A Brief Childhood Flashback

Not all youth was suffered or wasted. I just found, after searching on and off for over twenty years (!!), part of a wonderful collection of records from my childhood. Recorded in the late 50's and early 60's, these science 'folk' songs provided me with some of my earliest facts and gave me an interest in science I've followed until today. Those of you remembering 'The Sun is a Mass (of Incandescent Gas)" from They Must Be Giants will be surprised to know that it's a cover for this simple song from one of these albums (listen to the original here).

These are beautiful little ditties, great for playing again and again and again and again to little (and maybe not so little) kids. I daresay the students in my local public middle school would learn a thing or two from these simple melodies.

Now if someone could point me to the equally wonderful songs about other cultures, and history tunes, I'd be much obliged.

Sharon's Military Strategy

During the disengagement many people asked me why Sharon, an avowed right-winger, would do something so "dovish" as to give the Palestinians territory to call their own.

"He's not," I answered, "he's a pragmatic, right-wing general." Here's his bio.

This is the man who was one of the first (and only) Israeli politicians to purchase a large dwelling in East Jerusalem, through several proxies, and then move in, creating his personal 'Hebron community' within the Moslem Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. The same guy who was blamed for using Christian militia groups to help conquer Lebanese territory. The Phalange groups' behavior led to the horrific massacres in Sabra and Shatila.

The disengagement pulls the line of defence into a straight shot, and creates a clear field of fire into a territory where Israel doesn't have civilians. I am not the only on who sees the government's cynical abandonment of synagogues to be vandalized as part of a ploy for pity running up to an active, aggresive terror response.

Until the disengagement the Palestinians and the excuse, lame though it might be, that they couldn't possibly reign in Hamas because they didn't have the power and right to do what they needed. And Israel's responses were hamstrung. Things. Have. Changed.

Hamas has lost its cover. When shelled, Israel will respond with counter-battery fire. The PA is on the hook to keep order, and every time Hamas fires a rocket, they are undermining their assertion that their rule by might is right.

Everywhere Hamas fires a Qassam rocket will be come a target zone. Israelis return an accurate salvo before the missile lands. Even if Hamas terrorists run as soon as they light their missile fuses, Hamas cannot repeatedly withdraw from the field without creating instant Palestinian enemies from the survivor's if Israel's artillery strikes.

Unlike Israel's previous use of collective punishment, a singularly idiotic way of getting Palestinians to stop their kin given the PA's lack of power under Israeli-occupied territories, this has the effect of helping to empower the fabled 'Palestinian street' to take back their cities from the rule of the insane.

At the rate of fire available to Israel, there won't be a street, courtyard, public plaza or road intersection left after just a few weeks -- Gaza isn't all that big a target, and now it needs to act like a State, not a terrorist nest.

The Hurricane that Wasn't Here

Water stripped from shelves. Jocularly, consumers, like cows in a closing feedlot, crowd the flashlight, battery and duct tape areas of local stores. Across the country gas is being eyed with a bit of panic. Pepsi and Coke are hoarded like bottled water. People are muttering about traffic, passing on numbers, locations, horror stories of local traffic.

San Antonio struggles with it's already complex traffic. The Austin City Limits show continues as planned. Houston's biggest evacuation headaches, aside from the preventable tragedy of an exploding bus with over twenty casualties, is the realization that capitalist evacuation methods depending on private vehicles don't work: only a well-orchestrated public transportation system can move millions of citizens from any two points.

In the meantime, tens of thousands of refugees, thinking they were only a step ahead of the storm, are instead wallowing in another hot, Texas fall day all over Central and West Texas.

The story not being told, the story covered up by the fearless fire fighters fighting blazes in downtown Galveston, is of the toxic time bombs direcly in Rita's path. It will be days, if not weeks, for the real truth to bubble up as to the real damage to the environment from this hurricane strike directly at our chemical underbelly.

One ill-timed hurricane gust, one tornado just a shade too powerful, and pipes will clang like xylophones around our main refinery complexes, shredding fuel and pastic manufcaturing facilities that spread like artificial cities across miles and miles of Texas flatland.

I can't deny we need the products produced by these plants, if not at the quantity we consume them. With the abject failures of FEMA and of Louisiana's entire government, with clear failure of our Texan evacuation system (what if we didn't have two days to evacuate Houston from, say a WMD), I don't have faith that the ever self-'regulating' petrochemical industry isn't setting us up for another Bhopal.

May I be proved wrong -- live upwind.

Very Strange Coincidence...

Hmmm... maybe my post about FALN had strong voodoo jubjub... They're still battling it out!

Blood on the Road

Just over the wires was a report on an accident near Kibbutz Gonen, where I lived during my army service. It was a head-on accident on a curving, single-lane road with no divider, uphill, with a drunk drivers shaken taken from one car, a body and four kids taken from the other.

I drove that road just a couple of months ago. Even sober it was dangerous: busses rocketing to a local watering hole naturally took up a lane and a half, and knowing where one could swerve saved my life more than once when I lived there.

My cousin, his spouse and son were killed in a death accident back in 1982. Killed by my cousin's son, an F-16 pilot with more balls than sense, who managed to get T-boned at an intersection after swerving around speed bumps and ignoring a 4-way stop sign to speed to his death and decades of pain for his orphaned brother and sister. I drove past there too. I do it every time I'm in Israel. Mussa was a gentle human being, a cornerstone of the Kibbutz Movement and a member of Israel's Parliment. The son of that man, who helped me understand the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, of working towards changing the world for the better, shattered the world of tens of thousands around him with his singular act of suicidal stupidity.

It never ceases to amaze me how countries seem to take drunk driver assaults in particular and automobile accidents in general as a 'cost of doing business' in a modern society. Israel loses, each year, more people from vehicular slaughter than from all military and terrorist activities combined. Combined! Yet, just as the United States blindly invests in jails and law enforcement to the detriment of education and well-child care, Israel pours more and more money into yeshivot, special interest groups and kleptocratic squabbles, and then in pristine, wide toll roads, rather than taking a serious, sustained and long term investment in the police infrastructure and roads.

Studies show that the stress of terror and war directly correlate to car accidents. But the limp, passive, reactive, and ticket-oriented way in which the Israeli Police act doesn't act as a counterweight to such behavior.

America has been a great friend of Israel, and a financial as well as political contributor to many valid and important goals of my Jewish State -- starting with its continued existence.

Friends don't let friends drive -- or spend -- drunk.

Voting In a Terror Regime

Near future, San Juan, Puerto Rico Crowds or supporters, many of them firing automatic weapons into the air in joy, welcomed the new president of the Free State of Puerto Rico, into her offices today. "Now comes the hard work to liberate our sisters and brothers from under the oppressive gringo yoke," said Maria Torres through an interpreter. Torres, great-granddaughter of Alberto Torres, one of the famed liberation fighters from the early days of the revolution, when he fought the fascisti with Fuerzas Armadas Liberacion Nacional Puertoriquena (FALN) in the 1970's and 80's. "We must continue our armed struggle until not a single Spanish speaker suffers under the English yoke of oppression," Governor Torres said, waving one of the Cuban cigars for which she is famed for smoking -- and which has caused her not to be allowed into the United States. While the American Secretary of State complained commented on the aggressive start to La Presidenta Torres' rule, government officials dismissed the statement as a tactic meant to undermine Puerto Rico's place as a peer among nations. "We will not be cowed into obedience," an Interior Ministry spokesman said, "the time when the Great Satan could do that to us has passed.

Sound absurd? I think so. There isn't a country that I know of that would willingly bring to power an arch enemy at their border, or permit another country to do so. Iraq certainly wouldn't want that -- except, of course, that a majority of Iraqis are loyal, through clan or religion, to neighboring Iran, but that's a different story.

Hamas, avowed opponent of Israel, advocator of the destruction of the State of Israel, official terrorist organization by both American and international acclaim, is picking up the weapon of the vote. Under cover of supporting democracy, the United States and other Western powers may end up assisting in the installation of a mortal enemy around almost all of Israel's land border. Like other Iranian-backed sister organizations such as Hizballah, it gains converts to its fold by out-providing social services to its target populations -- while killing or derailing more legitimate organizations, such as the PA or the Lebanese governments, from doing the job that they, rightfully, should do. Check out this clinical discussion with one of the inventors of the suicide bomber.

I'm not going to go int0 a long discussion about whether Hamas is a terror organization or not; you can find out more about that here, here, here, here, here and here. I'm pointing to how terror organizations use the freedoms and tools extant in an open democracy to injure it. We trained the terrorists who flew the planes into the towers in our flight schools. We

Hamas is not a political organization: The following is a direct quote from the Hamas charter (Article 13):

Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers? ... There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.

Highlighting in the text is mine. This is no different than a party dedicated to the abolition of democracy and installation of a dictatorship running for the Presidency, except these folks can scare up the needed votes, and I mean that literally. Hamas in an election isn't an act of democracy, it's an act of terrorism.

So the discussion about the Palestinian Authority allowing Hamas to run in upcoming elections is nothing other than their throwing up their hands and facing the inevitable. And the inevitable consequence to Hamas sitting on one side of Israel's future
crenellated border will be the destruction of the Palestinian State, by Israel, by Western forces, or by civil war.

The real choice Abbas needs to make now is whether to disarm the militias and terror organizations in his midst. He does it now at great peril, or it will be done for his successors, for he will not live to see the peace he claims to strive towards.

New Orleans and the Attack of the Mad Herd Animals

Okay, everyone take a deep breath. We just witnessed the incredible trauma and stupidity surrounding the 'management' of the New Orleans hurricane response. Now, we are setting ourselves up for the next phase: the madding return (see my previous posting).

If FEMA is running the show, then FEMA needs to set down the ground rules. Not panicked local politicians, not the media, and not the citizenry, which has been whipsawed between death and life, heartache and survival pragmatics. If the federal governemnt is responsible for the safety and well-being of the affected citizenry, then it, not the local government, needs to make the rules. If the local government wants to run the show, then they need to recind their request for federal assistance. They can't have it both ways: ask for help, and then do stupid things.

Of course, getting FEMA to make a decision that makes sense is a whole discussion into itself. But if this can be shifted into a Coast Guard/military-style operation (calm down, all y'all posse comitatus folks!), then there's a possibility that the cleanup and basic safety needs of the population can be met before they return to swamp the crippled infrastructure with yet more raw sewage and self-induced casualties.

The Thin Veneer of America

"Welcome to our school," I said to a man, introduced as someone who had fled New Orleans. I was in the office to pick up a kiddo for a doctor's appointment.
"For the moment," he said, standing and shaking my head with a smile. He had that fit, quick look of someone with the time to take care of himself, and was well, if casually, dressed.
"Not planning on staying?"
"Well," he said, "I'm heading back next week. I think I'll be doing a lot of flying between there and here until we can get our house back in shape."
I blinked. "Your stuff is okay?"
He nodded. "I hear that my house stayed dry, and I know my office is in good shape."
"What do you d?"
"I'm a lawyer," he said. "Hiked up a lot of floors, but my business only needs power and air conditioning and then I'll be set to go."

Last Sunday I had dinner with a friend who's a radio reporter. The stories he told of the horrors in and around the flooded, ground floor areas of New Orleans are the stuff of future congressional investigations.

This morning CNN and MSNBC were running articles showing the reopening of the French Quarter in New Orleans complete with clean, dry white folk sipping their white, imported wine. From my point of view (and others) this looks like a lousy piece of PR by the White House and Louisiana city and state authorities.

I understand that New Orleans needs to return to some kind of normalcy. But feeding the America delusion that 'it's just those folks,' or 'it's not that bad,' or 'it'll be all right' are causing further damage to the hundreds of thousands of people, people who could never afford to eat at French Quarter restaurants or that high-floor attorney.

An indication of how cavalierly and cynically the government is using this disaster is in how it is pushing reformulation of environmental regulations and not raising taxes (letting taxes such as the Estate Tax, previously critical one's to the Republican agenda continue, an action tantamount to admitting the tax is, indeed, needed).

Sometimes a trauma, even a national one, needs to be exposed to full light of day and, like an infected cut, cleaned out. The scenes played out in the first days of the disaster show just how fragile our "American society" really is in the face of disaster. The arguements of whether it's the fault of the federal, state, or local governments are specious and, from what I can tell, indended to deflect criticism instead of invite investigation. And without the therapy, the catharsis, of a complete, open and impartial investigation, I fear we will never be able to fully heal from this scar still festering in our country's soft underbelly.

FEMA and Cheney: Two More Harbingers of Doom

Just a short post today. FEMA goose-stepped into the shelter I've worked at on Friday, assuming everything in their field of vision (real or imagined) was theirs to appropriate. One of my work associates actually had to unplug and remove power cords from our computers to be sure FEMA folks (walking down the crowded hallway three across in matching shirts and egos) wouldn't snag them for their own use. As opposed to using them to register students for school.

Today plans were made to move the computers out of public view altoghether, closer to the evacuee admitting area, to ensure that FEMA's burgeoning need for space didn't swallow us up. Everything got snarled for several hours, though, as the new bungler-in-chief representing the Feds showed up: Dick 'Tin Man' Cheney. Probably picked out shelter out because it was well run -- no thanks to bozos from D.C.

I apologize to my readers (and I now understand I have several regulars -- thank you!) about my pessimism. After serving many years in military structures, and with a degree and specific coursework that discusses the issue, we are in the 'code red' danger zone. Command and control are in place, the situation is technically stabilized, but the energy and emotional drain on managing this situation, and the civilian response, is overwhelming the local and state agencies that have been managing things to this point. Commanding Oficers need Executive Officers to fight battles. Submarines need A and B teams to ensure that crews are not stretched too thin mentally. In wars, divisions and batallions move in and out of place, covering for each other so that front-line solidiers can get required R&R. We don't have that here. There is no backup batallion for the city government. There is no respite for the command team, not without turning this into a military operation. Which we can't because our military is off making democracy safe for the impending Shi'ite takeover of Iraq.

Ahem... Where was I. Oh, exhaustion. Unless we can distribute the load of managing these shelters, reduce the population density as well as total population at any one point, we will start seeing classic 'Skinner Box' behavior. I already have reports of the city needing to do regular sweeps of the bathrooms to stop people from copulating in them. Maintenance and cleanup crews are rubbed down to nubs, and as a result the shelter area is being trashed to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The time for more decisive action, and a disruption of the rising chance of additional trauma to evacuees already hurt is nigh. I hope I'm not the only person reading up on this stuff.

With Receding Waters, Another Gathering Storm

It's been a few days since my last post. Time to work through the night, helping to set up and run the data center for where the evacuees are staying. Since Saturday night it's turned into a real command-and-control center, a floor up from the evacuees, ringed with computers, televisions, lists and notes, whiteboards, help desk phones and all the detritus of a complex technology organism.

On the floor the story is different. Their chaos has not become more orderly: rows of cots are hoarding locations. Hair stylists have set up shop where we computers stood. The no smoking signs in the evacuee center are systematically ignored by Louisianans and locals alike. The tension and crowding is palpable now; it's as if everyone fluffed up and is taking up more emotional and physical room.

During that long night I tried to play welcome committee to evacuees wandering the halls and caverns of the convention center. One was a man with an oversized, knitted cap bulging with dreads. "Is there a Western Union around here?" I explained that there was little to spend the money on at 2:30 in the morning. "No, that's fine; just show me." I pointed him in an approximate direction and went to the next issue. As I left the next morning I met him, grinning, a filtered cheroot between the fingers of one hand, a disposable camera with the other. He seemed inordinately pleased: he'd walked about four miles in various directions before finding a WU. He was taking pictures of trees, flashing police lights, me. He had clearly scored something other than cash -- I worried about where he'd be keeping his stash in the shelter.

FEMA is insinuating itself into the area. Typically, taking up space before taking form. Other social and welfare agencies, working since the weekend, are being moved aside so the debit-card issuing behemoth can get on with providing raw money instead of solutions.

My prayer, my fervent wish, is that we find some way, quickly, to move the families out of this booming, open shelter and into the community. The faster the better, before the feral humans swept up with innocents get hungry for foods no law allows.

In the Eye of the Periphery

I'm writing this from one of the evacuee centers set up in Texas, the third I've been in this week. I helped set up the first two, and am running the IT for the third, which is currently housing several thousand people.

I have no pictures to post. Those in my head must suffice, for to photograph these survivors would heap further shame on them.

Waving
"Yesterday I was on a bridge," an older man said, his eyes looking off in different directions. "With my mother and father. He was in a bad way," he continued. "It was so hot, and we hadn't had any water for days; I thought he was going to have a stroke. My mother, she walks with a walker. We left our house by boat, water up to here." He pointed a high water mark on his chest. "We got to the bridge and got stuck there for three days. I waved to all the helicopters, and none of them landed. Finally a medical helicopter came and took us away to the airport. Then we flew out here." He smiled. "I hope I can get a job here: I run a print press."

Lucky
"We got out in time," a man said, his wife nodding at his side. "I'm a trucker, and she," he said, after a nod at the woman at his side, "she's my wife. Makes ties. Do they have a tie-making factory here? She's done it for twenty eight years. My daughter is coming; she just finished university. A lawyer." They looked haggard and shocked, surrounded by mounds of food bars, juice and water bottles, and other sustenance.