Sex, Drugs, and Milkweed

As a deist baptized in a protestant church and separated by the Catholic Church by at least two generations, I withhold as much opinion as possible concerning the impending selection of Pope John Paul II’s successor. It’s simply not my place to interject my own theological ideas into a debate whose churches I have stepped into only as a freshman touring European with Core Abroad. My inquiries into whereabouts of the “Sunday school” rooms were in the St. Jean Cathedral in Lyon attests to the breadth of my native ignorance of the Mother Churches ways.

Though my knowledge of Vatican II and Canon Law are as profound as my understanding of a woman’s mind, I had a lot of respect for John Paul II. His moral conservatism was of a different strain than what I encounter in America. Though I disagree with his view on abortion, I respected his moral consistency that had him fight against unjust war, torture, and the death penalty just as hard with the same underlying principle that life is sacred.

The only complaint I feel comfortable in vocalizing is the churches ban on contraception. Modern alchemists have turned milkweed and poinsettia plants into one of the most cost effective birth control measures of all time, stopping both STD’s and unwanted pregnancies if used correctly. John Paul, however, issued several fatwa’s banning Catholics from using condoms. Our Malthusian population nightmare aside, one can imagine the decree this has had in Africa, Catholicism’s fastest growing demographic. Over twenty-five million sub-Saharan Africans are infected with HIV/AIDS with an infection rate of 7.5%. It is of unconscionable bad taste to exalt a single command given to a nascent human race over the entire theme of compassion that AIDS; another 2.4 million children are infected themselves. What would Jesus do?

John Paul II’s moral consistency was matched by only by his rigidity. What will taint his legacy more than the scandals amongst America clergy was this iron-willed persistence in damning Catholics who practiced birth control. Granted, God had some good words to say back in the day about fruitfulness and multiplicity. Those words were exceptionally relevant as late as 1492 when the Europeans had just found a new patch of grass to soil and the world population was still under 500 million. I just don’t know how much more fruitful God wants us to be in an age of 6 billion people. The founders of the Universal Church made a decision some two thousand years ago that even though Biblical law required circumcision, things, you know… changed. Three times as many people live on under $1 a day as lived on the planet when the Good Man himself preached in Judea. I think it’s fair to call God’s “Go Forth” campaign a complete and resounding success. We should at least put the program on pause until the polar ice caps melt and become habitable.

There is hope yet. Cardinal Tettamanzi of Milan, Vegas’s favorite to win the papacy, has been quoted as saying, "one African child sick with AIDS counts more than the entire universe." He has called on Western nations to contribute more to the fight. His economic stances are in line with international calls to de-commercialize the AIDS-drugs industry and provide zero-fee licensing for generics. It would be an amazing step forward to make a religious imperative out of treating AIDS victims, as Tettamanzi suggests. I counter that preventing the disease is even more important. The pride of the Church is at stake, especially after taking such a hard line for so long, but the next pope could slowly back off the official. He doesn’t need to recant the Church’s contraceptive policy – merely shying away from reinforcing it every chance he gets would be a tremendous help. After all, would Jesus spend more time arguing for the banishment of modern hygienic techniques or would he spend his time preaching love for all?

Social Security Reform

After I blew out the transmission in my first car (a Ford, imagine that) my father asked if it was doing anything funny before the final death throw. I told him yes, but that I just didn’t have the money to fix it and would rather suffer the drivetrain oddities than shell out cash from my anemic McPaychecks. He told me something that I’ve followed to this day: fixing problems early is hella cheaper than waiting until the entire system collapses.

Accordingly, I applaud Bush for pushing Social Security reform. Though the devils are in the details and I might not agree with him that the system is heading for guaranteed solvency in coming decades, I do believe the margins of error are too tight for comfort. I applaud him for having the political courage to reach out, touch that political third rail, and look at a problem before it blows up in our collective faces, potentially costing our generation the social safety net we are expecting.

Democrats should take a skeptical stance right now, in contrast to unflinching opposition. This is an assured method to be left out of the negotiation process. I earnestly want to believe Bush when he said he was open to any suggestion that allows for some sort of private account, does not raise payroll taxes, and is not a temporary solution. These are terms that Democrats should agree to on an ad hoc basis for the sake of coming to an acceptable compromise with a hesitant Republican majority.

Much the same as with Bush’s original tax cut proposal, his numbers are elephantine (and economically disastrous) on purpose – starting on higher ground to wage battle so that the inches ceded leave him with a result closer to his original goals. Allowing the Social Security to have its income slashed by 65% (4% of income, which will come out of the 6.2% payroll rate) would bankrupt the system as we know it. Though guaranteeing funding, albeit smaller than current payouts, for current freshman, it would nonetheless axe benefits for the non-traditional students. Already well into their careers, they have subsequently not had time to significantly pay into these accounts before costs exceed revenues in 2012 because of the accounts.

Bush purportedly has not ruled out raising the ceiling on taxable income. Currently, Social Security dishes out benefits proportional to what workers put in while they worked. In a bit of regressive-tax logic, only the first $90,000 of income is taxable – maxing out at $5580 a year. In raw numbers, that means that most liberal arts UNF graduates will be taxed 6.2% on all income, while an MBA peer making $900,000 yearly is only paying a tenth your tax rate at .62%.

Depending on Republican momentum on this issue, it is likely Democrats will have to make a “deal with the devil” to ensure the survival of America’s largest entitlement program’s. If allowing for small private accounts is necessary to eliminate the taxable income bar and make other steps necessary to ensure the programs solvency, , then that's a deal that should be made.

Iran and Such

Rumors of an impending invasion of Iran are a wild overstatement of what the administration is considering. These rumors stem from a New Yorker article written by Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story, that US special operations teams were scouting Iran looking for targets for a potential air strike should negotiations with the EU to close a nuclear power plant collapse. The simple truth is that we do not have the means to occupy a nation with nearly three times the land mass and population as Iraq.

In columns I wrote nearly a year ago I supported such air strikes against Iran. I argued that nations with significant military threats and minimal means of defense have no reason to negotiate away their only deterrence, weapons of mass destruction. Negotiating away even small percentages of our overwhelmingly redundant and oftentimes obsolete array of nuclear weapons can take years to complete even when the tradeoff has been fewer nuclear weapons aimed against us. Consequently, the only way you could take care of proliferation threats is to attack them in their nascent stages, the way Israel attacked Saddam’s Osirak nuclear complex in 1981.

The reason I am more reluctant today to support such a direct attack on Iran’s nuclear facility is because Iran is much more of a position to retaliate than Iraq was in 2003 or Iran was in the same year, when the degree of the nuclear threat became more lucid. Launching a military strike on Iran would be a declaration of war which would be fought both in our own cities and in Iraq. Iran holds many of the cards in Iraq and would no doubt go out of its way to provide the weapons, cash, and intelligence to insurgents. The Shi’ite city of Basra would quickly become the next Fallujah, conveniently blocking major access to the rest of Iraq from logistical bases in Kuwait.

A bigger danger is Hezbollah, the “Party of God” that was founded by the Iranians to spread the Islamic Revolution. Deputy of State Richard Armitage has been quoted as saying that it might well be that al Qaeda is the “B-team” of terrorism and Hezbollah is the “A-team.” They were in large part responsible for America’s withdrawal from Lebanon in the 1980’s, killing 241 Marines in their barracks in 1983. The consequences would be devastating were Hezbollah deployed in America.

We must approach this delicate situation with the respect that it deserves. We must abandon our view that only America and its allies have the right to a nuclear defense, though we should act vigilantly to stop proliferation. We must realize that the more we threaten, the more likely nations will want to deter. We must also accept the danger we will be putting ourselves into should we choose to launch air strikes against Iran.

Rumors of Budget Cuts

The rumors of a possible decommissioning of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy (CV-67) have spread like a nightclub fire through Jacksonville, carrying with it fears that Mayport will go the way of NAS Cecil Field. In a deft political response, Congressman Crenshaw and Senators Martinez and Neilson are drafting legislation making it illegal for the Navy to carry any less than the current number of carriers: twelve. Though aircraft carriers are a vital part of our nation’s defense, having twelve is an arbitrary number set to insure the careers of military brass, defense contractors, and a few congressmen.

President Eisenhower warned us in the 50’s of the military-industrial complex, which is the triad of power between congressmen, the military, and defense industry giants who build the hardware. On one side of the triangle stand the generals and Pentagon brass whose careers follow the success or failure of individual weapon systems. On another side of the triad are the industries that make the weapons and reap in the profits. Finally there are the Congressmen who have jobs created in their districts through the design, production, and basing of all this hardware who often receive direct bribes in the form of campaign donations to solidify support. The obvious problem that arises is there are incentives throughout the entire process to over-order equipment and build extravagant machines with unproven technologies almost solely because of their expense.

The brass at Mayport don’t want the Kennedy retired because it will likely cost them their careers, the congressmen have to fight keep the 3000+ sailors and support staff in town, and the myriad of companies responsible for keeping the 37 year old ship in service another two decades don’t want to loose the business. But who in authority is asking the real questions. Do we need 12 aircraft carriers in an age where we have unquestionable air and naval supremacy wherever we sail? If one carrier were to go, shouldn’t it be the one that requires the largest logistical network (the Kennedy is the only aircraft carrier in US Navy that needs to be refueled at sea during extended tours, the rest are nuclear powered)?

With war comes loss. Along with the nearly 20,000 troops who have lost life or limb in Iraq, we need to start making budgets that reflect the reality of the costs of Iraq. Almost half of Congress’s discretionary spending goes to the military, so it’s the obvious first place to look for waste – and it’s everywhere. We have an anti-ballistic missile system that can’t even hit the easiest of targets and can be easily decoyed, a 90-ship nuclear attack submarine fleet that can be outfoxed by diesel sub a tenth the cost, a two decade program to make hybrid helicopter-airplane that’s met with nothing but blood and failure, and a dozen aircraft carriers built to sink a fleet that’s rusting away in Russian ports. It seems there’s plenty of room for cuts to pay appropriate salaries, buy appropriate armor for troops in field, and make the sacrifices necessary to make victory in Iraq a possibility without breaking the bank.

Keep Your Chins Up Dems

Keep Your Chins Up Dems’

So we lost the election, I lost a $20 bet and my self-worth as an amateur poll-reader, and Fallujah was leveled in the victory celebrations. The victory wasn’t as sound as Republicans want you to believe though. There was no mandate, in fact Bush won with the smallest margin of any incumbent since Woodrow Wilson. The simply truth is half of the American voters wanted Bush the hell out of office. The Democrats have a moral obligation to not let the Republicans walk over them in Washington like they did in the lead-up to the Iraq war. We’ll probably lose most legislative battles until at least 2006, but we need to put up a hell of a fight until then and start looking for good candidates to sell to the American public.

Reframing debates will be an important tool in rallying the public behind our fights. We need to fight like hell to keep judges off the bench who will overturn Roe vs. Wade. In doing so, we need to reframe the abortion argument in libertarian and not feminist language. Though the latter is an important point, it doesn’t resonate as well as fighting to keep government out of doctor’s offices. Furthermore, we need to make absolutely clear that pro-choice is not pro-abortion. I think Kerry carried this point well during the election, but I’m not sure the point has solidified. We need to win over those who disagree with abortion, but also disagree with government intrusion into a very difficult decision that ought to be made by families, not Washington politicians.

We also need to fight like hell to keep taxes progressive. There’s been rumor floating Washington that Bush wants to rewrite US tax law with either a national sales tax or flat tax. Though it is universally agreed that we need tax reform in the country (for instance: Goodyear, Texaco, or nor Ryder paid taxes during the boom years of the late 90’s), but those two options would become tax cuts from hell. Wherein now tax rates are bracketed such that the rich pay progressively more than those making less, the result of a federal income tax would place a greater proportional burden of paying taxes on those who have the least. These would be the tax cuts from hell.

Democrats also need to stand strong and build a clearer defense policy than “see, I told you so.” America must stand up against all threats, but we also must use proportional force and use it wisely and in a manner that compliments our strengths. Democrats should build and sell a defense policy most Americans can agree with – using our military to strike terrorists wherever they hide, which does not necessitate invasion. Occupations must be an absolute last resort, being that they dive into our biggest military weakness, but also one that is not shirked when necessary.

Keep your chins up, Democrats. We’ve got the numbers to win elections and we’re on the right side of the issues. We just need to find a sellable candidate who can reframe the issues on the table in our favor, someone whose moral backbone stands in stark contrast to those who sell out the American people to the highest bidder.

On Iraq and Chechnya

Iraq is a failed state now. Security is consistently ranked the highest priority for voters in this election and that failure is the biggest threat to our security today. Though most Democrats resisted the invasion in the first place, we are there now and if we fail to rebuild the country a new generation of terrorist will plague us in ways that should be kept only in the realm of Hollywood movies. It is fast becoming what Afghanistan was twenty years ago when the disgruntled and aimless youth of Middle East found cause in defeating a foreign aggressor and later banded together to blow up embassies, barracks, refueling warships and finally punched a hole in the Manhattan skyline.

Contrary to Bush’s narrow-minded view, we will fail by getting stuck in Iraq just as much we will fail if we make a hasty withdrawal. Bush has openly advocated the endless attrition warfare policies of Russia and Israel, owners of the two bloodiest quagmires on the planet – Chechnya and Palestine. Wake up. It’s not working. Palestine has resisted occupation sense 1967. Chechnya has been a sea of blood for a decade now. It won’t work in Iraq. It’s obviously not working now. Things are horrible and getting worse.

John Kerry will not “cut and run,” but he won’t be setting a policy to ensure that we stay in Iraq for a decade to come. Though both candidates fully support training Iraqi’s to rescue their own country, they will not be able to secure their country from the insurgents in a timely manner. Kerry advocates bringing the allies back to the table: yes, that includes the French and Germans. The Germans have already signaled that though reluctant, they can be talked into sending troops. Though multi-lateralizing Iraq isn’t a magic pill it should bring the benefit of new ideas, extra hands, and trust-building checks and balances against any one occupier’s interests that are absent now.

The simple fact is we need all the help we can get to make the streets of Iraq safe enough to walk and vote in. We have paid a heavy cost for Bush’s arrogance and overconfidence. Though the US military today is the most professional and respected armed force in the world, we do not have an Army built for occupation. The militaries of Europe stand second only to our own in ability and have trained for half a century to fight alongside us. A failed Iraq perhaps even a more ominous cloud for them than us – they’re much closer. We will have to pay the price for their support. We will have to accept some input and may even hand many of our puppet-string powers in Iraq, like hand-picking former CIA operatives as the Prime Minister, over to the United Nations. This alternative seems far better than the alternative of Iraq becoming our own Chechnya.

Florida Polls

Article I wrote about one of my professors, Dr. Matt Corrigan.
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UNF students will once again have giant impress on a Presidential election when the head to the polls Tuesday, November 2. Florida’s importance as a battleground state has happened because even though the nation as a whole is evenly divided over the candidates, most states have a solid lead with one candidate or the other. The battle for this election is being fought where the state will be won with a few thousand or even a few hundred votes. After the recount battle Florida’s official vote count came out to a 537 lead for Bush, granting him all 27 Electoral Votes and winning him the election.

At the trenches in measuring public opinion in Florida this time around is UNF’s own Dr. Matt Corrigan. Working through the Public Opinion Research Laboratory, Corrigan has conducted a recent state-wide poll October 10th through the 15th that was referenced in USA Today and other national media outlets.

The result of Corrigan’s polling showed a one point lead for Kerry, 45%, but is nonetheless a statistical dead heat because of a 4% margin of error. Ralph Nader polled at 2%, a number equivalent to what he won in 2000.

The questions went beyond a presidential straw poll. “15% to 20% identified themselves as new voters,” likely because of age or a recent move. “Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of new voters may participate in Florida on Election Day.” At UNF alone, over a thousand students have been registered on campus this fall semester. This dynamic gives an edge of even more uncertainty.

“Voters overwhelmingly approve of the job that the federal government and the state government of Florida did in handling hurricane relief effort,” the study concluded. Despite this, 49% approve of President Bush’s job performance while 48% disapprove. 46% approve of how the president is handling Iraq and 50% disapprove.

The most important finding to Corrigan was that 26% of those polled felt that the other side was “sinful,” not just wrong. “This makes it extremely difficult to compromise, something that’s very important in a democracy,” Corrigan added. This number crossed ethnic, party, and racial lines.

Wag The Dog

On August 7^th, 1998 as my father was boarding a plane to fly out of N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, two car bombs blew apart the embassies of two other central African nations – Kenya and Tanzania. This was an opening salvo in the Terror Wars. President Clinton responded by unloading 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles into bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan and 13 missiles a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan.

Republicans complain today that this use of force was too feeble to be effective – bin Laden was left alive (he faked his location by using phones he knew were tapped and escaped). This wasn’t the criticism leveled at the time though. Back then it was that Clinton was merely “waging the dog,” as the term for using military force to get headlines in times of presidential trouble came to be known. A Republican Senator from Indiana, Dan Coats, was heard to say that the decision to strike was “made because it was necessary to save the president's job and distract attention away" from the perpetually spun Lewinsky scandal. It begs the question if the Lewinsky scandal was meant save the “Republican Revolution” and distract attention away from the real issues – like a growing terrorism specter.

Today, however, I feel we can more confidently say that it is this president who is “wagging the dog.” It’s always been a creeping suspicion of mine that the White House has been using terror threat alerts to keep an unnecessary and endless war-mentality that protects his job. There have been too many coincidences of late, though, to show that the President is using his position to keep unflattering news out of the headlines.

In the days after the Democratic Convention, the White House began talking of new and specific terrorist threats to against five financial institutions in the mid-Atlantic seaboard. The newspaper began reporting less on the anticipated bounce for Kerry and instead state focused on the security preparations around DC and New York. We then had the pleasure of learning that this was based on intelligence gathered prior to 9/11.

That was just the first obvious time. On the night of the debates, we learned that the US military was gathering tens of thousands of US troops outside of Summara, one of the “no-go” areas for the occupation forces. They proceeded to launch a three day assault that robbed headlines of the Kerry debate victory. It’s not that I don’t feel this attack was justified, but the timing is suspicious at best – sinister at worse. This wasn’t a random firefight, but a well planned and timed offensive. The timing couldn’t have been better for Bush if his staff had planned it – wait, the Presidents’ appointee’s do run the Pentagon who planned this…

Interview With Ray McGovern

Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst of 27 years, came to UNF on the September 22 to condemn what he saw as a massive failure of the US intelligence system of late. “They prostituted the intelligence process. Intelligence is supposed to be about telling it like it is without fear of favor.” Ray McGovern comes across as just a disgruntled former employee at first, but with time you begin to feel his passion and respect for his careers work. He says he looks back at his work as important and “at its best, lifesaving.” But he seems pissed. Slightly uncomfortable amongst the local Wage Peace activists who were hosting a dinner in his honor, he doesn’t fit the profile of your average anti-war activist. His anger was more personal than a general dislike of the President and his policies. Though clearly critical of the war, his anger is really over the black eye he says Bush gave the CIA to cover for the real reasons for war and his belief that the US intelligence system has become too tied into the Beltway political scene, thereby creating a credibility gap in what it reports.

“It all started with William Casey, Reagan’s CIA Director,” McGovern says. “There’s a Soviet under every rock!’ When there was an assassination attempt on the Pope and everyone was saying it was just a lone nut, Casey had a special committee set up, staffed with people more concerned with their careers than with truth, to tell him the answer he wanted: that the Soviets were involved. Those are the same guys who run the CIA today.”

Dr. Ted Stumm, Chairman of UNF’s Political Science Department, had a different opinion. “It happens everywhere, we even teach a course on how to do it in the Public Admin grad program. We teach them how to advance their careers, but also to follow the rules. I don’t doubt that it happens in the intelligence community too.” Stumm is a retired Air Force Colonel who once served as chief military negotiator in Turkey and base commander at Polk Air Force Base. He seems skeptical that the information was tainted by this though. There is never any one truth in intelligence assessments, he says, but rather that CIA leadership makes informed assessments on all the information given.

On the issue of the 9/11 Commission’s reported findings, Stumm and McGovern have widely different beliefs. “Independent?” McGovern began, “It was appointed by the President and they were almost all politicians and lawyers. There were no intelligence professionals there; its main objective from the beginning was to cover two of Bush’s mistakes: what he did before Sept 11, and what he did in response.” When asked to clarify, “They said it was an institutional failure - everyone was to blame - which means no one is to blame. They didn’t want to point fingers, but what the hell is an independent commission supposed to be doing?”

Stumm felt it was easy to level the criticism McGovern had after the fact. “I don’t know that there was an intelligence failure. Commissions always have the benefit of hindsight, something that didn’t exist on September 10th. What the intelligence said before 9/11 was the same thing before Pearl Harbor, ‘we have something cooking, but we don’t know when or where.’ There were 3000 planes in the skies over America when the attacks happened, even if you knew the date and time – how are you going to pick which 4 or 5 of them are the ones to be hijacked?”

“Douglas McArthur said that 95 percent of the intelligence he received as commander is useless,” Stumm continued. “It’s up to the commander to find out that 5 percent that’s important. Sometimes even McArthur picks the wrong 5 percent,” he said, referring to Macarthur’s conviction the Chinese would not fight in the Korean War. “Intelligence is always an incomplete picture; it’s more an art than a science.”

“There were so many warnings,” McGovern said. “Had anybody been doing half their jobs right – had Bush not been on vacation, had the FAA acted on the information that a hijacked plane just smashed into one of the twin towers and there were probably more hijacked airliners in the sky – a lot of this wouldn’t have happened as it did.”

1984 and 2004

“War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” This is the mantra of Big Brother, the imaginary head of the Oceana in the grim world that George Orwell painted on his death bed. Doublethink was the process in which Big Brother controlled his subjects, wherein people willfully forgot what they knew was true in order to be spoon fed a new lie, a faux reality. Beginning three years ago this week, I feel this is becoming a creeping reality beyond the literary world of 1984.

What else but doublethink explains a draft dodger having his campaigners criticize his opponent for receiving only minor wounds in Vietnam while he himself was out on a cocaine binge unable to report for National Guard duty? How else could you have “No Child Left Behind” without funding the bill, name a bill “Clear Skies” that leaves out greenhouse gases, or have a “Healthy Forest Initiative” which excludes environmental impact studies and hands our forests over to the timber industry to sell back to us? You’d almost think he hired a mining industry lobbyist as Secretary of the Interior.

Over 1,000 US troops and at least 12,000 Iraqi civilians have died since Bush invaded Iraq to destroy Saddam’s WMD program, bombs that have never been found - try telling that to the 80% of Fox News viewers who wrongly believe that we’ve either found direct evidence linking Hussein and al Qaida, an active WMD program, or believe world opinion supported the invasion. We’re all safer now that our entire defense structure, including the Army reserves, are fighting insurgents that never existed prior to March of last year rather than the enemy whose bite we felt in September two years prior. I certainly feel safer knowing a month ago we had more detailed plans for raiding the sacred Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf than hunting bin Laden in Peshawar.

Terrorists are attacking our freedom (I wasn’t aware that my freedom was dependent on the structural integrity of a potential target), so our liberties must be recessed. Makes sense to me. Forget habeas corpus; let’s give the President the power to indefinitely detain anyone he chooses, that’s what Jefferson intended. In 1984, when a citizen simply disappeared on executive order they were called an “unperson.” In America, we know that at least one of their names is José Padilla. He’s never been charged with a crime, nor does he need to be because our President neither understands nor cares about his constitutionally limited powers. He is now judge, jury, and executioner because of a war on terror he admitted can never be concluded.

Ignorance is strength. Forget that the Nobel laureates in economics have gathered to condemn Bush for his dismissal of inconvenient facts and embarking on a “reckless and extreme course that endangers the long-term economic health of our nation.” Forget that under his administration, we vote alone alongside Saudi Arabia & Co on women’s issues in UN. Forget about ozone holes, deforestation, desertification, rising sea water temperatures and climate change. Forget that CEO’s salaries have risen 23% last year alone the median annual household income fell, while the poverty level rose to 12.5%. Forget all this and believe what he tells you: that we’re stronger, safer, and better off. Try to forget all this and maybe you can vote for Bush with a clear conscious.

My Hurricane Vacation Story

What compels a man to drive to the eye of a hurricane twice the size of Andrew when it seems everyone else in their proper mind is getting as far away as possible? Perhaps it’s just a desire to find deeper thrills, perhaps a desire to have a deeper knowledge of my world, or maybe it’s just plain lunacy as most of my friends and family have suggested. I guess the only way I can describe it is that as we drove around inside the storm, I felt like a box was being checked in some mental inventory that said “Go through the eye of a Hurricane.” It was right between “Spend Spring Break in Amsterdam” and “See Phish before they break up.”

I led an expedition of two other UNF students to Hollywood on Thursday night, where we met with one of their friends, Tim Millar, who had a Jeep Cherokee 4x4 that had braved Charlie in the weeks prior. We left at 11pm on Thursday night after loading up on supplies and reserve fuel. I-95 southbound was a pretty lonely route, and even northbound was pretty clear that late a night though the rest areas were filled to the brim with sleeping refugees.

With the latest National Hurricane Center projections and a weather radio, we ventured out of Hollywood north about an hour or so until we reached Fort Pierce. The NHC was predicting a landfall somewhere between Melbourne and Vero, but intuition was telling us to stick further south. After finding a vacant motel in Fort Pierce where several professional storm chasers were staking out, we decided to camp out there and wait for the next day. We had left too early; the storm was slowing down over the Bahamas. We sat in our motel room, watched some movies and kept close track on the hurricanes movement. It was looking more and more like we were going to be in ground zero.

We woke up early on Saturday to a worsening situation. The sky was darkening with thick cloud cover. Every hour or so a strong band would hit with upwards of fifty mile an hour winds and horizontal rain would pound us for 20 minutes. As the day wore on the bands became more frequent, stronger, and lasted longer. In our original drive around Fort Pierce, we discovered the key locations around town to view things. The barrier island had been blocked off by squad cars but there was a Marina on the Indian River where you could watch the wave’s crash against the yachts where we could observe safely without wind gusts throwing formerly landed objects at you.

We used our hotel map to stake out different locations around Fort Pierce to watch the storm. We noticed that as soon as we found a location, professional storm chasers would wind up there a few minutes later asking us about where we had been. In fact, I have a picture of a Miami Herald picture being taken.

She was a slow mover, so we had all day to drive around and find different spots. Our favorite was Jensen Beach, a scenic little retirement town on the Indian River between Jupiter and Fort Pierce, only minutes from Stuart. Along the river were several marinas and trailer parks as well as an unanchored houseboat slamming up against the seawall.

After driving around a bit and scoping out other areas, like Savannas Sate Park, we arrived back in Jensen a few hours later. Our immediate concern was finding shelter for night when things would get bad, so we checked out a local elementary school where they told us that though they had over 600 people inside without power, they wouldn’t turn anyone away. The storm had worsened and the houseboat had disintegrated against the seawall. The trees we were parked under were now fallen. Six foot swells in the river were slamming into the seawall pelting us with thick blasts of salt water. I hid behind another photographer’s car to get the shots I did of the trailer park on the water getting hit like we were. Soon another car pulled up, and an old man came out and starting talking to Tim as he was filming to figure out just what we were doing, to which we always replied that I was reporting for a local newspaper and he’s reporting for a Miami radio station, which was true in the loosest of definitions of free-lancing. He offered us shelter.

After we were done filming and photographing, we followed his directions to a Moose Lodge about a mile away. A sturdy structure, it was a former bungalow that had the insulation ripped out and concrete poured in. We were met at the door by Phillip Black, captain of Lodge 1690 in Jensen Beach. Kenny Murphy, the man who had introduced himself to Tim, was also there.

The Lodge was essentially a bar and restaurant for the older men of Jensen Beach and we were all forty years the junior of any man there. They quickly offered us warm food and cold beer by candlelight and were all curious to know what the four of us were up to, so we fed them the freelance journalist line. Kenny saw right through it and knew we were there on our own accord, looking for a little adventure. He asked if he could come out with us on the next expedition and told us he knew where we should go.

Two of the guys wanted to stay in and dry up a little bit, but Tim and I wanted to go back out and see the storm in different places. We stopped first to check on Kenny’s boat at a local marina on the St. Lucie River. The waters had risen, but his boats were fine. We left from there and drove to Jupiter Inlet. On the Palm County side of the line, we drove into an expensive condo high-rise and snuck through the locked gates out to the beach. The beach was unlike anything I’ve ever seen in real life. It was straight out of a movie. The eye wall was fifty miles off the coast by this point and the surf was easily fifteen foot high, though you couldn’t see more than a couple hundred feet ahead because of the sandstorm blowing against our backs. I made the mistake once of turning into the wind and being stung in the face by millions of sand grains hitting me at 80 miles an hour.

We left there to go check on another yacht club of his on the other side of the inlet. The winds died down a little and we drove around near the lighthouse and found another club right on the inlet next to the jetties with people standing outside watching the storm. We walked up to their balcony and took some photos and video before getting back to the car.

On the way out of the neighborhood Tim made a wrong turn away from the bridge. Kenny said it was fine, there was another bridge seven miles up the road. It felt wrong, but we went with it anyway. About a mile into the road the winds picked up and we could see the Intercoastal, which was on the immediate left of the Jeep, rising. Trees were suddenly falling all over the road. We put the Jeep in four wheel drive, hit the gas, and started driving around them. The entire island was maybe three homes deep at its thickest and the idea of being caught in a barrier island surrounded by falling trees and rising waters right before landfall was becoming an ever more ominous specter on my mental horizon. We finally hit a tree too big too get around and we had nothing but a hatchet for clearing, so we turned around and drove back even faster. There were even more trees on the road this time, ones we knew weren’t there five minutes before. We made it off the island though and warned another car full of journalist about the dangers ahead, but they proceeded anyway.

After that, we drove through Stuart and shot some video of the St. Lucie River swallowing the local pier. Like in Jensen, traffic lights were lying broken in the road or dangling in the wind by a single wire. Fast food signs were blown out and tree’s and power lines had snapped. We made it back to the Moose Lodge in time for another hot meal – probably the only in the county – before nightfall. The eye would be coming in at 2am.

We stayed inside mostly after dark. Every street light was out and it was simply too hard to see anything falling near you. The vents on the ceiling would slam up and down as gusts would come overhead, bringing in a creepy echoed howl from outside. A gentleman named Allen bought us round after round of drinks to keep the stories and jokes going as the wind became louder outside. He told me his story, mostly of the misfortunes that had befallen him in recent years – both financially and physically. Those who have the least always give the most.

We went outside after getting a little stir crazy. We had an extra poncho so we brought Allen out with us. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were in the eye wall. The trees around the Lodge blocked most of the wind. We walked a block up to a mini-mall and took cover. We could barely hear each other over the constant howl of the wind from above. We shined our MagLite’s around surveying the damage. The landmark Fidelity Financial bank near the lodge had lost its sign. The tin roofing on a bank across the street was making eerie creaks and bangs as it flapped in the 105 mile an hour wind. We could see other searchlights looking up into the sky watching the clouds fly by. Ryan pointed out the smell of fresh cut wood in the air.

The winds slowed down a little bit and we went back inside. One of the men inside the lodge was cranking up his handheld radio. Familiar voices that we had been listening to all weekend were talking about how the eye was making landfall at Jupiter as they spoke. The winds died. The vents on the ceiling stopped flapping.

We grabbed our gear and walked out to the car. It was still a little rainy and still windy. Contrary to my expectations, it was also still cloudy. Turns out the eye had closed off. We drove out and concluded we were indeed in the eye, then after driving little further inland I called my dad on the cell phone to get a radar update of how much longer we had to drive around before the storm picked back up again.

Two hours was what we had. The eye was somewhere between sixty to eighty miles wide and moving at six miles an hour. The four of us drove around the county taping and surveying the damage. Things were a lot worse now than they were eight hours earlier in the daylight. We made it as far as Palm Beach County before we started running into cops again. Police were a persistent fear because of the curfew in place and the “zero-tolerance” approach heralded on the radio.

Eventually we dropped the other two guys from the UNF contingent back off at the Moose Lodge and Tim and I drove out to the river. The water had risen considerably. I took his searchlight and started taping the damage. We drove through the trailer parks we saw getting battered earlier and filmed the damage inside. Eventually we had to turn around because storm surge had covered State Road 707 along the Indian River.

We went back and I fell asleep. Ryan and Tim went out filming earlier in the morning when I was asleep. They woke me up at nine and we drove out back to Hollywood. We didn’t stay in the area long and got on I-95, which wasn’t too damaged, to avoid the roadblocks.

The trip back home from Hollywood was faced with one giant problem from the outset: we didn’t have enough gas to get back home. South of Jacksonville gas was nearly impossible to find. Once we got near Miami, I was able to cap off my tank and had two five gallon canisters with me. We brought the canisters with us in the Jeep and used about four gallons to keep the generator at the Lodge running. Though Kenny had given us two gallons at the Lodge, we still needed enough to get the Jeep back to Hollywood. By the time we left I had 13 gallons of gas on hand, but needed 16 to get home. I called a friend to arrange for him to deliver gas in case we ran out but was informed that all the gas stations were closed in Jacksonville because the power was out.

Before we hit the highway, we found one stations open in Davie. The clerk told us the highway patrol had escorted a tanker in from Port Everglades earlier. We filled up our tanks and drove back. With no cops on the highway, we booked back on 95 until we reached Daytona. Once there, every mile or so we’d find a huge tree fallen over in the right hand lane of I-95. We decided to pull off into Daytona Beach to check on UNF legend Abe Kowitz. We never quite made it because the police were on every street. Daytona was hit a lot harder than we thought and the police were out rigidly enforcing the curfew to stop looters. Eventually we were pulled over and threatened with jail unless we turned around and left the way we came.

We made it home without a scratch, except for the small dent in my car from the encounter with a fallen tree in Palm Coast. It was nice to be home, dry, with hot food and hot showers. It was nice to get the familiar calls from friends and family once I got reception on my phone again, and they all said the same familiar thing, “Trey, glad you’re safe… but that was stupid. I hope you don’t plan a career in this now.”

Kerry Got Baited

Though it's been very difficult arriving at this conclusion, I've decided to write a column in support of a Bush campaign initiative. I felt baited while weighing the issue out and I wasn't able to solidify my own position until hearing Kerry's weak rebuttal. The issue was George Bush deciding to bring home 70,000 troops from their Asian and Western European posts. Bush supported this decision with his own ideology of "Force Transformation," which I feel was inapplicabable and was only brought up to successfully bait Kerry.

"Force Transformation" has been a stable of neocon lexicon for the past four years, referring to the now discredited belief that we simply do not need as many infantry in our Army because of advances in weapons technology. Rumsfeld & Co have been trumpeting the idea of a leaner, stronger, more mobile army without tanks and artillery that packs more punch with fewer logistical requirements. While we do need a more mobile force, few of the reservists in Iraq that left families and idling careers half a world away would agree that our current active duty army is too large.

Bush has packaged this ideology with a military necessity that John Kerry should be behind too - changing our militaries basing structure. We're on the brink of a global realignment of our military posture. With the Cold War over, we no longer need troops poised to stop Soviet armor from passing through the Folda Gap into Western Europe. What we need now is the ability to contain possible Chinese expansion in addition to being able to project our forces anywhere we need them in the Terror Wars - which has a front stretching from the Atlantic coast of Morocco, as far north as the Caucuses, and as far east as the Philippines. It looks as if the center of this will be in Iraq, where we will be sure to have a large military presence for many, many years to come so long as we "win the peace." The conventional wisdom has held that he troops stationed in Western European NATO countries will be moved into the more amiable "New Europe," as Rumsfeld so eloquently put it. These are the former Soviet Bloc nations eager for US aid and protection, and are consequently more easily in line with our foreign policies

Instead of building huge new bases and simply shuffling troops around, Bush wants to build a series of skeleton bases around the globe that would easily expand to carry tens of thousands of troops and their pre-positioned weapons. Far from shrinking the size of the Army, this would be an anecdote for the "Second Christmas Syndrome," wherein soldiers are far less likely to stay in the military after spending a second Christmas away from their families in a far off corner of the globe.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker Bush Kerry Force Transformation

A Modest Proposal for Gas Prices

Many people don’t know why gas prices are so high, so today I’ll share what I know of it: crude oil is selling right now for about $1.40 a gallon, of which 20¢ is rumored to be terrorism insurance. Add transportation costs, refining costs, federal and state taxes (Florida: 14¢), and mark it up a few cents for the gas stations themselves, and suddenly you’re paying $2 a gallon to go to school.

Obviously, the biggest part of the price is for the raw crude, but why? Two reasons: supply and demand. Supply has been edging off, as OPEC has been trying to raise oil prices to bring in more revenue to their dilapidated economies. As strange as it may seem, oil-producing nations right now tend to be the most financially insecure, mostly because elites have mismanaged their wealth instead of investing it at home. Secondly, the world is consuming more oil –because we Americans are becoming less fuel-efficient and because nations like China are now consuming as much oil as Japan. Less oil on the market and higher demand equals less Corona and more Bud Lite for you, the college consumer. It’s also early summer, when energy demand is greatest and prices peak.

“So what do we do to lower the costs?” the budget-minded undergrad asks. The way I see it is if we really want to put a dent in oil prices, we need to ask if we want to do it long term or short term. See, oil prices aren’t even that high right now compared to the 70’s OPEC oil embargo or even to what they will be when we pass peak production. Within our lifetimes, oil-nations will be unable to pump more oil than previous years but demand will be even higher than it is now. Gas prices will be astronomical compared to today, even when adjusted to inflation.

If we want to counter the big oil crunch of tomorrow, we’re going to have to take a bigger bite today. Like Europe, we’d need to jack up gas prices through taxation to provide demand-side incentives for fuel efficiency. People are going to need a good reason to buy a station wagon instead of a Hummer.

Who wants to pay more for gas right now? Therefore, I propose that we fix the problem in the short term, in the new American fashion: from the supply-side. We need to withdraw our Marines from Iraq and place them back on the ships that brought them there. We then need to sail them to three places: a few hundred miles south to the Saudi oil fields, out to the Nigerian oil fields, and then out to the Venezuelan oil fields south of Aruba. We’ll let the 82nd Airborne take over the Caspian. We need to secure these oil fields, free the people living and working inside of them, and open the pumps and let the oil flow, flow, flow. After taking out a small fee to pay for the Marines, bullets, and whatnot we’ll give the rest of the revenue to the governments that host the liberated fields. This modest proposal gets to the heart of what we should be doing in Iraq: we don’t come to steal the oil, we’re more than happy to pay for it; we just want to make sure it flows at peak capacity so it’s cheap.


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker Gas Prices Modest Proposal military 82nd Jonathon Swift satire China Japan markets

Rwanda, Ten Years On

I was twelve years old when I started following the news. My mother kept all our TIME magazines in a bin by the fireplace in our living room, so I used to go through old issues and read about the great battles in the desert of the Gulf War when I was done with the new issue. At that point, all the flags and parades and the pride of victory was still actively in my memory. As I was really getting into it, I learned that a plane had gone down over some African country and a President died. One ethnic group blamed the other for the accident. The magazine started having horrific pictures in them of dead women and children, hacked up by machetes. By that August, the cover had a few adults standing in a field of dead children’s bodies. I don’t remember if I read about it or if I saw it, but I still see in my minds eye some river turned blood red with corpses. That started ten years ago this month.

The experience changed me deeply. I was angered when Clinton responded years later by saying that he didn’t know the depth of the horror while defending his inaction. I was 12 and I knew, how could the President have not known? Though I understand now that the US response had more to do with Somalia than anything else did (the events that were dramatized in “Black Hawk Down” happened a few months earlier), I have always felt a deep conviction that we can and must stop such horror in the future.

After the events in Somalia, Haiti, and now in Iraq, Americans seem more reluctant than ever to commit forces anywhere where our national interests are not immediately evident. Some even argue that it’s none of our business. I retort that just as an adult has a moral obligation to break up a fight between children who are fighting with sticks, America has the moral obligation to use its superior firepower and logistical reach to prevent atrocities from happening in places where no one is in a position to stop it. With power comes responsibility. With democracy, comes a more ethically guided foreign policy. I feel there is no greater calling for a country than to prevent the demons of human nature like genocide from going unchecked again. We must also learn from our past mistakes, and take simple but effective steps to stop the bloodshed when troops leave, like ensuring a balance of power amongst rivals. This, my friends, is a moral necessity in a brutal world.


Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker, Current Events Rwanda genocide

Burn, Yassin, Burn

I will pray for the destruction of any group, no matter how just their cause might be, that intentionally kills women and children because of their religion, genes, or beliefs. It disturbs me that many world leaders have reacted with such outrage towards the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas. These same Ministers have never lifted a phone to call the grieving families who took the brunt of this man’s inspired atrocities. They’ve called Israel out for violating international law, but where are their relentless public condemnations of suicide bombing civilians? Yassin was fully involved in a genocidal struggle to purge the land he lives in of Jews. He got what he deserved.

Many in the European and American left have adopted the Palestinian cause without fully understanding the complexity of the situation. As with many on the hawkish right, they willfully disregard the well-being of one of the parties to come to an easy conclusion that no one can live with. The propaganda on both sides is well financed and riddled with hate.

It is unfortunate that so many of these people, who associate themselves with the causes of global justice and peace, haven’t stood loud and strong against the most violent and ruthless killers of our time. Hamas, al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are no freedom fighters in the tradition we idolize in grade school text books, but instead they indulge in the purposeful bloodletting of civilians. There is nothing redeeming about choosing a target only because it kills the most Jews. As such, these groups must be obliterated for the good of man.

Many rebut that what the suicide bombers do and what the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) does are analogous. There are very few similarities. Operation Grapes of Wrath and the Sabra and Shatila massacres are the only cases where one can find intended non-combatant bloodletting by IDF forces. Though many non-combatants have died during IDF operations, it is unfortunate and unintentional collateral damage. When Hamas detonates a bomb, the end in itself is the collateral civilian damage. The IDF uses only guided weapons when attacking targets like Yassin – they aren’t firebombing entire cities as Hamas would if they had an air force. May all of Hamas find the same fate as their founder. Burn, Yassin, Burn.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker, Current Events Yassim, Terrorists Terrorism

Sanctity

President Bush decided recently that he would support a Constitutional ban on gay marriage. It would seem then that Karl Rove is positioning the topic of homosexual rights to the front of the agenda, where Republicans have popular support on their stance. This is tragic in both how it reflects on our society and our Constitution grounding.

Homosexuals have become the scapegoat for all that is wrong in American society. Societies outrage at young sexual exploration, teen pregnancy, high divorce rates, and the homogenization of sociopathic and destructive tendencies in our youth are channeled at the loudest group urging for a loosening of societal norms. Somehow, it is felt, that if only gays were banned from making legally binding lifelong commitments to their significant others, then straight couples would learn to work together in the best interest of their family in their own marriages! Besides, Britney Spears getting married during a Vegas weekend made a better case for allowing gay marriage than any pride parade ever could have.

Though loosening popular norms might be part of the equation for the general decay in the social fabric of our nation, there is more. Perhaps it is the rigged individualism preached in our society as the pillar of all that is American. Think about it, our entire economic system is based on the premise that if everyone just acts autonomously in their own self-interest all of the time somehow society is elevated. Thinking this at least eight hours a day must lead to some bleeding through into our social interactions.

The other problem is the sanctity of our Constitution. The Constitution, with one bad example of prohibition, has always been a granter of the people’s rights rather than a denier. Denying rights based on sexual identity has not place in the same document that enshrines my freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly.

It worries me that perhaps we do not take our Constitution as seriously as we used to. We are continuing to see the erosion of the right to bear arms and simple civil liberties like habeas corpus and right to trial have been revoked for US citizens with the wrong friends. Constitutional amendments banning rights to US citizens have no place in this years campaign guide.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Gay Marriage Constitution Bush Amendment

The Fog of War

_____ Fog of War ____

Events in Iraq are unfolding the same way they have been for almost a year – dizzying yet familiar in that nothing is a surprising anymore. Though the headlines are fading, but the fog of war has yet to lift from this ancient land. American troops are still dying at a rate of about one a day, which is a bit lower than it was over the summer before the Army devised tactics to counter urban ambushes and the infamous “improvised explosives.” Helicopters are now flying more erratic routes to avoid surface-to-air missiles. Though the death of any man is tragic, this is not what should worry us. What should worry us is the growing prospect of civil war in Iraq – and that’s seems precisely the aim of the insurgents.

Because American targets are becoming harder to hit, the new Iraqi police have become cannon fodder to the nihilistic insurgents. In one week in February, at least 150 Iraqi police died in car bombings. The intent is clear: minimize the raw numbers and morale of the American proxies once sovereignty is allegedly restored this July and troops begin pulling out of urban areas.

Once we begin urban withdrawal, these men will be doing our bidding on the streets of Baghdad – fighting terrorist and crooks alike. These men will be the protectors of the Governing Council; American GI’s will try to act only as backup. It would seem the larger strategy is to force an American withdrawal under fire. They intend to do this by sucking us back into the cities or to become actors in a civil war to play the part of the neo-colonialist that never intends to leave. We cannot win with that role.

Let us not forget the historical example Al Qaeda & Co. intends to follow – the Mujahideen resistance in Afghanistan. There they patiently brought a superpower to its knees and sparked the collapse of an entire empire. That was on the Soviet’s own border, we are half a world away. This prospect should scare Republicans and Democrats, friend and French alike. It is time that both parties put resources and minds together to create a serious but flexible exit strategy from Iraq.

We must not overreact and play into their plans, but we must not retreat because we are under fire. By reacting the way they want us to, staying because they are still violent, we are playing into their plans. This is precisely the endless conundrum the Israeli's are in. If American GI’s are still patrolling the streets of Baghdad two years from now, we will have lost this battle in the Terror Wars. If American GI’s are still patrolling the streets of Baghdad five years from now, we will have already lost the War.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Bush Iraq Quagmire Terrorism

Spacemen

-- New Spinnaker Column --

This month President Bush announced ambitious, and ambiguous, plans to return man to his rightful throne of discovery. After falling astray for the past two decades with the Shuttle program it’s about time NASA is given a new mandate. America needs to see, as we did 30 years ago when man first landed on the moon, how much we can accomplish as a people that we cannot do us individuals.

The problem with the Shuttle was that it was always a problem looking for a solution. It wasn’t practical in any meaningful sense. It was only huge and costly. It was built around the idea that by factoring in economies of scale, the shuttle would quickly pay for itself making bi-weekly deliveries of satellites and/or people into space. This is why it was designed to be reusable. It turns out those giant Saturn V rockets that sent man to the moon and later delivered a space-station in one load was cheaper.

To justify the existential problem of the Shuttle at the end of the Cold War, NASA resurrected the idea of a giant multi-national space station. This idea has come to fruition with the nearly complete but totally useless International Space Station (ISS), the only real purpose of which is to keep the Shuttle useful for another decade. Now, we learn that Hubble is going to be left for dead because NASA needs to complete ISS before the Shuttle retires in 2008.

There are at least two alternative views to Bush’s vision of where we should go from here. One undercurrent with rising popularity is that we abandon space programs all together, considering that these two NASA rovers cost us half a billion dollars to build and land rovers 300 million miles away from the problems here on Earth. The problem with this approach is that it relies on a perfectionist fallacy, where we must tie our hands behind our backs and do nothing outside of the physical boundaries of our nation until every internal problem is fixed.

Another emerging view is that we stop government-funded manned exploration all together, allowing robots to do the scientific work and allow the free market, via space tourism, to build an affordable gateway to the stars in a way that NASA has not. This is exemplified through a $10m contest called the X-Prize. In the spirit of the contests that jumpstarted aviation, investors are hoping that entrepreneurs and backyard engineers will be able to build the first commercially viable manned vehicle capable of leaving Earth’s atmosphere, taking at least two millionaire tourist up with them.

As with most cases, private enterprise and government programs can co-exist peaceably together so long as the government gets out of the tourism business as soon as someone claims that X-Prize. The government must learn its lesson from the Shuttle, however, and have a clear plan for the manned space program so that we never again have to loose valuable scientific tools like Hubble for pointless projects like the ISS has become.


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Bush, space moon mars shuttle NASA hubble HST

Impressions on Africa

-- a short assignment in a class, i was supposed to write what my pre-class impressions on Africa were ---


Africa awakens inside of me the demons of my mind – the demons of Marx, Malthus, Hobbes, conquest, genocide, and eugenics. For all the pain and anguish there are no clear cut answers, only gut-churning emotional impulses. How does one account for such a large scale failing of human endeavor? Blame it on the people, the conquerors, the neo-imperialist investors, or perhaps by into the non-linearist myth that they never even tried to modernize and “civilize” – none of it fits just right.

My father flew out of N’djamena the night al Qaeda blew up the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1997. He was working for Esso/Exxon as the communications director for their Saharan oil drilling project. The two pieces of memorabilia from Chad he keeps on his desk are an ancient but giant 10-megabyte hard drive he pulled out of a working computer there, and a picture of himself in front of a company Cessna surrounded by fifteen militiamen armed with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles taken as he went to examine a desert satellite Earth Station. He flew out of the State’s as a mildly racist Kentucky-bred white male born to the upper class in middle of the 1950’s; he flew out a hardened eugenist of a time seven decades past. This was his only way to rationalize the grinding poverty and misery he saw in one of the poorest countries on Earth.

My second my lucid memory of Africa is inside of a French hotel room watching the BBC report as their headline the first African “world war,” which was the violence surrounding Mobuto Sese Seko’s demise. It was at that point that I understood the difference between American news media and the rest of the world’s news. Not every nation produces enough wire reports to talk about itself for an hour every night on every network, and nor does sub-Saharan combat have the same appeal or glamour that a thirty-six hour celebrity marriage does.

“National” division to weaken and conquer again was the Western response the anti-colonialist movement. Perhaps all that ended was the occupation. The white man drew borders in the African mans land not on tribal, historical, geographic or religious realities but rather on where on white army met another. Outside of Egypt and the Horn, African countries will never transcend merely being states instead of nations. This weakness, coupled with the events at Bretton Woods, made the new colonial masters: the banks. It was always wealth and relative power against other Europeans that the colonialist wanted out of Africa, but the latter involved occupation and became too bloody and costly to endure – so “civilized” man left at the same time, but left behind them a dependency trailing back to their colonial masters.

Overheard conversation of Africa is awash in Malthusian beliefs that AIDS is nature’s way of taking care of a surplus, that is to say useless, population on the planet. Academic lectures on international security skip over Africa, attributing what goes on there to some Hobbesian nightmare of the state of nature not worthy of the same time given to more civilized and courtly means of killing one another with shinier weapons. Sub-Saharan Africa is the holocaust of our time – the one truth that refutes even the best political or socio-philosophic theory.


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Africa AIDS Malthus Hobbes Congo

The Saddam Capture and Psy Ops

If something seems to good to be true, it probably is. As such, some interesting wire reports are coming out about the Saddam capture. Basically, what they are saying that what really happened was that a Saddam was staying in Tikrit, his home town, and was ratted out by a tribe who had a daughter raped by his son Uday. They turned him into Jamil Talibani's PUK Kurdish Pesh Merga, who then worked out a political deal with the Americans. They then drugged him and put him in the "rat hole" for the Americans.

My feeling is that US Army psychological warfare teams* couldn’t have created a better story of the capture of Saddam, which means it’s likely that they did. Everything about the capture perfectly resonated the feelings that the US wants to push onto the Arab world: resistance is futile. Even the Lion of Babylon, the man who defied American power for over a decade, was found in a hole amongst rats looking like an Arab Ted Kazinsky when his card was finally pulled.


Here’s an interesting excerpt from an interview with Bush:

MS. SAWYER: Was he sedated? And was it designed to humiliate him?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I don't--first of all, I don't know if he was sedated or not. I mean, that's a question you'd ask the folks in the field.

Secondly, it was designed to reflect the truth and to show--and to show the world that this barbaric person was found in a hole, hiding, cowering...

So what makes me give credence to this particular claim from the Kurds? Well, US brass and Ahmed Chalabi made several mentions of help from the Kurdish militia, but what kind of help could the Pesh Merga really offer US Special Ops? There is no comparison between a US Navy SEAL and Kurdish mountain fighter. So just what kind of help was it?

I don’t know that if this is true it will amount to a scandal. The Bush administration, armed with the mind of Karl Rove, knows how to manage image. Ever notice those little banners behind Bush with a few key words reinforcing his message? Will the American public really care that the Bush team lied about how they captured Saddam when they really don’t seem to care that no WMD has been found?

It worries me how much control this administration has over information. If you remember, the Afghanistan War was reported only as a series of Pentagon and White House press releases. The mainstream press has not given proper skepticism to the words of Bush (whereas the alternative press has never given proper credit to the truth and wisdom to any of Bush’s words). The networks need to work around being the advocater of this Administration, while still reporting on it's agenda.

* Psychological Warfare is an integral part of any modern military. Psy Ops specialists are masters of perception and deception. Their most infamous work was building a mock armored battalion out of wood along the Kuwaiti border in 1991 to feign a direct invasion instead of the left hook through Iraq that actually took place. They also arrange for soldiers only over six feet tall to guard the Korean DMZ. They’re also in charge of propaganda and publishing and help in crafting press releases and press conferences. It was recently uncovered that Psy Ops was sending letters to the editor to local news papers and forging the names of troops as the signatories.


Links:
DebkaFILE - Very pro-Israeli hawkish site
Republicons - Obviously a bit partisan
More as I find them


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq Saddam Hussein Capture Bush staged Pys-Ops Pyschological Warfare