For a likely pandemic, swine flu outbreak seems relatively mild for now, and why shouldn’t the Mexican border be closed???

While I am not for a minute underestimating the potential of the 2009 H1N1 virus, better known as the swine flu, it seems that for now for what is seen as a potential for a pandemic is not acting like a pandemic.

That is to say that although Mexico has suffered 150 or more deaths officially attributed to the H1N1 virus – let’s just call it swine flu with no offense to pigs or pork – it does not seem to be terribly deadly elsewhere – yet. The U.S. has only suffered one death and that was a child who came here from Mexico seeking medical treatment. As of this writing I have not read nor heard about deaths elsewhere (although news changes rapidly).

A look at the current numbers (and realize that by the time many read this they no longer will be current) shows 109 confirmed cases in the U.S. and a handful in the various regions of the world. It seems that most of the cases can be attributed to the simple fact that people travel directly from Mexico to other areas of the world. A member of President Obama’s staff and his family are suspected of having contracted the swine flu, it has been reported. There had even been concern for the president himself when one report said that an official with whom he shook hands on his recent trip to Mexico later died, but last I heard it was not from the swine flu (maybe it was old age, I don’t know).

So anyway, 150 deaths in Mexico (some say no more than might be attributed in any given year or less to the more regular forms of flu), and 109 cases (and counting?) in the U.S. and as I said a handful elsewhere. I should note that Mexico reports 2,400 suspected cases.

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AND HERE IS AN UPDATE FROM MY ORIGINAL POST:

The World Health Organization (WHO) is now calling the current swine flu virus Influenza A (H1N1).

The latest numbers as of this update (late Thursday evening my time) are 257 confirmed cases world-wide, 109 in the U.S. and 97 in Mexico.

I will also note here that I have been reading that so far this current virus has actually not been detected in pigs (that’s curious).

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But the world population is 6.7 billion. So by any measure, the potential pandemic is small at this time.

According to current news reports, the swine flu is suspected to have begun in a Mexican village in the state of Veracruz where the villagers think it may have originated from a commercial hog farm (run by a U.S. company). Tests, though, reportedly have come up negative for swine flu at that hog farm. It has also been reported that villagers there reported getting sick as far back as April 2 and I have also read as far back as February.

So, anyway, the swine flu spread in Mexico and then because of travel spread to the U.S. and elsewhere.

I have to wonder why the border has not been shut down. Perhaps that would be an overreaction, but I do not understand the rationale given by officials in the Obama administration and the advice of health authorities that it would be useless since the virus has already traveled here.

Would not more cases coming in increase the likelihood of increased transmission by some exponential effect? I am not calling for a border shutdown, but I would be interested to know why it should not be seriously considered, at least till things are sorted out. I realize it would have a drastic effect on the economy (more than has already taken place) and the lives of people who find themselves for family reasons going back and forth, but so could a pandemic.

The big mystery in all of this is why the swine flu seems to be harder on the Mexican population than those elsewhere. It seems as if the cases people are contracting elsewhere seem to be milder so far.

While I am out of my league in a matter that only doctors would understand, I have to wonder if the lack of healthy and sanitary living conditions in much of Mexico is the reason. I have not heard that discussed (although it may have been). Maybe that would not be politically correct.

Mexican citizens themselves can hardly be blamed for the swine flu. For all I know it may be the fault of U.S. hog farm (factory) operations in Mexico (or not). But it is interesting to note that with the amount of world travel there is, a heath problem in one nation becomes a health problem everywhere.

P.s.

One health official noted today that in the southern hemisphere (that would of course be considerably south of Mexico) winter is coming on and it will be important to see if the virus will take off there. Also health officials are looking at the fact it could show a resurgence here in the northern hemisphere next Fall. I understand the so-called second wave of the influenza pandemic back in 1918 was the worst part of it.

P.s. P.s.

There has also been an observation that unlike other flu strains that seem to leave the very young and the very old most vulnerable, this one seems to strike otherwise healthy people not in those two afore-mentioned catergories. And there has been talk that perhaps people with healthy immune systems are more vulnerable because in reaction to this new strain  their immune systems overreact. No, I have no idea how that is. I’d like to read more about that.

I would not want to be called a “Red” no matter what it means today…

When did being “Red” come to mean being a Republican?

When Rush Limburger (not his real name) said “good riddance” about Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter jumping from the Republican fold to the Democrats and said he wished he’d take Sen. John McCain (the Republican’s unsuccessful presidential candidate) and his daughter and political blogger Megan McCain with him, she had a response:

“Red till I’m dead baby. I love the Republican Party enough to give it criticism…”

When I was a little kid in the 50s and a teenager in the 60s, saying you were “red” meant you were a communist.

I recall the worry of the “red menace” and teachers having to sign loyalty oaths, lest they be moles for the KGB (Soviet spies) trying to indoctrinate our little minds (as if an enemy agent would have any qualms about signing a piece of paper).

Even though I’ve followed current events and politics all my life, somehow this slipped by me. Yes I have realized for some time now that when the TV talking heads say “red” states, they mean where Republicans are ahead in voting registration and when they say “blue” they are talking about Democrats.

And when I looked this thing up on Wikipedia the article said it all began with the election of 2000 when one of the networks started the ball rolling with a color-coded map that put the Republicans in red and the Democrats in blue.

I’m surprised that the Republicans went along with it. You’d think the last thing the party of Joe McCarthy who made wild allegations of people being communist agents (sometimes true, possibly, often not) in order to gain political power by sensationalism that got his name in the news and the ability to intimidate others would want to be identified with the color red that stood for communism or the red menace for so long. Who lost China to the Red Chinese (communist Chinese)? they hollered after 1949. Democratic president Harry S Truman was so unnerved by the accusation of being soft on the red menace that he got the nation involved in the Korean War in order to prove he was not soft on communism.

Democratic Party support for labor and civil rights and social programs has often led its opposition to call it “liberal”, “socialist”, and “left learning”, since socialists and communists in this nation are said to be on the left of the political spectrum (but when the old Soviet Union broke up the communists there were called “conservatives” because they wanted to hold on to what had been the status quo – but I digress).

So, anyway, a color is just a color and right and left depend upon point of view and I guess geography.

But I still would not want to be called a “Red”.

Exploding swine flu vials, now there’s something to be concerned about; meanwhile, pigs are getting a bad rap…

UPDATE: Since I first posted this blog the World Health Organizaton has raised its alert level on swine flu to its second highest mark, phase 5, meaning a pandemic (epidemic over a wide geographical area) is imminent.  Germany and Austria have been added to the list of nations reporting swine flu. “It really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic,” the health organization director Dr. Margaret Chan was quoted as saying.

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So, amid all this concern, anxiety, panic, or however you might describe it over the swine flu, a container filled with swine flu virus explodes on a train carrying 60 passengers in Switzerland.

That’s what I read on the Der Spiegel website.

According to the story, officials assured everyone that even though it was swine flu, it was a strain of the virus somehow different than the one that is killing people in Mexico and seems to be spreading world wide (I don’t know the science of that).

Just like it was noted in the story, it was something like a plot for a science fiction movie (although it really happened). A lab technician out of Geneva had been sent to Zurich to pick up several ampules of the flu virus that were to be used in testing for the flu epidemic. The ampules were hermetically sealed and packed in dry ice in the container, but apparently not packed properly and gas escaped, resulting in the explosion. The train was evacuated and passengers were held for an hour, but then released. But officials said they did take contact information, presumably for followup.

In a previous blog I said that I would be making sure to use hand sanitizer a lot (I already had been doing that compulsively after going through a bout of low-immune system problems in the recent past – I’m supposedly okay now).

So where did I go today? To one of our local hospitals to visit an ailing brother-in-law (not from the swine flu). But I did use plenty of sanitizer while I was there, but I did not wear a face mask (I just try to hold my breath when people crowd too close, like in the elevator).

There has now been at least one confirmed death in the U.S. from swine flue, a 23-month old child in Houston, Tx. The child had been in Mexico. Some 150 deaths in Mexico have been attributed to the swine flu.

I  read a story that said students from a New York School had been in Cancun, Mexico and contracted the virus. Now hundreds of students in New York have reportedly come down with the flu.

Several U.S. states have reported cases. And several nations around the world have reported cases, to include New Zealand, Israel, Canada, Great Britain (to include Scotland) and Spain.

As everyone is reporting it is called swine flu because originally it was a virus found in pigs and sometimes transmitted from them to humans. This virus seems to have mutated and is being transmitted from human to human. The experts do not have a lot of answers yet and seem to be saying there is not much they can do to fight it right now.

As to the source, I have heard at least two reports (details unclear – partly because I did not take my own notes when I heard them) that workers at a commercial hog farm or farms in Mexico reported getting a flu-like sickness, possibly as far back as February.

It has now been reported that a 5-year-old boy in the Mexican state of Veracruz had the first identified case of swine flu. It was recorded on April 2. He appeared to be recovering at last word. His family reportedly lives near a large U.S.-owned hog farm. But tests there for swine flu were said to be negative.

U.S. companies are running what would more accurately be described as hog factories in Mexico. They run them in the U.S. too, but they get a lot of opposition. The animals are raised in tight confinement and there is a lot of waste.

Even though health officials have repeatedly said you cannot get the swine flu from eating pork (but you should cook it well – that has always been the case with pork), at least one hog industry member said the market is being affected adversely.

In Egypt the government has ordered that all pigs be slaughtered. Although Egypt is a predominantly Muslim nation, whose adherants don’t eat pork, pig farmers there sell pork to the Christian minority. (What the thinking is on this I don’t know, since the disease is reportedly being spread from human to human despite its name.)

I sure don’t like the idea of those commercial hog factories. I raised pigs once when I was in high school and a member of the Future Farmers of America. But mine were not confined in a tight space. And I’ve seen plenty of places where pigs were raised with much open room to run, even on pasture. Pigs love to forage and root.

And contrary to popular conception and the vernacular (“dirty as a pig”), pigs by nature are quite intelligent and clean animals when they can be. They do like to wallow in mud. That’s because they have no pores through which to sweat. On a hot day they love a pig wallow.

My pigs drank out of a fountain which they had to push their snouts up against for the water to run. Also, “eat like a pig” might be accurate if comparing someone’s eating manner to a pig at the trough, but in reality pigs only eat until they are full, whereas a cow or especially a horse will eat until they are sick.

But pigs are highly susceptible to contracting various diseases that afflict swine.

I personally think there ought to be a law against cramped confinement of swine and all other animals. I’m not big on cattle feedlots either. In fact, feedlot type feeding has been linked to mad cow disease (you’d go mad too).

But I would not be concerned about eating sufficiently-cooked pork. And I am going to keep using that hand sanitizer.

P.s.

Due to concerns of the swine industry, at least one health official said there is some consideration in coming up with a new name for what is being called the swine flu.  And what I gather is some type of fundamentalist right wing group called SaveCalifornia.com is calling on President Obama to close the border with Mexico and is calling the virus the “killer Mexican flu”.

Way to go Republicans; chase your membership out of the party…

I’m having a hard time figuring what Republican Party leaders are thinking. They chased Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter out of their ranks and now he has become a Democrat.

If Al Franken finally gets seated as the new Democratic Senator from Minnesota, which it now appears is just a matter of time (more time than has already taken place since last Fall’s election), the Democrats will have a 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

While I realize Specter was a thorn in the side of the Republicans, especially the far right ones, it would seem they need all the members they can get just about now.

This goes along with the far right Republican strategy of hounding out any Republican who would dare side with the Democrats (and the public at large) on any given issue. Free thinkers the Republicans are not.

I’ve always figured that the electorate is neither far left nor far right, but middle of the road. The current Republican Party strategy seems strange to me.

But I say to the Republicans: keep it up. You’re doing a nice job.

World’s newspapers share top story: the swine flu…

Newspapers all over the world shared a top story in their Monday editions, the swine flu. I understand that there is concern that a lot of misinformation is going around via new electronic gossipy devices such as Twitter, and I have nothing authoritative to add to the serious subject of the swine flu. But I was perusing a site I have on my favorites by the Newseum that displays front pages all over the U.S. and all over the world. Most of the papers carried the swine flu as the lead story and others had it prominently displayed. The Japan Times (English edition) headline said: Swine Flu in Mexico Sparks Global Panic. I thought that was a little over the top, perhaps (above that newspaper’s masthead is the slogan: All the news without fear or favor).

From Minnesota, however, the Duluth News headline read: Flu Threat Real, but Don’t Panic. The Buffalo News ran the story below the fold with a headline that read: Nations Gird to Avoid Flu Pandemic.

Most of the newspapers had photos of people in Mexico City wearing face masks. A newspaper in Germany ran a photo of Mexican soldiers armed with automatic weapons and wearing face masks with a headline that said: Soldiers Looking for Sick (that seemed ominous).

One in Vienna had a photo of a violin player in an orchestra wearing a face mask, but I don’t know if the photo was in Vienna or Mexico. But a violin player photo from the city famous for violins seemed appropriate to me.

My German is not good, but I do know some Spanish. The headline in Reforma out of Mexico City, the heart of the Swine flu crisis, read: Federal District Lives in Suspense. An accompanying photo showed a religious procession with people wearing masks carrying a replica of Jesus on the cross.

And I hope I am not spreading misinformation, but it seemed the headline below the main story said something to the effect that “they knew since April 2.”  I do know that I heard a story on the CBS Evening News that said workers on commercial hog farms in Mexico (some owned by U.S. companies) had reported getting sick for some time.

By the time most people read this blog it will be Tuesday, and I don’t know what the updated assessment will be, but I know I am going to avoid crowds and keep using that hand sanitizer.

P.s.

You can see the front pages of newspapers all over the world by Googling newseum front pages. (Newspapers are not dead yet!)

There was a conspiracy to torture, but prosecution could dismantle our system…

(Note: In my last post I hinted I might quit blogging – fat chance, unless my laptop konks out.)

When prosecuting wrong doers do you go after the wrongdoers or the lawyers who gave them “bad advice?”

That seemed to be the question on a couple of Sunday morning news/talk/opinion shows I just watched.

But I’ll cut to the chase here. From the investigative news accounts I have taken in so far it seems abundantly clear that what happened is that former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and others directly or indirectly (a wink and a nod) solicited bad advice from legal counsel to justify what anyone without consulting a lawyer would know was wrong (under the Geneva convention and any sense of morality), that is to torture people.

They told the lawyers what they wanted the lawyers to repeat back to them. The lawyers just had to figure out the right legal justifications and terminology.

So who’s wrong. Well both sides of course. It was a conspiracy.

In my opinionated mind they are all guilty of something akin to the war crimes for which we prosecuted military and governmental leaders of Germany and Japan after World War II.

(We hanged some of them.)

I think the resulting scope of the Bush/Cheney violations or the resulting torture activities is probably much smaller than that of the Axis powers in World War II.

And the problem is that if our government now was to go after Bush and Cheney it might mean the total break down of our system. How could we have a system in which, say, the president of the United States has to fear that in the future he could be prosecuted for a policy decision? And I think that is the question that our current president, Barack Obama, is wrestling with.

While I think that Bush and Cheney knew full well that what they did was wrong, they also rationalized it, perhaps through tortured logic (pun intended, even though it’s not so funny) that it was for the security of the nation (but if you waterboard someone hundreds of times, as has been reported, does that not tend to prove it doesn’t work?. And in my mind, even if it did, it was wrong).

Certainly if Bush and Cheney has perpetrated torture and killings and other war crimes on the scale of Adolf Hitler or Gen. Tojo then there would be no question as to their guilt and need to be prosecuted. But I don’t think it quite matches.

Adding to the cover for our two bad boys is the fact that much of what they were doing and how they were doing it was reported early on. The American public in general seemed to acquiesce.

The most shameful part of all of this is that the only people who were ever jailed and/or otherwise severely punished were some enlisted people in the military.

While I am not at all sure that those punished people were entirely without culpability, giving to the circumstances, that is to say, knowing now that apparently orders from the top came down directly and indirectly to torture prisoners (detainees), I personally believe it would be right that those enlisted personnel be fully pardoned and their ranks reinstated.

Whether there can ever be any prosecutions, I don’t know. But if there are to be, they should be at the higher levels. But then we’re back to Bush and Cheney and the whole idea of prosecuting ex presidents and vice presidents, something that again I think would tear apart our system of government.

The tragedy of our for the most part senseless and every-changing war policies in the Middle East and our economic fiasco brought on by imprudent use of credit point to a moral breakdown that took place in our society. We may be pulling ourselves out of that.

I don’t know, maybe an official statement owning up to the fact that we used poor judgment but will do better in the future is enough.

P.s.

Whatever leverage the U.S. may have had against other nations or enemies torturing our own citizens has been severely eroded.

I’m entitled to my own opinions but maybe I could keep them to myself … or could I???

Maybe it’s time to quit blogging.

I’ve heard it said that opinions (which I spew out constantly) are like rear ends. Everyone has one and they all stink.

I’m not sure why I have so many opinions and why I have this compulsion to give them out.

In my mind, even though I have opinions, I feel that I respect those of others (except from the likes of Rush Limberger) and I often allow in my writings that I am not even totally convinced mine are correct.

The only thing that I can come up with as to why I have all these opinions is that I was raised in a strange environment as a child in which all the TV news seeped into me in a kind of osmosis fashion. For several years my next oldest brother and I slept in a bedroom that doubled as the family’s TV room. And each morning my mom would turn on the Today Show.

I used to watch the Huntley-Brinkley newscast every night too.

Later, instead of reading comic books I devoured Time Magazine.

My father was a newspaperman too. But I think I got more of my interest in current events from my mother. At 98 she is still a fan. She takes in CNN as much as she can.

In school I was passable in most subjects – math was my weak area – but I automatically excelled in what was called social studies (history, geography, civics).

I eventually obtained a four-year college degree in Political Science for the sole reason that it was the path of least resistance, since it came so easy to me.

But alas I have found that all this opinion stuff has not made me happy nor has it made those around me happy.

Opinions. Everyone has them but….

 P.s.

I’ve been told I am not the world’s best listener. While I know that is true, it is ironic that I spent some 15 years as a journalist scrawling out copious notes in my own cumbersome form of shorthand (using 4 for for or four, or a ? for the word what or the word question(ed), that kind of thing) and poring over them and trying to get into my stories a goodly sample of what everyone said (covering all sides – there are usually more than two sides, if that makes sense).

P.s. P.s.

I recall an unsuccessful and bitterly disappointed candidate for California governor once saying: “you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more”. Uh, he did come back (and got kicked around again after doing some kicking of his own). I do go on.

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Long haul trucking in danger of decline…

I’m going to go out on the line a little here and predict that long haul trucking as we have known it for the past several decades is on its way out and it could lose ground rather rapidly. I don’t think it will disappear altogether anytime soon. But I think the combined forces of unpredictable energy costs, the global recession (that is a lot like a depression), and the move toward more energy efficiency and environmentally-friendly ways of doing things is hastening long haul’s demise.

Until or unless we find some drastically different way of moving goods trucks will of course be needed for local and even regional delivery and I imagine long haul of some goods will continue for practical reasons.

But during last summer’s diesel spike that saw per gallon prices move toward $5 many shippers started looking more seriously at using alternative means of transport, namely the railroad. Also I read one story that said that some goods coming to America from Asia that had heretofore been unloaded at Pacific Coast ports to be trucked across the nation were instead being shipped via the Panama Canal to the East Coast. The trip was somewhat longer, but the savings in fuel costs made it worth it.

Also during that fuel crisis it was reported that the produce industry in Salinas, Ca. was looking seriously at refurbishing the spur lines into the packing sheds. One packer said he recalled shipping by rail back in the 70s.

Today a freight forwarder called Railex is shipping produce via a unit train each week (and is set to add one more) from Delano, Ca. To Rotterdam, N.Y., just west of that state’s capital city of Albany. Railex also has a shipping facility at Wallula, Wa. that loads produce rail shipments destined for New York state.

The price of fuel came down, but the economy crashed in what has become the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Freight levels continue to drop. The major trucking companies are reporting losses. And one small trucking company official told me that everyone is undercutting each other in rates. Good for shippers if they have anything to ship.

Of course you still see the freeways heavy with truck traffic. But ask any long haul driver lucky enough to be out there with a load and he or she will likely tell you that the wait for a return load once the destination is reached is often long.

While railroad freight, especially intermodel (truck trailers and often double-stacked containers), is down considerably, I notice from the vantage point where I live that the Union Pacific trains are hauling a steady stream of truck trailers and containers (that might otherwise be going up and down the highways).

I just read a recent article that noted that the Norfolk Southern Railroad has received financing from the state of Virginia to help it rebuild its infrastructure, the idea being to unclog the I-81 corridor through the Shenandoah Valley (and I suppose be green by reducing truck traffic too). The state estimated that within 10 to 12 years truck traffic on that stretch could be reduced by 30 percent.

And that same article (possibly planted by the railroad lobby – I don’t know) suggested that with an investment of $500 billion 85 percent of the big truck traffic on the nation’s highways could be eliminated by 2030.

One the one hand, knowing what I know from working in trucking (I am not now) for more than a decade, it is kind of hard to imagine all freight going via rail (save for local delivery), especially with the model of  ” just on-time delivery” that shippers and receivers have worked with for so long.

The whole industry has been used to being able to ship relatively small orders rapidly straight through from shipping door to receiving door and of being able to place shipping orders at the last minute (no need for time-consuming train or ship reservations).

But the pressures of environmental concerns and fuel efficiency and availability is pushing the freight shipping industry toward railroads at the moment. The continued economic decline is raising havoc as well.

I am not at all against trucks. I was a truck driver for some 12 years. Trucks certainly have an edge on speed of delivery. I note that unit train only promises five-day delivery from California to New York state. I don’t know why that is, but I do know that I hauled a load of oranges along with a team driver from Porterville, Ca. to Massachusetts in about two and a half days.

No one can accurately predict the future, but I do think that long haul trucking will not continue the way it has been operating for the past several decades and will likely lose ground for many types of freight.

If the economy were to surge back though it would be interesting to see if the railroads could really handle the volume. They certainly could not at first because the infrastructure is not there. And if the economy was booming they might continue to be more selective and not be so excited to handle such a variety of freight.

P.s.

I feel compelled to note that I first posted this piece on my Tony’s Transport Blog.

The problem is really all about how we divide up the fishsticks…

While on any given day with all the bad economic news I am prone to think that the situation is hopeless or at least that we will be in this recession (depression?) for a long time, I also realize that the world governments, particularly the richer westernized democratic ones, probably have the power to save us all.

(I know, conservatives will pounce on this and remind me that “government is not the answer”.  And as a middle-of-the-roader I will remind them back that no government or anarchy is not the answer either. We can maintain our freedom and at the same time cooperate with each other through government to maintain some type of order.)

Overall there is no shortage of food and we have not destroyed our planet yet (the fact that Eskimos in Alaska are being flooded out due to a melting of the polar ice cap notwithstanding)  and there is no shortage of work to be done. And as far as a lack of money or too much money owed, one must keep in mind that there is no intrinsic value in money, especially since paper money or computer accounts do not represent some specified amount of, say gold.

In an introduction to economics class I took we had a text that used hard-to-understand economic terms but also had simplistic but probably quite accurate explanations as well. It gave a little illustrative story about the nature of money. As I recall, it basically told of an island (this is fictional, of course) where the natives traded fish as money and then moved on to trading fish sticks because they were easier to handle and could be stored over time. The king kept the fish sticks in his bank, but then there was a fire and all the fish sticks were destroyed and all the islanders were in a panic because they thought they were all broke. But the king said not to worry because he would issue paper representing fishsticks and they could trade back and forth just as before and that he would by his authority guarantee the soundness of the paper fishstick currency (this is my recollection of what I read in Economics, the Science fo Common Sense, by Elbert V. Bowden, copyright 1977).

As I have blogged previously, I along with a lot of others grew up hearing and reading that a government could not successfully simply just print money based on nothing. It had, for example, been tried by Germany in the 1930s and failed miserably with a haus frau having to push a wheelbarrow full of marks to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread. In more recent times, people in Zimbabwe had to hand over millions of their equivalent of dollars to buy a loaf of bread.

But today in the United States of America our government is essentially printing make believe money which represents no more than the full faith and credit of the USA. And people still want dollars.

Part of the value of our dollars is based on money our government is borrowing from countries such as China and then giving it to the Federal Reserve to in turn give it to the banks who in turn loan it to businesses (or are supposed to).

I realize that anyone who is learned in economics realizes that I am already in way over my head here, but if you can show me how I am wrong, go ahead and comment at the end of this blog.

But really money is not bars of gold or silver or fish sticks, it has become a device we use as kind of tickets or coupons to divide and share our resources. In our semi-capitalist society we operate on the notion that the dividing is not done necessarily on an equal basis but a basis determined on what we do for each other. If you can do more for others than the next guy you have created more value and you get more coupons or tickets or dollars. But in our benevolence we also dole out fishstick paper to those who may not be able, temporarily or permanently, to put forth effort to create value.

If ever there was a pure dog-eat-dog capitalist society with no social safeguards or socialist type policies we have not had one in the USA since the at least Great Depression of the 1930s.

With Republican rule we did our best to move away from too much socialism (maybe) and promote more capitalism, but strangely it ended with Republican President George W. Bush unexpectedly in a financial panic moving our government to some form of what looked like national socialism (not completely unlike the Nazis if the 1930s, as far as the relationship between the government and big business).

And now the Democratic President Barack Obama has taken it a step further, essentially nationalizing the banking industry and the domestic automakers (minus Ford so far).

Some ultra conservatives might want to go back to a system in which some men simply put in a day’s work for a day’s pay and others who had saved up capital lived off the profits of their businesses and the interest they made on their capital and where for those who because of lack of talent or health could not make it depended upon the charity of churches and family.

And I am not going to say that what I just described in the previous paragraph is completely undesirable, but I will say that society seems to have decided long ago that it was not completely comfortable with that approach.

What we have in the USA now is basically an economic system based on capitalism but with some elements of some form of socialism, and we have a democratic republic for a government that incorporates some socialism, especially in terms of an economic safety net.

Right now our system has been severely damaged and we are trying to fix it. I think we can because in the end it is always a cooperative effort and I think that even if we disagree wildly with each other on the finer points of how our system should work, we have thus far agreed on preserving our nation and the ideals of individualism and freedom of expression and freedom of the pursuit to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now if we could just figure out how to divide up the fishsticks….

P.s.

Please view my German-American blog at http://vonwalther.wordpress.com

You don’t have to follow an illegal order, or do you???

While I think some of those GIs we saw in those awful Abu Ghraib photos abusing and torturing prisoners may have looked as they were all having a little too much fun, I realize the terrible dilemma they faced.

The evidence is clear that they were ordered to use harsh treatment (the euphemism for torture) on the prisoners (or detainees, another and strange euphemism) by non-military personnel (who were put in charge of some in the military) and by superior officers (that is not to say that it would not be possible that even then some went beyond what was ordered, although I doubt it).

But the terrible dilemma faced by anyone in the military, especially the lowly enlisted person, is that while you are not supposed to follow illegal orders, if you don’t, you could still be subject to punishment, to include courts martial. And if you do follow illegal orders, you may well still be subject to punishment to include courts martial (just ask Lynndie England and Charles Graner, for example) .

I am not a lawyer or legal authority but I did take Army basic training. I remember it clearly back in February of 1968 at Ft. Lewis, Wa. in a basic training company in the north fort area in what was a small wooden building that was something like a garage. The officer told us that we were not expected to follow illegal orders. “If you were told to march over the cliff,” you would not have to comply, he told us. But soldiers are not lawyers (generally) and have no way of knowing how to interpret the law in all cases (most cases) or, worse still, how the courts martial or courts of appeal might interpret it. We were told that if we chose to disobey what we deemed an illegal order that we’d better be right, because if we were not we would be subject to disciplinary action, to include courts martial.

If I am a guard at a prison and I am ordered or instructed that I should slap a prisoner, or I should make him or her remove her clothes and to otherwise humiliate a prisoner, or if I am ordered to take part in water boarding (but told it is not torture, just a harsh technique), who am I to argue? It might or might not seem morally repugnant to me, but in the eyes of the law it might not be illegal.

Also, as I mentioned in a previous blog, one of the first things a soldier learns in basic training is that superiors always have the double standard of telling you what to do but at the same time retaining deniability if something goes wrong. That is why career military people learn to cover their asses, CYA.

So what I am really trying to say here is that while in all of this harsh treatment and torture stuff, while I think that some of the lower level people may have known on some level that what they were doing was wrong and while they may (or may not) have enjoyed it a little too much, if they had wanted to be on the straight and narrow they would have likely faced a Catch 22.

That’s why the moral compass has to be set at the top.

P.s.

Many articles I have read suggest that out and out torture is not generally effective. There are many mind games and methods that use deception and the fear of the unknown that produce positive results.

It may (or may not) hurt our intelligence gathering capability to the extent that prisoners might in the future feel that they will not face actual torture. Hopefully we can deal with the wrong doing of the past (and we do need to in order to make sure it does not happen again) without opening up our whole play book to the other side.