Middle East has succeeded in creating enemies and weakening real or potential friends, in building-up repressive, violent and aggressive regimes and destroying the hopes of reformers and democrats.
Perhaps nowhere else at the moment is this better illustrated than in the Palestinian community, where, for those who have eyes and ears, the human dimension of our stupidity plays out so intimately yet dramatically, and at such great cost to any hope for peace and stability.
Palestinian-Americans (and other well-educated and prosperous Palestinians) are possibly in the best position to put an end to the violence thoughout the region and build a viable and just state. Now however they are being encouraged to leave, in many cases after returning from abroad during the last decade, when it appeared that their homeland was on the verge of statehood.

The residents of Turmus Aya, most of whom are American citizens, are trapped most days behind concrete blocks that Israeli soldiers have placed across the road into town, which is not a hot spot in the conflict.
….
[Because of the Israeli military occupation] Universities are inaccessible, and beyond selling corn flakes at the Supermarket California or pizza at the local restaurant, there is little work to be had.
Palestinian-Americans are concentrated in the southern West Bank, in Ramallah and surrounding villages like this one, where there are plenty of basketball hoops and residents tend to greet strangers with, “How ya doin’?” Like Turmus Aya, Deir Dibwan, to the south, also feels like a ghost town, because so many residents have gone to America.
….
These days, some Palestinian-Americans are embarrassed to be leaving for the United States, and others even to admit their citizenship, but Mustafa Zatar, 55, who worked for many years in Puerto Rico, proudly wears a baseball cap bearing the American flag.
“Every Fourth of July I fly the flag on my roof,” he said.
For four generations, as the West Bank passed from the Turks to the British to the Jordanians and then the Israelis, Palestinians have been leaving to seek their fortunes elsewhere. They gained citizenship in the United States, or Panama or France, and passed it on to their children.
The pattern has been for men like Ziad Igbara to leave after they finish high school to study or to work, but to raise their families here. Mr. Igbara said he did not know his own father until he was 14.
With his father and brothers, Mr. Igbara has been selling clothes in the Bronx for 22 years now. Unlike his brother Najeh, he is leaving his wife and six children here when he returns to the United States again this summer, because he is determined that they establish roots here. But he said he did not know how long he could hold out.

Two very, very good men are together about to make a very big difference in South Africa–and the world. South Africa’s most visible HIV activist, Zackie Achmat, and its undisputed moral leader, Nelson Mandela, are joining together to create a future for people with AIDS and the world which needs them.

[At great risk to his declining health, Achmat] refuses to take anti-retroviral drugs until the government makes them available to the general population.
Holding hands with Mr Achmat, Mr Mandela said the Aids campaigner was “a role model and his action is based on a fundamental principle which we all admire”.
After the meeting, Mr Mandela, whose attacks on the government’s Aids policies are subtle but insistent, said he would meet President Mbeki to discuss Mr Achmat’s condition, and by implication, those same government policies.
“I think that I’ve got a case to take to the president of the country and to acquaint him with what his position is,” said Mr Mandela.

President Mbeki’s notorious, anti-scientific views on AIDS are hugely responsible for the country’s disastrous response to the epidemic, and anything which might neutralize or reverse the impact on government policy of his current attitudes would be an enormous victory for sanity, and life, even beyond South Africa.