November 2, 2009 -- Memos left for the future, in case some archeologist many generations from now, poking through ancient rubble digs up this old hard drive and recovers the data therein stored, will get a feel of how things seemed to be the last week of October in the year 2009. At least from the perspective of one observer of the passing parade. Of course this computer will have one day crashed.
All computers in our day crash, starting with the first internet message sent October 29, 1969. Leonard Kleinrock, of UCLA who helped send it says, "We transmitted the 'L'. . . . and the 'O' -- and then the other computer crashed. He was trying to type the word 'login.'" Here forty years later things haven’t gotten much better but it is said it is almost impossible to completely erase everything on the hard drive so we will leave these memos for posterity.
Memo on dithering. Or at least “dithering” is what Dick Cheney, far right Hawks, and FOX News are calling that action, or inaction of the President and his administration while they carefully study and ponder how to proceed on our military conflict in Afghanistan. Here is the scene; the General says, “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize.”
That was not Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, to President Obama. That was Sergei Akhromeyev, the commander of the Soviet armed forces, to the Soviet Union’s Politburo on Nov. 13, 1986.
He was describing the mujahideen’s jihad against the godless Communist invaders and occupiers. In the spring of 1986 USSR President Gorbachev said, “We cannot leave in our underpants ... or without any”, which sounds like ex-VP Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard, and their FOX-TV camp followers. These quotes are from the records of the Politburo, now available to historians. Gorbachev expressed a fear of a Soviet pullout of Afghanistan similar to the U.S.A. unseemly flee from Viet Nam. But by February of 1989 when the Soviets pulled out after nine years of conflict around 15,000 Soviet soldiers and 800,000 Afghans had died. Other Soviet satellite countries got the message and began to revolt which contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union. What is the lesson here for the U.S.A.? Must we go down the same road?
When you sum up what you read about the situation you can understand “dithering” while you figure out what to do. The question is how many troops to commit? Should troops be deployed broadly or just in the cities and towns? (NYT columnist David Brooks) And more important, what are we trying to do there? If it’s nation building we’re out of luck no matter what the Cheney cronies say. There are two Afghanistans (boy doesn’t that sound familiar). There are major centers where, when conditions are stable, people live in western fashion with businesses, homes, cars, schools and women lead decent lives. One of the president’s brothers, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has developed a kind of Levittown in one major city selling homes to professionals, lawyers, doctors and the like as fast as he can build them (becoming fabulously rich in the process. The President is paid only $487 a month). The brother lived here in the Midwest for about ten years while the Taliban ruled. Ran a restaurant in Chicago.
Then there is the other Afghanistan, an incredibly wild country of wild tribes living in the 14th Century. Most of them, some forty million of them, are Pushtun. Some people, Brooks included think the “war” is winnable with more troops but as Brooks writes, “It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later.” And to try to win will take years and years. Ask the Russians.
Compounding the problem is that we have been there so long we are viewed as occupiers. And the government we support is corrupt and fraudulent, with little support from the general population. There was to be a rerun of the last presidential election, but the opposition candidate just announced he doesn’t want to do it again.
More troops like the surge in Iraq? It worked because it was preceded by an Iraqi uprising kicked off by a Sunni tribal leader, Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, who, using his own forces, set out to evict the pro-Al Qaeda thugs who had taken over Sunni towns and were imposing a fundamentalist lifestyle. Our troops gave that movement vital assistance to grow.
It now looks like the plan will be to secure, stabilize, and protect ten major populations centers and help train and develop police and local military forces while helping to build infrastructure. Instead of going head to head with the tribes, it is thought they might end up fighting one another. Some tribes it is thought may even be happy to become paid mercenaries. Some might be content to just be left alone. We can use drones from ships off the gulf or from our entrenched positions to attack when necessary. The thought is that we will be more secure here at home if we husband our resources. And we will avoid a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. If that works it will have been worth a dither.
Memo: Disappearing print.
Consensus is that newspapers are dying, while magazine are cutting back, combining, or closing and the printed page will soon disappear. Communication is going all electronic. Or is it? The book business seems to be thriving and not just on the Kindle electronic book system. People still want to hold a book in their hands and turn pages.
Publishers forked over $1.25 million as an advance to the once upon a time governor of Alaska Sarah Palin for her new book, “Going Rogue,” due out November 17th. Advance presales indicate they are going to come out very nicely. Americans always have been voyeurs who like to stop and view a train wreck.
Newsweek (still a magazine printed on paper) covers Al Gore’s new book “Our Choice: a Plan to Solve the Climate Crises.” The book uses “100 percent recycled paper for a savings of 1,513 trees and 126,000 pounds of carbon dioxide; all associated CO2 emissions offset through the CarbonNeutral Co.; all profits to the Alliance for Climate Protection” Sharon Begley of Newsweek reports.
Interviewed, Gore was pleased that $3.4 billion in stimulus money is for work on a smart grid and happy about the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions. He called attention to solar panels on his roof, and to his driveway, 300 feet beneath which seven geothermal wells gather the planet's warmth to heat and cool his house.
Trivia made a field trip to Austin last Friday to see and hear two remarkable women talk about their new books in taped interviews for Texas Monthly Talks.
Madeleine Albright, whose new book is “"Read My Pins: Stories From a Diplomat's Jewel Box", was something of a surprise. Very much at ease, she showed a delightful sense of humor, and capable of a robust laugh. If you judge the personality of people by whether you think you would enjoy sitting down across the table with them Mrs. Albright fills that bill. The work she described as doing for the UN sounds meaningful and important.
“When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present” is the title of the latest book by Gail Collins, who was not a surprise; she is just as warm, witty, and charming as you would expect from reading her columns twice a week in the New York Times. In her books she has followed and chronicled the changing role of women over the years in what has been a men’s world. And she lived it; the female editor of the publications of her college; as a young reporter launching a successful business serving over thirty newspapers; chosen as the first female editor of the New York Times editorial page. Those of us who missed the late Molly Ivins got the vacuum filled when Collins started writing her Times column. Sit down across the table with her? I would follow her back to Woodstock, or anywhere else she chose to go. She is a joy.
How many books can you get out of almost 2,000 pages? That is what the Health Care Reform Bill comes to as it heads for a vote in the House. Members will have 72 hours to study it before it is do-or-don’t-come time. Like Spock on the Star Ship Enterprise perhaps they can lay hands on it and think hard, although thinking hard might be a stretch for some of them in that body. The original Social Security Bill only took 64 pages. And Readers Digest is gone now when we really need it.
Memo: It’s nice to know we are all above average.
We have NYT columnist David Brooks to thank for this. Like the children in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon who are all above average, “ninety-four percent of college professors believe they are above average teachers, and 90 percent of drivers believe they are above average behind the wheel” according to researchers Paul J.H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo.
Memo: How to cash in on the health care reform bill.
Play the market. Insurance company stocks soared when Senator "Wandering Joe" Lieberman's vowed to filibuster a public option. In Huffington Post Lincoln Mitchell suggests since Joe wandered off the path of reason he seems to need attention and feel important. You could almost feel sorry for him except he keeps gumming up the works.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates 96 percent of legal residents too young to receive Medicare would get health insurance. It also estimates that the House bill, in particular, would actually reduce the deficit by $100 billion over the next ten years.
Women have a tough time getting a break. Unless they fix it, as it stands now, domestic violence is considered a pre-existing condition by some insurance companies. Currently women pay as much as 50 percent more for the same coverage a man gets. That’s especially tough in Texas where, under the guidance of Rick Perry and his fellow Republicans, from 2000 to 2009, health insurance premiums have risen 91.6 percent. No wonder Texas had more uninsured people than any other state. Let’s give Perry a hand; the back of same.
Memo: Eating our way to oblivion.
The late author Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the making of wine in his book “Breakfast of Champions” that it happens when a little living creature (yeast) gets into a liquid that holds sugar in suspension, eats the sugar and excretes alcohol. But when the alcohol content reaches a certain level, now somewhere up to about fifteen percent the yeast dies. Therefore, as he put it, it “drowns in its own excreta.” A lovely thought. But if you believe what’s being written about lately it describes what is happening to the human race. We are at risk, in a way, of drowning in our own waste or wastefulness. And factory faming seems to have a lot to do with it.
It does not look as though the new Al Gore book won’t have much to say about this, but a book by Jonathan Safran Foer, “Eating Animals”, has stirred up a lot of commentary about the deleterious effect on the environment as well as the morality of the factory farming of living creatures. From what is being said about the book, I suggest you don’t read it if you are a carnivore.
I really did not expect sweet young Natalie Portman, although as a multi-lingual graduate of Harvard who is going for a doctorate is nothing like the stereotype of a Hollywood bimbo, to be writing about pig shit, as she did in a Huffington Post about factory farms: “The copious amounts of pig shit sprayed into the air that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed animals, and the origins of the swine flu epidemic, whose story has gripped the nation …”
Author Foer’s book by all accounts is more of a stomach turner than the famous book by Upton Sinclair in 1906, “The Jungle,” that laid waste to the meat packing business that led to public outcry and regulatory laws. If you thought nailing the feet of live geese to boards, then force feeding them to enlarge their livers for Paté de Foie Gras is disgusting, it doesn’t hold a candle to descriptions of animals jammed in tight quarters shoulder to shoulder, sometimes in the dark, fed manufactured feed, treated with antibiotics. Overlook the inhumane part of it and you get the big problem; it is terrible for the environment and is a major contributor to the climate change crises.
We eat a lot of meat in this country and 99 percent of is comes from or is processed in factory operations. The average American in 2003 ate 273 pounds of meat … and it shows. People in Okinawa eat less than half as much and are the world's longest-lived people, healthiest by any way you look at it.
Well, we can expect our government to address this problem, right? The House did by voting to bar the EPA from mandating the reporting of greenhouse gas emissions generated by cattle and hog producers. I suppose another way to pollute is by the lobby process, polluting the political process.
Should we all, then, become vegans like Miss Portman? (most red bloodied American males would follow her anywhere). Should we join the locavore movement, eating food that is locally produced, not moved long distances to market? There is a movement to grow your own chickens in suburban back yards which has taken hold in places like Austin, Texas, where they are very serious about it. I doubt, though, if I will ever hear the crowing of roosters in my little subdivision, as pastoral as that would be.
There are not yet chickens to be seen at the White House, but this week the First Lady conducted the first Fall Harvest from the White House garden and, according to the Baltimore Sun, “collected 223 pounds of huge sweet potatoes, carrots, fennel, lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli, turnips, eggplant, peppers, tomatillos, and greens.” At White House signing ceremonies usually pens are given out No word if Mrs. Obama passed out ceremonial green beans.
But wait. With even a vegetarian enthusiast like Andrew Weil, M.D in the Huffington Post calling for responsibly raised beef, pork and poultry, there is another side to this story as laid out in an OpEd piece in the New York Times by Nicolette Hahn Niman, a lawyer and livestock rancher, and author of “Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms.” The greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides. Take everything into consideration like processing, transportation, storage, retailing and food preparation, she says and a “potato chip, for instance, turns out to be a dreadfully climate-hostile food.” And “Wetland rice fields alone account for as much as 29 percent of the world’s human-generated methane.” And I’ve been eating rice milk on my cereal.
So what if we eat soy? Worse. Much worse. Most of the world’s soy beans come from Brazil where they clear out forests to farm them. Deforestation is not a good thing. Over half of Brazil’s soy harvest is controlled by a handful of international agribusiness companies, which ship it all over the world for animal feed and food products, causing emissions in the process. Our lives will be ruined by Tofu?
The rancher’s point was that raising free-range cattle on grass is better for the land, more climate friendly and produces healthier meat. When buffalo roamed all over the middle of the U.S. they were good for the soil, a lot better than, say, sugar beets. Tastier, too.
So how do we help save the planet? About half of the food produced in the United States is thrown away is the claim, so eat up or take smaller portions. Avoid processed foods and those from industrialized farms; buy local and in season. Put a clutch of chickens in your back yard and tell your homeowners association to jam it; you are saving the world one cluck at a time.
I have some other suggestions. Make use of the natural wild vegetation that grows locally. In my part of the world a plant called “poke sallet” has been eaten by generations of share croppers. It grew wild on a weekend farm I once owned with my father. An uncle, a surgeon, was convinced of its curative powers would come every year, harvest it, and fill his freezer to be sure he was never without it. Let the dandelions thrive in your back yard. The tender leaves are edible. Every home should have at least one pecan tree or almond tree in climate zones permitting. Grow your own cactus. The de-thorned pads are delicious. And they look good in a Xeriscaped yard. You do have a Xeriscaped yard, don't you? The planet needs you.
As for animal protein, my choice to replace beef and pork is frog legs. As it happens, I’ve eaten frog legs twice in the last two weeks and they’re delicious. No greenhouse gas emissions from frog legs. This could be a boon to all of the cat fish farmers and craw fish farmers who abandoned the business when they lost out to Asian farmers (it became cheaper to import crawfish from the orient than to raise them in Louisiana) and there must be plenty of abandoned ponds suitable for raising amphibians. How about Ribbet McNuggets? Or an amphiburger?
Another alternative is snake. Nothing wrong with snake. I’ve eaten it a number of times and it tastes like chicken (it is always said that whatever the exotic wild meat is that it “tastes like chicken”). We’ve got plenty of snakes in this country and a lot of people out of work who could become snake wranglers. Towns all over Oklahoma and Texas, even Alabama and Georgia have annual snake roundups. Rattlesnake chili is a feature at such events. It tastes like a Cornish game hen some say. Without feathers.
The trouble with this plan is that if we dramatically reduced the wild snake population we might be covered up with rodents. Of course people did eat prairie dogs at one time. Buffalo Bill had prairie dog on his game menus for the dinners he hosted for wealthy Eastern tycoons. Maybe we need alternative food like we need alternative fuels … snake meat loaf … snake tacos … chicken fried snake. A little pricey perhaps. Rattlesnake meat now runs about $30 a pound.
This is probably not a food you want to grow yourself. A viper pit in your back yard is probably not a good idea. Better stick to chickens.
