The Earth has climate change - too many SUVs burning gas.
Mars and Jupiter have climate change - do they have too many SUVs too?
As Frank Sinatra sang (Fly me to the Moon): “Let me see what Spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”
Well, Frank, we know it’s getting hotter.
Same where you are?
Jupiter is an enormous gas bag, like Al Gore. Could this be evidence that Al is an alien, perhaps our first Jupeterian?
Will they be sweltering on the rings of Saturn, with a hot breeze blowing up Uranus?
Friday, May 23, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
There Will Always be an England, Always Muddling Through
We showed up for our bus from the Heathrow Holiday Inn at 4:15 AM, and it showed up at 4:45 to take us to Heathrow for a 7:05 departure. Not to worry.
I had double-checked at the Holiday Inn desk that our flight on British Airways to Istanbul at 7:05 would leave from Terminal 1. When we got to Terminal 1, we found a long line of passengers waiting at the locked gate to the British Airways check-in area. At one side was another line, this one of British Airways employees waiting to go to work. No one had the key. Not to worry.
Finally the door was unlocked and we streamed inside, British Airways employees to one side of the check-in counters, passengers to the other. I asked an British Airways agent who appeared to be directing traffic where Alice and I should start. She informed us that we should start in Terminal 5, because British Airways flights to Istanbul no longer leave from Terminal 1 - and hadn’t for a long time. Not to worry.
If we passed back through Terminal 1 we would find a lift - elevator - to take us to the Express Train to Terminal 5. As we and several other distraught passengers wandered down a long corridor to the Express Train to Terminal 5, a Heathrow transportation specialist informed us that the trains were not running at the moment. He suggested we walk back partially through Terminal 1 and take the Underground to Terminal 5. Not to worry.
Fortunately a “wisdom of the crowd” enabled our group of confused and distraught passengers to make the correct turns and reach the Underground - Subway - to take us from Terminal 1 to Terminal 5. It is amazing how a group of people, not one of which knows the way through new territories, finds its way unerringly. Unerringly may not be a good word to use in context of going to the latest airport wonder of wonders, the infamous Heathrow Terminal 5, which commanded banner headlines for weeks after its opening two months ago because of the monumental foul-ups passengers and their baggage suffered in and through it. Not to worry.
We were in Terminal 5, human guinea pigs in the development of a new world being, World Traveler. Among many things, World Traveler will know how to do much travel processing itself. For example, it will know to go to small kiosks, scan in a passport page, and punch in flight information that will cause the production of boarding passes and other apparently necessary and perhaps even useful pieces of paper. From there you take it all to a Fast Bags station, where an attendant examines the papers and places a baggage tag on each piece of checked luggage.
Then we were directed to Security South, apparently because it was much farther away than Security North, where we tried to enter only to be chased away to the South. At this point I became alarmed about not having a gate assigned for our flight, and was told we would get it after Security. Not to worry.
The Security posts were all manned by Indians, Pakistanis, and South Africans, which meant they were all better and clearer speakers of English than our English speaking citizens working in Airport Security stateside, and far more polite.
We quickly exited Security, still without a gate assignment. Our flight number 678, British Airways to Istanbul, was on the board, but with no indicated gate. So with less than an hour to go to takeoff, we went to a snack shop for a light breakfast with a good view of the departure board. Not to worry.
As we finished breakfast, our gate assignment appeared, A20, only a short block equivalent away. I began to not worry.
All went well. Our hotel sent a driver who met us at the Istanbul Airport and whisked us to the Sumengen Hotel, three blocks from the Blue Mosque and only a couple more blocks to Aya Sophia. Suddenly all is easy and relaxed, and that worries me.
I had double-checked at the Holiday Inn desk that our flight on British Airways to Istanbul at 7:05 would leave from Terminal 1. When we got to Terminal 1, we found a long line of passengers waiting at the locked gate to the British Airways check-in area. At one side was another line, this one of British Airways employees waiting to go to work. No one had the key. Not to worry.
Finally the door was unlocked and we streamed inside, British Airways employees to one side of the check-in counters, passengers to the other. I asked an British Airways agent who appeared to be directing traffic where Alice and I should start. She informed us that we should start in Terminal 5, because British Airways flights to Istanbul no longer leave from Terminal 1 - and hadn’t for a long time. Not to worry.
If we passed back through Terminal 1 we would find a lift - elevator - to take us to the Express Train to Terminal 5. As we and several other distraught passengers wandered down a long corridor to the Express Train to Terminal 5, a Heathrow transportation specialist informed us that the trains were not running at the moment. He suggested we walk back partially through Terminal 1 and take the Underground to Terminal 5. Not to worry.
Fortunately a “wisdom of the crowd” enabled our group of confused and distraught passengers to make the correct turns and reach the Underground - Subway - to take us from Terminal 1 to Terminal 5. It is amazing how a group of people, not one of which knows the way through new territories, finds its way unerringly. Unerringly may not be a good word to use in context of going to the latest airport wonder of wonders, the infamous Heathrow Terminal 5, which commanded banner headlines for weeks after its opening two months ago because of the monumental foul-ups passengers and their baggage suffered in and through it. Not to worry.
We were in Terminal 5, human guinea pigs in the development of a new world being, World Traveler. Among many things, World Traveler will know how to do much travel processing itself. For example, it will know to go to small kiosks, scan in a passport page, and punch in flight information that will cause the production of boarding passes and other apparently necessary and perhaps even useful pieces of paper. From there you take it all to a Fast Bags station, where an attendant examines the papers and places a baggage tag on each piece of checked luggage.
Then we were directed to Security South, apparently because it was much farther away than Security North, where we tried to enter only to be chased away to the South. At this point I became alarmed about not having a gate assigned for our flight, and was told we would get it after Security. Not to worry.
The Security posts were all manned by Indians, Pakistanis, and South Africans, which meant they were all better and clearer speakers of English than our English speaking citizens working in Airport Security stateside, and far more polite.
We quickly exited Security, still without a gate assignment. Our flight number 678, British Airways to Istanbul, was on the board, but with no indicated gate. So with less than an hour to go to takeoff, we went to a snack shop for a light breakfast with a good view of the departure board. Not to worry.
As we finished breakfast, our gate assignment appeared, A20, only a short block equivalent away. I began to not worry.
All went well. Our hotel sent a driver who met us at the Istanbul Airport and whisked us to the Sumengen Hotel, three blocks from the Blue Mosque and only a couple more blocks to Aya Sophia. Suddenly all is easy and relaxed, and that worries me.
Friday, May 16, 2008
An Argument I didn't have in Anchor Bay
On my short walk from Banana Belt Properties to buy The San Francisco Chronicle at the Anchor Bay Store, I passed two young men standing on the sidewalk. As I went by the taller – dark haired, tall and thin, with a short scraggly beard and unkempt clothes – asked me: “Are you the guy with the Bush bumper sticker?”
“Yep, that’s me” I replied. I have a Bush/Cheney sticker that I put on the bumper of my 1999 Toyota Rav-4 shortly after I bought it used in 2000.
“How do you justify that?” he asked.
I assumed he meant how could I justify supporting President Bush. Since I was in a hurry to buy my newspaper and get home – I was already very late for lunch, and was sure Alice was very worried (she was) – I answered: “I’m an American. I don’t have to justify anything to you,” and walked on.
“Oh yes you do,” he called after me.
I hurriedly bought my newspaper, and walked out and back towards my car, eager to have a few more words with the impertinent young man. I was going to remind him that over 2.5 million Americans voted for President Bush in a total of two elections than voted for his Democrat opponents, that he had received more votes in 2004 than any president ever, and unlike Bill Clinton, had received over 50 percent of the votes.
My purpose in presenting these facts was to demonstrate I had a lot of company in supporting President Bush. Unfortunately the young man was nowhere to be seen.
Pity. I was eager to be argumentative, and particularly wanted to remind him that we hadn’t been attacked since 9/11. I’m sure I would have been wasting my time and words, and in retrospect it was a good thing he was gone.
Alice would not have appreciated me being any later than I already was.
I saw him again a couple of days later. He was getting into an old car I had noticed earlier when I walked past it. It had been vacant at that time, but it caught my attention because it looked like someone had been living in it. Probably the young man was.
He drove off apparently without noticing me.
“Yep, that’s me” I replied. I have a Bush/Cheney sticker that I put on the bumper of my 1999 Toyota Rav-4 shortly after I bought it used in 2000.
“How do you justify that?” he asked.
I assumed he meant how could I justify supporting President Bush. Since I was in a hurry to buy my newspaper and get home – I was already very late for lunch, and was sure Alice was very worried (she was) – I answered: “I’m an American. I don’t have to justify anything to you,” and walked on.
“Oh yes you do,” he called after me.
I hurriedly bought my newspaper, and walked out and back towards my car, eager to have a few more words with the impertinent young man. I was going to remind him that over 2.5 million Americans voted for President Bush in a total of two elections than voted for his Democrat opponents, that he had received more votes in 2004 than any president ever, and unlike Bill Clinton, had received over 50 percent of the votes.
My purpose in presenting these facts was to demonstrate I had a lot of company in supporting President Bush. Unfortunately the young man was nowhere to be seen.
Pity. I was eager to be argumentative, and particularly wanted to remind him that we hadn’t been attacked since 9/11. I’m sure I would have been wasting my time and words, and in retrospect it was a good thing he was gone.
Alice would not have appreciated me being any later than I already was.
I saw him again a couple of days later. He was getting into an old car I had noticed earlier when I walked past it. It had been vacant at that time, but it caught my attention because it looked like someone had been living in it. Probably the young man was.
He drove off apparently without noticing me.
Farm Bill - The Wrong Bill at the Wrong Time
“With this legislation we will help families facing high food prices,” said Nancy Pelosi about the Farm Bill just passed by the House and Senate, and facing a presidential veto.
Democrats continue their policy of causing problems and then “fixing” them.
Why are food prices high? How about government subsidies and mandates for increased ethanol production? Food costs are also high because of increased fuel costs, and among many good reasons for higher fuel costs are several bad ones, again thanks to government stupidity.
Liberals don’t want the United States to develop proven sources of oil, gas, and energy by drilling in Alaska and off-shore, increasing refining capacity (half of what it was in 1982), increasing nuclear production, and developing our huge reserves of coal and tar sand. Instead they want to develop “renewable” energy sources, such as biofuels and wind and solar power, which are very limited in potential and compete for scarce government and agricultural resources.
Renewable energy: even with the high cost of oil, still requires taxpayer subsidies; competes for land, water, and open space with food-production agriculture, parks, and other recreation needs; and requires 100% conventional stand-by generation up and spinning for times when the Sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow, the rains don’t come, the rains do come with devastating storms and floods, and other natural disasters.
Cold, hard facts: fuel from plants needed to replace kerosene as jet fuel at today’s low needs (compared to future demand) would required farming an area twice the size of Germany, and it would take almost a century of greenhouse gas savings to repay the greenhouse gases released by placing the land into production. Of course, all surface transportation would have to be powered by electricity.
Backers of the Farm Bill are quick to point out that it is not just about paying obscene sums to incredibly wealthy farmers for just a few commodity crops, it’s about providing food aid to the most overfed humans in the history of humanity on this planet. Between the crops subsidized, and the food stamps provided, it should be called the Obesity Support Bill, or from the medical side of the issue, Diabetes-R-Us.
Actually, this bill should be called the Buffett Line Bill, because it was loaded up with a lot of something for everyone. Big City legislators get food stamps (and the defrauders of the food stamp program get ten billion dollars more to play with), rural ones get subsidies for crops with recent increases from 45 to 126 percent, environmentalists get some land conservation funds, and on and on – in other words, everyone’s pot was sweetened.
Except the taxpayers. Don’t Democrats always find that there are better uses for government funds when Republicans want to strengthen national defense? Don’t they always suggest it would be better to spend on education, or health care, or any of hundreds of government give-away programs near and dear to Liberal hearts?
So where are the Democrats up in arms about government wastefully subsidizing the obscenely wealthy? It looks like Democrats are still on their extended holiday from their ideals.
Democrats continue their policy of causing problems and then “fixing” them.
Why are food prices high? How about government subsidies and mandates for increased ethanol production? Food costs are also high because of increased fuel costs, and among many good reasons for higher fuel costs are several bad ones, again thanks to government stupidity.
Liberals don’t want the United States to develop proven sources of oil, gas, and energy by drilling in Alaska and off-shore, increasing refining capacity (half of what it was in 1982), increasing nuclear production, and developing our huge reserves of coal and tar sand. Instead they want to develop “renewable” energy sources, such as biofuels and wind and solar power, which are very limited in potential and compete for scarce government and agricultural resources.
Renewable energy: even with the high cost of oil, still requires taxpayer subsidies; competes for land, water, and open space with food-production agriculture, parks, and other recreation needs; and requires 100% conventional stand-by generation up and spinning for times when the Sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow, the rains don’t come, the rains do come with devastating storms and floods, and other natural disasters.
Cold, hard facts: fuel from plants needed to replace kerosene as jet fuel at today’s low needs (compared to future demand) would required farming an area twice the size of Germany, and it would take almost a century of greenhouse gas savings to repay the greenhouse gases released by placing the land into production. Of course, all surface transportation would have to be powered by electricity.
Backers of the Farm Bill are quick to point out that it is not just about paying obscene sums to incredibly wealthy farmers for just a few commodity crops, it’s about providing food aid to the most overfed humans in the history of humanity on this planet. Between the crops subsidized, and the food stamps provided, it should be called the Obesity Support Bill, or from the medical side of the issue, Diabetes-R-Us.
Actually, this bill should be called the Buffett Line Bill, because it was loaded up with a lot of something for everyone. Big City legislators get food stamps (and the defrauders of the food stamp program get ten billion dollars more to play with), rural ones get subsidies for crops with recent increases from 45 to 126 percent, environmentalists get some land conservation funds, and on and on – in other words, everyone’s pot was sweetened.
Except the taxpayers. Don’t Democrats always find that there are better uses for government funds when Republicans want to strengthen national defense? Don’t they always suggest it would be better to spend on education, or health care, or any of hundreds of government give-away programs near and dear to Liberal hearts?
So where are the Democrats up in arms about government wastefully subsidizing the obscenely wealthy? It looks like Democrats are still on their extended holiday from their ideals.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
MSM Obsession with Veteran Suicide
Our Main Stream Media (MSM) are obsessed with trying to make stories out of active and veteran military matters, as long as they’re not positive.
CBS News and Perky Katie Couric hyperventilated over a story about an “epidemic of veteran suicides,” in which CBS News unwittingly proved that veterans committed suicide at the same rate as comparably aged American males, and at a far lower rate than the rates for many nations, regardless of age and sex.
Instead of reporting an epidemic of veteran suicides, CBS News would have been much more informative if they reported that Russians committed suicide at a rate of 34 per 100,000 per year, almost double our predominantly male veterans, or that French males regardless of age have a higher suicide rate (27.5).
Or how about reporting that veterans commit suicide at a lower rate than same-aged American males? In an Associated Press article in The San Francisco Chronicle: “VA mental health chief sorry about 'Shh!' on suicidal vets,” by Kimberly Hefling, Associated Press, May 7, 2008, information was buried in the article that demonstrated Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have a lower suicide rate than American civilian males. Of nearly 500,000 veterans who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq and then left the military from 2002 to 2005, 144 took their own lives, for a suicide rate of 9.6 per 100,000 per year.
The suicide rate for American males was 17.9 in 2002, or almost double the rate for Afghanistan and Iraq veterans.
Why don’t our Main Stream Media provide a context and perspective on issues like veteran suicides?
Is it because they can’t, or that they don’t want to?
Hint: I can do it, and all I have is an internet connection giving me access to Google.
CBS News and Perky Katie Couric hyperventilated over a story about an “epidemic of veteran suicides,” in which CBS News unwittingly proved that veterans committed suicide at the same rate as comparably aged American males, and at a far lower rate than the rates for many nations, regardless of age and sex.
Instead of reporting an epidemic of veteran suicides, CBS News would have been much more informative if they reported that Russians committed suicide at a rate of 34 per 100,000 per year, almost double our predominantly male veterans, or that French males regardless of age have a higher suicide rate (27.5).
Or how about reporting that veterans commit suicide at a lower rate than same-aged American males? In an Associated Press article in The San Francisco Chronicle: “VA mental health chief sorry about 'Shh!' on suicidal vets,” by Kimberly Hefling, Associated Press, May 7, 2008, information was buried in the article that demonstrated Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have a lower suicide rate than American civilian males. Of nearly 500,000 veterans who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq and then left the military from 2002 to 2005, 144 took their own lives, for a suicide rate of 9.6 per 100,000 per year.
The suicide rate for American males was 17.9 in 2002, or almost double the rate for Afghanistan and Iraq veterans.
Why don’t our Main Stream Media provide a context and perspective on issues like veteran suicides?
Is it because they can’t, or that they don’t want to?
Hint: I can do it, and all I have is an internet connection giving me access to Google.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Arab Blood on Arab Hands in Gaza
This is a response to a Letter to the Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. The text of the letter follows my reply.
The one thing Michael Scott (Letters, May 2) forgot to mention in his snide diatribe against Israel was that Arab nations violently defied United Nations resolutions beginning in 1947 when the UN formed Israel, and have been in defiance ever since. Earlier, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1940 allied Muslims with Nazis to exterminate Jews. Rather than being pious supporters of UN resolutions, as Mr. Scott implies, the Arab Middle East states have been bent on annihilation of Jews.
Prior to the Six Days War in 1967, Egypt expelled the UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai preparatory to launching what Syria’s then defense leader Hafez al-Assad termed a “battle of annihilation.” A week later the Arabs had a new name for it, “The Setback.” However, Arab leaders noted that although Israel won again, Arabs only had to win once.
Mr. Scott calls Israel “morally culpable for the collective punishment being imposed on the Palestinian people in Gaza,” but doesn’t add that Israel is responding to rocket attacks launched against civilians that are condoned by Gaza leaders. If Gazans don’t like what their elected leaders are doing, they can "un-elect" them.
Muslim, Christian and Jew are all People of The Book and should heed the New Testament admonition, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”
This is the letter that inspired my response.
The one thing Michael Scott (Letters, May 2) forgot to mention in his snide diatribe against Israel was that Arab nations violently defied United Nations resolutions beginning in 1947 when the UN formed Israel, and have been in defiance ever since. Earlier, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1940 allied Muslims with Nazis to exterminate Jews. Rather than being pious supporters of UN resolutions, as Mr. Scott implies, the Arab Middle East states have been bent on annihilation of Jews.
Prior to the Six Days War in 1967, Egypt expelled the UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai preparatory to launching what Syria’s then defense leader Hafez al-Assad termed a “battle of annihilation.” A week later the Arabs had a new name for it, “The Setback.” However, Arab leaders noted that although Israel won again, Arabs only had to win once.
Mr. Scott calls Israel “morally culpable for the collective punishment being imposed on the Palestinian people in Gaza,” but doesn’t add that Israel is responding to rocket attacks launched against civilians that are condoned by Gaza leaders. If Gazans don’t like what their elected leaders are doing, they can "un-elect" them.
Muslim, Christian and Jew are all People of The Book and should heed the New Testament admonition, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”
This is the letter that inspired my response.
At least Carter, for all his faults, isn't mindlessly parroting right-wing Israel's talking points when looking for solutions, but then I know people like Mr. Weiner don't have time to think about peace when all his energy is being spent defending a country that not only continues to defy United Nations resolutions, but is morally culpable for the collective punishment being imposed on the Palestinian people in Gaza for having the temerity to vote for a party the West doesn't approve of.
MICHAEL SCOTT
San Francisco
Friday, May 02, 2008
San Francisco Chronicle's Misleading Reporting of Veteran Suicide Trial
Recently I had a frustrating experience trying to correct very poor and biased reporting of a trial in San Francisco on charges brought against the Veterans Administration by two lawyers for two veterans advocate groups concerning veterans' suicides.
(Below is my original letter I sent on April 23, 2008 that The San Francisco Chronicle ignored)
Editor
“More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week,” according to veterans advocates, began a San Francisco Chronicle front-page story: VA stalls on care while 18 veterans a day commit suicide, judge is told, by Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer, Tuesday, April 22, 2008.
That’s terrible. Terrible journalism, that is. The rate of 18 veterans a day committing suicide is for all veterans, not just veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For comparison purposes, the acknowledged VA veteran suicide rate is 19 per 100,000 per year, which is about the same or lower than the suicide rates for both sexes in entire countries: Japan, Belgium, Finland, Cuba, France, Austria, Korea, and Switzerland.
In US male veterans to all males comparisons, which is the closest I could get to “apples to apples,” the entire male populations of over forty nations have higher or similar suicide rates than our veterans (the rate for all American males is 17.9). Our active duty military suicide rate is 11 per 100,000 per year, about half our civilian rate for same-age males. From an analysis of suicide statistics, it actually shows it is safer from a suicide perspective to be a veteran or serving on active military duty.
True, but you’ll never see that in a Chronicle headline on the front page.
(I e-mailed the following letter after waiting several days and not getting a response to my orignal letter above.)
Editor
I sent a letter to the Chronicle Editor April 22, 2008 about errors in a Chronicle story about a lawsuit by veterans advocates. More recent Chronicle news stories on the trial are bringing out that plaintiffs' lawyer Arturo Gonzalez does not understand that the Veterans Administration suicide numbers are for all 26 million veterans, not just the 1.7 million Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans (whose 144 suicides over a four-year period produce a very low suicide rate of 2 per 100,000 per year, less than one-quarter of the general population rate). I don't understand how Gonzalez's ignorance of such a basic fact could prevent the judge from throwing this case out immediately. As a minimum the Chronicle should correct its previous reporting on this issue and set the record straight.
(A Chronicle columnist informed me that the Chronicle had run a correction on April 26, 2008, the day after the Chronicle had run an article by the columnist containing similar erroneous information from Mr. Erspamer, lawyer for one of the plaintiffs. The San Francisco Chronicle ran the correction two days after I had informed them of the error in their original April 22, 2008 story on veteran suicides.)
Correction:
-- An article on Tuesday about the trial of a lawsuit by veterans' groups over health treatment mischaracterized a government report that 18 veterans a day commit suicide. The report referred to veterans of all wars, not just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(I dashed off an immediate reply.)
I found the correction, but it doesn't tell the story. Both lawyers, Erspamer and Gonzalez, according to quotes that both you (the columnist) and Bob Egelko ran with, said that the 18 suicides a day were Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans.
Don't you think there is a story to be told about how you and the court were given misleading information, information that supposedly formed the major basis for this issue to be brought to court?
The article didn't "mischaracterize" the government report about veteran suicides, the veteran advocates' attorneys did.
(I had copied the Chronicle's Readers Representative on the above message, and at this point he entered the discussion.)
Mike ...
Since you copied me on this, let me jump in. I might be misreading, but I don't see anywhere that Erspamer or Gonzalez asserted 18 suicides per day for Iraq/Afghanistan vets -- at least not in Bob Egelko's stories or Chuck Nevius' column. The lawyers' comments referred to 18 per day for veterans, period. The Iraq/Afghanistan qualifier was the paper's mistake. It mischaracterized, not the lawyers.
In the Egelko story, Erspamer was described this way: "He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day - a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 e-mail - and the agency's backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, an increase of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003."
That line was interpreted in the editing process to mean veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan -- the paper's error. In the Nevius column, the Erspamer quote is: "If you add up the veterans' suicides among those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and compare it to the total combat deaths, the veteran suicides are higher," says Erspamer, who introduced a VA e-mail at the trial that showed an average of 18 vets a day are committing suicide. "The VA doesn't want that out."
There might be a little ambiguity there, but strictly speaking Erspamer's not saying 18 a day attributable to Iraq/Afghanistan. Now as to your point about whether Erspamer is misleading the court, I think the jury's out on that, to steal a phrase. Using rough numbers of five years of war and 4,000 combat deaths, it would take slightly over 2 suicides per day among Iraq/Afghanistan vets to exceed the combat figures. e.g.: 4000/(5*365). My arithmetic might be faulty here, so feel free to critique, but my point is that it would be possible to exceed the combat death toll without ever approaching the 18 suicides per day figure.
Hope I'm not confusing things.
(Again I sent the immediate reply below.)
Thank you for your reply to my concerns. Although I profoundly disagree with your analysis and conclusion, I appreciate you took the time to respond. I hope you will carefully and with an open mind consider what I present below. I gleaned these five items from the Chronicle this week. The last item is courtesy your e-mail.
I begin my comments and analysis after the fifth item. I added the bold highlighting to the items.
Item 1
Item 2
Item 3
Item 4
Item 5
(My reply to the Readers Representative.)
I guess you don’t read your own paper. In an AP release April 25 covering this trial (my Item 3, first paragraph), the VA states that “144 combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide between October 2001 and December 2005.” That’s 36 a year, e.g. 144/4, compared to 4,000 combat deaths in five years.
I can understand why your reporter, Bob Egelko, was confused about the 18 suicides per day being by veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq (my Item 4, second paragraph). That’s what Ronald Maris, a University of South Carolina sociology professor, apparently told U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti in San Francisco, according to Egelko’s April 23 report.
Clearly Gonzalez was misleading the court. When the VA stated the 144 veteran suicides in four years involved Iraq and Afghanistan service, Gonzalez contested that and contended that 18 veterans per day were committing suicide (my Item 3). That was then countered by the VA, but it is obvious that Gonzalez was referring to suicides by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
Based on information I gleaned from the pages of the Chronicle this past week, is the jury still out, as you say, that Erspamer, Maris, and Gonzalez were providing misleading information? If so, the jury must be deaf, dumb, and blind, and have no nose for news.
By the way, Dick, can’t anyone at the Chronicle critically analyze statistical information? Veterans committing suicide at the rate of 18 per day * 365 days = 6570 per year.
6570 veteran suicides per year divided by 26,000,000 veterans = 0.000253
0.000253 * 100, 000 = 25 veteran suicides per 100,000 per year.
Suicide rates are conventionally expressed as the number of suicides per 100,000 persons per year.
A couple of months ago CBS News did an exhaustive five-month study of veteran suicides and determined rates of 18 to 20 per 100,000 per year. In their ignorance of world suicide rates, Katie Couric and crew trumpeted their finding as an “epidemic of veteran suicides,” even though the rate they found was low by world standards. Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans: A CBS News Investigation Uncovers A Suicide Rate For Veterans Twice That Of Other Americans
(My hint to CBS News – Katie, the suicide rate for veterans is twice that of other Americans, because over half of the other Americans are females, and less than ten percent of veterans are females. Also, Katie, a large percentage of other Americans are sub-teen children, and none of the veterans are.)
This link is to my blog post trying to correct CBS News and Perky Katie Couric for the hash they made of reporting veteran suicides. They did the same thing as the Chronicle, and ignored the facts to preserve the bashing of the Bush administration.
As a basis for comparison, eight nations have suicide rates above 25 per 100,000 per year regardless of gender or age (Russia’s is 34, according to the World Health Organization), and Japan’s at 24 per 100,000 per year is only slightly lower. Use this link to check on my statistics. I Googled it, just as any quasi-competent journalist would.
Using the CBS News veteran suicide rate, roughly twenty nations have higher all population rates. In fact, the suicide rates for all males in thirty-seven nations are as high or higher than the American veteran rate.
Comparing apples to apples, at least twenty-one nations of the world have higher male suicide rates than American veterans, and those rates include the males of those nations of all ages – you know, like babies and sub-teens, and middle-aged men, all who have traditionally low suicide rates.
Even France, with its health system that is lauded by believers in national health systems, has a suicide rate for all French males of 27.5, or ten percent higher than our veterans’ rate which is heavily skewed towards aging Vietnam era men. Older men have relatively high suicide rates because of illness and infirmity.
I’m sure someone at the Chronicle in an editor position must be aware of this sort of information. Or should be.
There is a real news story in all this, but it doesn’t look like the Chronicle is capable of digging it out, no matter how hard I try to assist.
(Below is my original letter I sent on April 23, 2008 that The San Francisco Chronicle ignored)
Editor
“More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week,” according to veterans advocates, began a San Francisco Chronicle front-page story: VA stalls on care while 18 veterans a day commit suicide, judge is told, by Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer, Tuesday, April 22, 2008.
That’s terrible. Terrible journalism, that is. The rate of 18 veterans a day committing suicide is for all veterans, not just veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For comparison purposes, the acknowledged VA veteran suicide rate is 19 per 100,000 per year, which is about the same or lower than the suicide rates for both sexes in entire countries: Japan, Belgium, Finland, Cuba, France, Austria, Korea, and Switzerland.
In US male veterans to all males comparisons, which is the closest I could get to “apples to apples,” the entire male populations of over forty nations have higher or similar suicide rates than our veterans (the rate for all American males is 17.9). Our active duty military suicide rate is 11 per 100,000 per year, about half our civilian rate for same-age males. From an analysis of suicide statistics, it actually shows it is safer from a suicide perspective to be a veteran or serving on active military duty.
True, but you’ll never see that in a Chronicle headline on the front page.
(I e-mailed the following letter after waiting several days and not getting a response to my orignal letter above.)
Editor
I sent a letter to the Chronicle Editor April 22, 2008 about errors in a Chronicle story about a lawsuit by veterans advocates. More recent Chronicle news stories on the trial are bringing out that plaintiffs' lawyer Arturo Gonzalez does not understand that the Veterans Administration suicide numbers are for all 26 million veterans, not just the 1.7 million Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans (whose 144 suicides over a four-year period produce a very low suicide rate of 2 per 100,000 per year, less than one-quarter of the general population rate). I don't understand how Gonzalez's ignorance of such a basic fact could prevent the judge from throwing this case out immediately. As a minimum the Chronicle should correct its previous reporting on this issue and set the record straight.
(A Chronicle columnist informed me that the Chronicle had run a correction on April 26, 2008, the day after the Chronicle had run an article by the columnist containing similar erroneous information from Mr. Erspamer, lawyer for one of the plaintiffs. The San Francisco Chronicle ran the correction two days after I had informed them of the error in their original April 22, 2008 story on veteran suicides.)
Correction:
-- An article on Tuesday about the trial of a lawsuit by veterans' groups over health treatment mischaracterized a government report that 18 veterans a day commit suicide. The report referred to veterans of all wars, not just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(I dashed off an immediate reply.)
I found the correction, but it doesn't tell the story. Both lawyers, Erspamer and Gonzalez, according to quotes that both you (the columnist) and Bob Egelko ran with, said that the 18 suicides a day were Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans.
Don't you think there is a story to be told about how you and the court were given misleading information, information that supposedly formed the major basis for this issue to be brought to court?
The article didn't "mischaracterize" the government report about veteran suicides, the veteran advocates' attorneys did.
(I had copied the Chronicle's Readers Representative on the above message, and at this point he entered the discussion.)
Mike ...
Since you copied me on this, let me jump in. I might be misreading, but I don't see anywhere that Erspamer or Gonzalez asserted 18 suicides per day for Iraq/Afghanistan vets -- at least not in Bob Egelko's stories or Chuck Nevius' column. The lawyers' comments referred to 18 per day for veterans, period. The Iraq/Afghanistan qualifier was the paper's mistake. It mischaracterized, not the lawyers.
In the Egelko story, Erspamer was described this way: "He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day - a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 e-mail - and the agency's backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, an increase of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003."
That line was interpreted in the editing process to mean veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan -- the paper's error. In the Nevius column, the Erspamer quote is: "If you add up the veterans' suicides among those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and compare it to the total combat deaths, the veteran suicides are higher," says Erspamer, who introduced a VA e-mail at the trial that showed an average of 18 vets a day are committing suicide. "The VA doesn't want that out."
There might be a little ambiguity there, but strictly speaking Erspamer's not saying 18 a day attributable to Iraq/Afghanistan. Now as to your point about whether Erspamer is misleading the court, I think the jury's out on that, to steal a phrase. Using rough numbers of five years of war and 4,000 combat deaths, it would take slightly over 2 suicides per day among Iraq/Afghanistan vets to exceed the combat figures. e.g.: 4000/(5*365). My arithmetic might be faulty here, so feel free to critique, but my point is that it would be possible to exceed the combat death toll without ever approaching the 18 suicides per day figure.
Hope I'm not confusing things.
(Again I sent the immediate reply below.)
Thank you for your reply to my concerns. Although I profoundly disagree with your analysis and conclusion, I appreciate you took the time to respond. I hope you will carefully and with an open mind consider what I present below. I gleaned these five items from the Chronicle this week. The last item is courtesy your e-mail.
I begin my comments and analysis after the fifth item. I added the bold highlighting to the items.
Item 1
More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates told a federal judge Monday in San Francisco. VA stalls on care while 18 veterans a day commit suicide, judge is told, by Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer, Tuesday, April 22, 2008.
Item 2
"If you add up the veterans' suicides among those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and compare it to the total combat deaths, the veteran suicides are higher," says Erspamer, who introduced a VA e-mail at the trial that showed an average of 18 vets a day are committing suicide. "The VA doesn't want that out." Attorney leading suit a veteran in battling VA, by C.W. Nevius, Thursday, April 24, 2008
Item 3
For instance, VA Secretary James Peake told Congress in a Feb. 5 letter that 144 combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide between October 2001 and December 2005.
But Gonzalez produced internal VA e-mails that contended that 18 veterans a day were committing suicide. Kussman countered that the figure, provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, included all 26 million veterans in the country, including aging Vietnam veterans who are reporting an increased number of health problems. Veterans Affairs official denies cover-up of suicide rates, By PAUL ELIAS, Associated Press Writer, Friday, April 25, 2008, published in the Chronicle.
Item 4
During opening statements Monday, a lawyer for the veterans' groups displayed an e-mail that a top VA mental health official, Ira Katz, sent in December in which he said veterans were committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day.
Maris said Tuesday that Katz had been referring primarily to veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In an interview, he said the suicide rate among veterans has been increasing since 2001, according to government reports he has studied. VA faulted in diagnosing suicide candidates, by Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer, Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Item 5
Now as to your point about whether Erspamer is misleading the court, I think the jury's out on that, to steal a phrase. Using rough numbers of five years of war and 4,000 combat deaths, it would take slightly over 2 suicides per day among Iraq/Afghanistan vets to exceed the combat figures. e.g.: 4000/(5*365).
(This is an excerpt from the e-mail sent me by the Chronicle Readers Representative.)
(My reply to the Readers Representative.)
I guess you don’t read your own paper. In an AP release April 25 covering this trial (my Item 3, first paragraph), the VA states that “144 combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide between October 2001 and December 2005.” That’s 36 a year, e.g. 144/4, compared to 4,000 combat deaths in five years.
I can understand why your reporter, Bob Egelko, was confused about the 18 suicides per day being by veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq (my Item 4, second paragraph). That’s what Ronald Maris, a University of South Carolina sociology professor, apparently told U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti in San Francisco, according to Egelko’s April 23 report.
Clearly Gonzalez was misleading the court. When the VA stated the 144 veteran suicides in four years involved Iraq and Afghanistan service, Gonzalez contested that and contended that 18 veterans per day were committing suicide (my Item 3). That was then countered by the VA, but it is obvious that Gonzalez was referring to suicides by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
Based on information I gleaned from the pages of the Chronicle this past week, is the jury still out, as you say, that Erspamer, Maris, and Gonzalez were providing misleading information? If so, the jury must be deaf, dumb, and blind, and have no nose for news.
By the way, Dick, can’t anyone at the Chronicle critically analyze statistical information? Veterans committing suicide at the rate of 18 per day * 365 days = 6570 per year.
6570 veteran suicides per year divided by 26,000,000 veterans = 0.000253
0.000253 * 100, 000 = 25 veteran suicides per 100,000 per year.
Suicide rates are conventionally expressed as the number of suicides per 100,000 persons per year.
A couple of months ago CBS News did an exhaustive five-month study of veteran suicides and determined rates of 18 to 20 per 100,000 per year. In their ignorance of world suicide rates, Katie Couric and crew trumpeted their finding as an “epidemic of veteran suicides,” even though the rate they found was low by world standards. Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans: A CBS News Investigation Uncovers A Suicide Rate For Veterans Twice That Of Other Americans
(My hint to CBS News – Katie, the suicide rate for veterans is twice that of other Americans, because over half of the other Americans are females, and less than ten percent of veterans are females. Also, Katie, a large percentage of other Americans are sub-teen children, and none of the veterans are.)
This link is to my blog post trying to correct CBS News and Perky Katie Couric for the hash they made of reporting veteran suicides. They did the same thing as the Chronicle, and ignored the facts to preserve the bashing of the Bush administration.
As a basis for comparison, eight nations have suicide rates above 25 per 100,000 per year regardless of gender or age (Russia’s is 34, according to the World Health Organization), and Japan’s at 24 per 100,000 per year is only slightly lower. Use this link to check on my statistics. I Googled it, just as any quasi-competent journalist would.
Using the CBS News veteran suicide rate, roughly twenty nations have higher all population rates. In fact, the suicide rates for all males in thirty-seven nations are as high or higher than the American veteran rate.
Comparing apples to apples, at least twenty-one nations of the world have higher male suicide rates than American veterans, and those rates include the males of those nations of all ages – you know, like babies and sub-teens, and middle-aged men, all who have traditionally low suicide rates.
Even France, with its health system that is lauded by believers in national health systems, has a suicide rate for all French males of 27.5, or ten percent higher than our veterans’ rate which is heavily skewed towards aging Vietnam era men. Older men have relatively high suicide rates because of illness and infirmity.
I’m sure someone at the Chronicle in an editor position must be aware of this sort of information. Or should be.
There is a real news story in all this, but it doesn’t look like the Chronicle is capable of digging it out, no matter how hard I try to assist.
McCain Interview on MSNBC - Conservative Bloggers Rebel!
MSNBC trumps Neocons; bloggers rebel, By: Mike Combs May 2, 2008 01:01 PM EST
The nation’s top Republicans are suddenly rushing to appear on the low-rated Liberal news channel MSNBC, which they once had shunned as enemy territory and the nemesis of conservative bloggers.
The détente with this Liberal news channel has provoked a backlash from conservative bloggers, who contend the party’s leaders are turning their backs on the base — and lending credibility and legitimacy to the network conservatives love to hate — in a quest for a few swing votes.
In a span of eight days, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan have all taking their seats with the network that calls itself “fair and balanced sometimes” but is widely viewed as skewing wildly liberal.
With the party’s presidential contest reduced to watching the Democrats slice and dice each other, Republicans are turning to the ratings loser among cable news channels in a clear rebuff to the conservative activists known as the Neocons. Major Mike, founder of the leading conservative site in Gualala Strong as as Ox and Nearly as Smart, told his wife, Alice: "Republicans are being idiotic by going on that network.”
Alice replied: “MSNBC? Are they still on?”
A Net Movement Correspondent (whatever that is) told Strong as an Ox Etc. that conservative activists and the Neocons are “not happy about it.”
“I don’t think that it is tenable to completely neglect or ignore what your base wants,” the Correspondent said.
See Also
The Republican leaders’ new openness to MSNBC reflects the conservative right’s diminishing power, at least at this point in the political cycle. Once feared by the Republican candidate, these activists are now viewed at least in part as an impediment to winning the broad swatch of support needed to clinch the election.
Goaded in part by a taunting “Olbermann Is Watching You” clock displayed by MSNBC’s Countdown host Keith Olbermann, McCain appeared recently after resisting the show’s entreaties throughout the campaign. McCain had a civil interview with occasionally coherent host Keith Olbermann, who has always mocked all things Republican.
Early in this presidential race, John McCain led the Republican candidates in what amounted to a MSNBC boycott.
Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, took McCain’s MSNBC interview in stride, commenting that more Democrats alone watch Fox than the total viewing audience for MSNBC regardless of party affiliation. Ailes further noted that MSNBC was Fox’s news competitor “only in their dreams.”
Recognizing that McCain’s appearance risked incurring blog wrath, a “senior McCain adviser” vowed to Major Mike of Strong as an Ox Etc. before the interview that the senator would “take MSNBC on” during the broadcast. But since no one watched the interview, Major Mike wrote that the pledge had turned out to be “as irrelevant as MSNBC.”
“This actually was good news for conservative bloggers who had worked very hard to get GOP’ers to boycott MSNBC. It was a good demonstration of its irrelevance, and we were wrong to criticize McCain for agreeing to appear in the first place,” Major Mike wrote.
Network records show that since the campaign began in January 2007, no one knows how many interviews McCain has given to MSNBC News anchors and correspondents, because no one gave a rat’s patootie.
(This report was adapted from Fox trumps Netroots; bloggers rebel By MIKE ALLEN 5/1/08 10:30 PM EST , and any copyright infringement, plagarism, or other screw ups are because of my carelessness and lack of scruples, and were not intentional because I have no idea what I'm doing, and I am therefore incapable of forming intent.)
The nation’s top Republicans are suddenly rushing to appear on the low-rated Liberal news channel MSNBC, which they once had shunned as enemy territory and the nemesis of conservative bloggers.
The détente with this Liberal news channel has provoked a backlash from conservative bloggers, who contend the party’s leaders are turning their backs on the base — and lending credibility and legitimacy to the network conservatives love to hate — in a quest for a few swing votes.
In a span of eight days, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan have all taking their seats with the network that calls itself “fair and balanced sometimes” but is widely viewed as skewing wildly liberal.
With the party’s presidential contest reduced to watching the Democrats slice and dice each other, Republicans are turning to the ratings loser among cable news channels in a clear rebuff to the conservative activists known as the Neocons. Major Mike, founder of the leading conservative site in Gualala Strong as as Ox and Nearly as Smart, told his wife, Alice: "Republicans are being idiotic by going on that network.”
Alice replied: “MSNBC? Are they still on?”
A Net Movement Correspondent (whatever that is) told Strong as an Ox Etc. that conservative activists and the Neocons are “not happy about it.”
“I don’t think that it is tenable to completely neglect or ignore what your base wants,” the Correspondent said.
See Also
There goes nutty Jimmy Carter again
Elitist John McCain
Democrats are bitter whiners
The Republican leaders’ new openness to MSNBC reflects the conservative right’s diminishing power, at least at this point in the political cycle. Once feared by the Republican candidate, these activists are now viewed at least in part as an impediment to winning the broad swatch of support needed to clinch the election.
Goaded in part by a taunting “Olbermann Is Watching You” clock displayed by MSNBC’s Countdown host Keith Olbermann, McCain appeared recently after resisting the show’s entreaties throughout the campaign. McCain had a civil interview with occasionally coherent host Keith Olbermann, who has always mocked all things Republican.
Early in this presidential race, John McCain led the Republican candidates in what amounted to a MSNBC boycott.
Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, took McCain’s MSNBC interview in stride, commenting that more Democrats alone watch Fox than the total viewing audience for MSNBC regardless of party affiliation. Ailes further noted that MSNBC was Fox’s news competitor “only in their dreams.”
Recognizing that McCain’s appearance risked incurring blog wrath, a “senior McCain adviser” vowed to Major Mike of Strong as an Ox Etc. before the interview that the senator would “take MSNBC on” during the broadcast. But since no one watched the interview, Major Mike wrote that the pledge had turned out to be “as irrelevant as MSNBC.”
“This actually was good news for conservative bloggers who had worked very hard to get GOP’ers to boycott MSNBC. It was a good demonstration of its irrelevance, and we were wrong to criticize McCain for agreeing to appear in the first place,” Major Mike wrote.
Network records show that since the campaign began in January 2007, no one knows how many interviews McCain has given to MSNBC News anchors and correspondents, because no one gave a rat’s patootie.
(This report was adapted from Fox trumps Netroots; bloggers rebel By MIKE ALLEN 5/1/08 10:30 PM EST , and any copyright infringement, plagarism, or other screw ups are because of my carelessness and lack of scruples, and were not intentional because I have no idea what I'm doing, and I am therefore incapable of forming intent.)
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
What War Economy?
Welcome, Wizbangers!
Please poke around and look at some of my other posts, especially the ones on global warming. And please leave comments, one way or the other. Pretty please hit the "News Commentary" label on the bottom. I've had some fun with CBS News, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle recently.
Major Mike
The editor of our local weekly newspaper, The Independent Coast Observer, like most Democrats finds a way to blame anything happening in the world that they term "bad" on President Bush. In a recent editorial titled "War Economy" he blamed "skyrocketing" interest rates and our slumping economy on the Iraq war. I wrote the following to try to give him a little Economics 101.
At 4 percent of GDP, defense spending is 1.5 percentage points of GDP below its 45-year historical average. It is less than half of the rate during the Vietnam War and only two-thirds of the rate prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Discretionary spending, the portion of the budget subject to annual review, has risen 152 percent since 1965. Mandatory spending, consisting mostly of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which run on autopilot, has risen 759 percent since 1965.
Mandatory spending as a percent of GDP has risen to twice the size of Defense spending. In absolute dollar terms, in 2007 entitlement or mandatory spending was $1.45 trillion, or $400 billion higher than the total for all discretionary spending (which includes defense).
The total inflation adjusted government spending burden on American households has grown over $21,000 per household or 129 percent since 1965. State and local spending per household has increased 156 percent, while federal spending has increased 115 percent.
Blaming the war for current problems exposes a gaping hole in economic knowledge. So called “skyrocketing” interest rates went from 5.85% for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in January 2003 to 6.07% in January 2008. The subprime mortgage boom since 1995 fueled prosperity and a surge in home ownership to record levels. However, when home value increases slowed in 2006, some mortgages based on the assumption that increases were perpetual went into default. The write-downs of mortgage portfolios removed liquidity from the market, not government borrowing.
To put the war costs in perspective, annual Medicare and Medicaid fraud costs about as much as the war, and are increasing rapidly along with the accelerating increases in these already insolvent programs.
Please poke around and look at some of my other posts, especially the ones on global warming. And please leave comments, one way or the other. Pretty please hit the "News Commentary" label on the bottom. I've had some fun with CBS News, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle recently.
Major Mike
The editor of our local weekly newspaper, The Independent Coast Observer, like most Democrats finds a way to blame anything happening in the world that they term "bad" on President Bush. In a recent editorial titled "War Economy" he blamed "skyrocketing" interest rates and our slumping economy on the Iraq war. I wrote the following to try to give him a little Economics 101.
At 4 percent of GDP, defense spending is 1.5 percentage points of GDP below its 45-year historical average. It is less than half of the rate during the Vietnam War and only two-thirds of the rate prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Discretionary spending, the portion of the budget subject to annual review, has risen 152 percent since 1965. Mandatory spending, consisting mostly of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which run on autopilot, has risen 759 percent since 1965.
Mandatory spending as a percent of GDP has risen to twice the size of Defense spending. In absolute dollar terms, in 2007 entitlement or mandatory spending was $1.45 trillion, or $400 billion higher than the total for all discretionary spending (which includes defense).
The total inflation adjusted government spending burden on American households has grown over $21,000 per household or 129 percent since 1965. State and local spending per household has increased 156 percent, while federal spending has increased 115 percent.
Blaming the war for current problems exposes a gaping hole in economic knowledge. So called “skyrocketing” interest rates went from 5.85% for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in January 2003 to 6.07% in January 2008. The subprime mortgage boom since 1995 fueled prosperity and a surge in home ownership to record levels. However, when home value increases slowed in 2006, some mortgages based on the assumption that increases were perpetual went into default. The write-downs of mortgage portfolios removed liquidity from the market, not government borrowing.
To put the war costs in perspective, annual Medicare and Medicaid fraud costs about as much as the war, and are increasing rapidly along with the accelerating increases in these already insolvent programs.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Veteran Suicides - When Will They Learn? Updated!
“More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week,” according to veterans advocates, began a San Francisco Chronicle front-page story: VA stalls on care while 18 veterans a day commit suicide, judge is told, by Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer, Tuesday, April 22, 2008.
The San Francisco Chronicle is trying to be as incompetent reporting veteran issues as CBS News and Perky Katie Couric.
Veteran suicides are terrible. The journalism in reporting them is even worse. The rate of 18 veterans a day committing suicide is for all veterans, not just veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For comparison purposes, the acknowledged VA veteran suicide rate is 19 per 100,000 per year, which is about the same or lower than the suicide rates for both sexes in entire countries: Japan, Belgium, Finland, Cuba, France, Austria, Korea, and Switzerland. In a US male veteran to all males comparison, which is the closest I could get to “apples to apples,” the entire male populations of over forty nations have higher or similar suicide rates than our veterans, including all American males.
Our active duty military suicide rate is 11 per 100,000 per year, about half our civilian rate for same-age males. From an analysis of suicide statistics, it actually shows it is safer from a suicide perspective to be a veteran or serving on active duty.
True, but you’ll never see that in a Chronicle headline on the front page.
FIVE-STAR UPDATE!
The Chronicle finally buried a correction to the error on April 25, saying that their article "mischaracterized" the report. It reminded me of Hillary saying she "misspoke" about ducking sniper fire in Bosnia. Apparently the new way the Left avoids admitting a lie is to use the mis- prefix.
This is the Chronicle correction:
-- An article on Tuesday about the trial of a lawsuit by veterans' groups over health treatment mischaracterized a government report that 18 veterans a day commit suicide. The report referred to veterans of all wars, not just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lest we forget, the original Chronicle article ran a direct quote: “More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week,” by Gordon Erspamer, the lawyer for the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit against the Veterans Administration. Does that sound like someone mischaracterized a government report?
It sounds to me like a lawyer lying through his teeth, not only to a mere reporter for a Left-wing newspaper, but to the judge trying the case.
To confirm his lie, he later gave an interview to one of my favorite columnists for the Chronicle, C. W. Nevius, and amplified the lie he told the judge. This is what CW reported from his interview of Mr. Erspamer:
CW noted that Mr. Erspamer is not being paid for this (it looks like you get what you pay for), and is doing it as a personal crusade. That explains his total lack of objectivity, I suppose.
This ran in CW's column the day before the correction, and a day after I had urgently emailed the Chronicle letters editor and Readers Representative about Mr. Erspamer's lie. It is hard for me to believe that highly paid and experienced journalism professionals would have given an OK to CW's article while they had information in hand that led to issuing their misleading correction the following day (there's that mis- word again).
It's the old story of the journalism of the Left: Tell the lies with headlines, bury the truth.
The San Francisco Chronicle is trying to be as incompetent reporting veteran issues as CBS News and Perky Katie Couric.
Veteran suicides are terrible. The journalism in reporting them is even worse. The rate of 18 veterans a day committing suicide is for all veterans, not just veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For comparison purposes, the acknowledged VA veteran suicide rate is 19 per 100,000 per year, which is about the same or lower than the suicide rates for both sexes in entire countries: Japan, Belgium, Finland, Cuba, France, Austria, Korea, and Switzerland. In a US male veteran to all males comparison, which is the closest I could get to “apples to apples,” the entire male populations of over forty nations have higher or similar suicide rates than our veterans, including all American males.
Our active duty military suicide rate is 11 per 100,000 per year, about half our civilian rate for same-age males. From an analysis of suicide statistics, it actually shows it is safer from a suicide perspective to be a veteran or serving on active duty.
True, but you’ll never see that in a Chronicle headline on the front page.
FIVE-STAR UPDATE!
The Chronicle finally buried a correction to the error on April 25, saying that their article "mischaracterized" the report. It reminded me of Hillary saying she "misspoke" about ducking sniper fire in Bosnia. Apparently the new way the Left avoids admitting a lie is to use the mis- prefix.
This is the Chronicle correction:
-- An article on Tuesday about the trial of a lawsuit by veterans' groups over health treatment mischaracterized a government report that 18 veterans a day commit suicide. The report referred to veterans of all wars, not just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lest we forget, the original Chronicle article ran a direct quote: “More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week,” by Gordon Erspamer, the lawyer for the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit against the Veterans Administration. Does that sound like someone mischaracterized a government report?
It sounds to me like a lawyer lying through his teeth, not only to a mere reporter for a Left-wing newspaper, but to the judge trying the case.
To confirm his lie, he later gave an interview to one of my favorite columnists for the Chronicle, C. W. Nevius, and amplified the lie he told the judge. This is what CW reported from his interview of Mr. Erspamer:
"If you add up the veterans' suicides among those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and compare it to the total combat deaths, the veteran suicides are higher," says Erspamer, who introduced a VA e-mail at the trial that showed an average of 18 vets a day are committing suicide. "The VA doesn't want that out."
CW noted that Mr. Erspamer is not being paid for this (it looks like you get what you pay for), and is doing it as a personal crusade. That explains his total lack of objectivity, I suppose.
This ran in CW's column the day before the correction, and a day after I had urgently emailed the Chronicle letters editor and Readers Representative about Mr. Erspamer's lie. It is hard for me to believe that highly paid and experienced journalism professionals would have given an OK to CW's article while they had information in hand that led to issuing their misleading correction the following day (there's that mis- word again).
It's the old story of the journalism of the Left: Tell the lies with headlines, bury the truth.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Irrational Islamophobia
UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian defined Islamophobia as "unfounded hostility toward Muslims and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims." (Looking at people's phobia of Muslims, by Matthai Kuruvila, Chronicle Religion Writer, Saturday, April 26, 2008)
I’m sure that since the first academic conference focused on Islamophobia is being held at Berkeley, the finding will be that fear of Muslims is totally irrational.
It’s certain that Bali tourists, London and Madrid commuters, Danish cartoonists, Salman Rushdie, Theo van Gogh and Aayan Hirsi Ali, Hindus in Kashmir, former Muslims who convert, Israelis living anywhere, but particularly near Gaza and the West Bank, the children of Beslan, the Moscow theater hostages, and many others, would all agree that fear of Muslims is totally irrational. Those still alive would, anyway.
Unlike Nicholas Berg, the three Christian girls in Indonesia, Daniel Pearl, Jack Hensley, Eugene Armstrong, Paul Johnson, some Turks, an Egyptian, a Korean, some Bulgarians, a British businessman, a Nepalese, and countless others, we shouldn’t lose our heads and give in to irrational fear.
Personally, I lived “on the economy” in Turkey with my late first wife and infant son for a year in 1964, and felt no fear. However, I can’t say the same for Armenians half a century before.
Although fear of Islam is irrational, American newspapers that had no qualms about publishing such things as photos of Serrano’s “Piss Christ” will not print the Danish “Mohammad” cartoons. It’s safe to criticize Islam, if you are ready to go into protective custody the rest of your life.
I’m sure that since the first academic conference focused on Islamophobia is being held at Berkeley, the finding will be that fear of Muslims is totally irrational.
It’s certain that Bali tourists, London and Madrid commuters, Danish cartoonists, Salman Rushdie, Theo van Gogh and Aayan Hirsi Ali, Hindus in Kashmir, former Muslims who convert, Israelis living anywhere, but particularly near Gaza and the West Bank, the children of Beslan, the Moscow theater hostages, and many others, would all agree that fear of Muslims is totally irrational. Those still alive would, anyway.
Unlike Nicholas Berg, the three Christian girls in Indonesia, Daniel Pearl, Jack Hensley, Eugene Armstrong, Paul Johnson, some Turks, an Egyptian, a Korean, some Bulgarians, a British businessman, a Nepalese, and countless others, we shouldn’t lose our heads and give in to irrational fear.
Personally, I lived “on the economy” in Turkey with my late first wife and infant son for a year in 1964, and felt no fear. However, I can’t say the same for Armenians half a century before.
Although fear of Islam is irrational, American newspapers that had no qualms about publishing such things as photos of Serrano’s “Piss Christ” will not print the Danish “Mohammad” cartoons. It’s safe to criticize Islam, if you are ready to go into protective custody the rest of your life.
Everything I Know I Learned While Fishing
It’s a good thing I did a lot of fishing when I was young, and learned everything then, because sad to say I haven’t done much fishing for many years now.
When I was a school boy in Point Arena, 1949-1960, I never thought about going fishing, I just went. Unlike modern-day anglers, or even many during my boyhood, fishing only required a minimum of equipment (meaning it only required a minimum of cash), and a lot of time. Time I had, money I didn’t, so fishing was a perfect choice.
As a pre-teen, fishing consisted of catching trout in Point Arena Creek (also known as Shit Creek, because the waste water from the sewer ponds went into it, or Sweetwater Creek, again because the waste water from the sewer ponds went into it), which flowed along the southern edge of town.
Sweetwater Creek was small. You could step across it in most places. Its banks were well protected with stinging nettles growing amongst the thick willows. About two-thirds of the way up Mill Street the creek went over a small falls, only about a three-foot drop, but that was enough to stop the trout from going further upstream.
We soon stopped fishing further upstream and just concentrated on a half-mile stretch from the falls to where Soldani’s cattle made a crossing about a hundred yards from the sewer ponds. At that point there was still over a half mile of creek between the sewer ponds and the ocean, but we never fished down there.
I guess the thought of catching fish swimming amongst sewer pond overflow put us off.
We never talked about it, we just never went there.
The trout fishing was pretty good without expanding our territory.
We outfitted ourselves with wrapping string for fish line that we begged from whoever was working the counter at Gilmore and Stornetta’s General Merchandise Store. In the 1950s, many of the things we bought at the store were wrapped in paper and tied with string. We would tie the string to a four to five-foot willow pole, tie a leader with hook to the string, and as soon as we dug a couple of dozen worms we were ready to fish.
A note for the historical record.
Usually it was Jackie Gilmore or his wife, Sue, or my buddy Bob Seymour’s mother, Floe, working the cash register. For several years, Taylor and Doris York, the parents of my fishing buddy, Chuck York, worked in the store before they took over running Titus’ Sweet Shop. Doris was one of Jackie’s older sisters. Her sister Merle, and Merle’s husband Wendy May, also worked in the store. Now and then we would be waited on by one of Jackie’s parents, Orin or Leona Gilmore, although they owned the store and spent most of their time in the raised office area a third of the way in on the right-hand side.
In those days, in the little town of Point Arena, this small general merchandise store provided the total financial support for four or five families. Then there was the McMillen General Store just down the street, and it supported another four families. As times passed, and their competition became the national retailers in Santa Rosa seventy-five miles away (almost a two-hour drive), profit margins were squeezed and eventually the two stores barely supported one family each as owner/operators. Finally the out-of-area big stores like Costco, then the added competition of the Internet, only left a market big enough for one store to survive, and Jackie and Sue closed Gilmore’s, then later sold it and the building was converted into the Coast Community Library.
Back to fishing.
Most of the good fishing spots on Sweetwater Creek were easy to reach, particularly when we were careful not to brush the stinging nettles. We approached each fishing hole quietly. Most of them weren’t much bigger than a large bathtub. We put a worm on the hook, and then tossed it into the water. Usually something happened immediately.
Often our worm would be swarmed by sticklebacks, minnow-sized fish with three needle-sharp spines on their backs that would nibble and worry the worm until it was torn from the hook. When it looked like stickleback were hitting the worm, we would pull it out of the water, usually with a stickleback or two hanging on, and let the sticklebacks fall off on the ground, and eventually die.
We would toss the worm back in, or rebait our hook if necessary, and hope that a trout would get to it first instead of the sticklebacks. As soon as a trout struck the bait, we would bring the tip of our willow pole fishing rod up to set the hook, because the trout would spit the worm out immediately otherwise.
If we were successful hooking the trout, a short battle would ensue. Our main concern was keeping the trout from wrapping the line around underwater roots, while also keeping it from catching in the branches above. If we could prevent entanglements, the trout was quickly ours.
As much as we learned stalking the wily trout, our real education began with ocean fishing, usually from the Point Arena Wharf or the rocks north of the wharf. We usually caught perch or greenling (sea trout) from the wharf, and perch, greenling, and cabazone or the occasional ling cod from the rocks.
Our fishing gear was very inexpensive because of the continuing chronic cash shortages. Our biggest investment was a 100-yard ball of braided cotton line (90¢), and a dozen leaderless 6/0 black hooks (25¢). Bait was abalone guts and trimmings preserved with rock salt we collected and stored in a large crock, and took fishing in a coffee can. For sinkers we went to the local gas service stations. The mechanic at Pelascio’s Union 76 station, the late Jimmy Morrison, would toss old spark plugs replaced during engine tune-ups into a box in the garage, and we took what we needed for sinkers. Our tackle boxes were gunny sacks, and the only additional gear we needed we found on the rocks, pieces of drift wood to wrap our lines.
Casting our lines was simple. We would unwind line from the stick, being careful not to tangle or catch in on the rocks or around our feet, then swing the line with hook, bait, and sinker over our heads, then release it hopefully to fly out and land where we intended. We tried to hit deeper holes between patches of seaweed, and if we were successful we would take in the slack and hold the line in our hand and wait.
As soon as we felt a couple of sharp tugs, we would yank the line back to set the hook, then pull it in hand over hand, dragging the fish over and through the seaweed. If all went well we would pull in a flopping fish. After we took it off the hook, which sometimes was quite a chore if the fish swallowed the bait and was hooked deeply, we put the fish in a small tide pool to keep it fresh while we continued fishing.
It was on these fishing trips on the rocks where we gained the wisdom that has guided our lives so well. Our first lesson was that whatever we needed for a successful fishing trip we had to plan and bring with us. We didn’t have a car in those days, and anything we forgot or didn’t think of was at least a round-trip hour’s walk away. The other side of the issue, of course, was that anything we brought with us we had to carry in our gunny sacks on our long walk to and from the rocks. If we had a good day fishing, the weight of the fish would be added to the weight in our sacks, so in packing to go fishing we had to make allowances for possible success and the weight of fish in our sacks.
We realized that for an overall satisfying fishing experience, we didn’t want to take everything with us, just the right things.
This then led us to the learning process we soon labeled, “If, maybe, and next time.” While we were fishing, killing time listening to the Giants on my transistor radio, or eating our lunches/snacks, while waiting for a bite, we would often remark about something: for instance, “If we carried some water with us, we sure wouldn’t be so thirsty right now.”
“Maybe we can find some bottles to fill with water.”
“Next time we’ll have water with us when we feel thirsty.”
One time we caught our late friend, Jimmy Hedden, eating our frozen bait shrimp raw.
“If we always brought a tin of kippered herring with us, maybe next time Jimmy will leave the bait shrimp alone.”
Our assumption was that we would remember to bring water in bottles, or kipper snacks, or whatever, the next time. The reality was that we would often forget what we planned, and when we were thirsty again, or run out of bait, then we would remember.
“If we would bring a piece of paper and a pencil every time, and write stuff down, then maybe we would remember it the next time.”
What this did, of course, was give us the opportunity to add a pencil and paper to the growing list of things to forget the next time.
However, as our youth passed slowly and unhurriedly, and we joked about “if, maybe, and next time,” I think we learned a lot about other people and ourselves out of the independence and challenges of our fishing experiences.
But I can hear protests from those who read this far: “My husband/significant other/boyfriend, Gavin, has started going fishing with his friends, and he isn’t acting any wiser. In fact, he seems dumber.”
I can see the problems already. Anyone named Gavin is from a generation or two after mine. Gavin and his friends were never allowed to just go fishing by themselves. They didn’t have an opportunity to scrape together a buck or two and rig a fishing outfit, then walk a mile or two to the ocean by themselves.
Gavin and his friends were organized, supervised, and authorized to go fishing. They didn’t have the exertion of walking a mile or two carrying their fishing gear, then the frustration of finding they had forgotten something, then the satisfaction of figuring how to work around whatever was forgot, the elation of doing it all themselves, and increased confidence from being at the ocean on their own.
I’ve seen fishermen who have started fishing later in life. They buy expensive, very powerful boats, outfitted with every convenience known to man, and space age fishing gear. Fishing just becomes another competition: bigger, faster, costlier – more fish are caught quicker, trophy fish are sought – and a day fishing is anything but cheap relaxation.
If the fish aren’t biting, the day’s fishing is a failure.
When we went fishing, if the fish weren’t biting we spent the time chatting and philosophizing, and still had a great time. We didn’t rush anywhere, because there was nowhere else we had to be, and we weren’t late for anything.
We would run over the rocks because it was fun, not because we had to hurry somewhere.
Our parents trusted us not to do anything dumb enough to get ourselves killed or badly injured, and knew we would be home by suppertime.
Maybe even with some fish to add to the family food supply.
When I was a school boy in Point Arena, 1949-1960, I never thought about going fishing, I just went. Unlike modern-day anglers, or even many during my boyhood, fishing only required a minimum of equipment (meaning it only required a minimum of cash), and a lot of time. Time I had, money I didn’t, so fishing was a perfect choice.
As a pre-teen, fishing consisted of catching trout in Point Arena Creek (also known as Shit Creek, because the waste water from the sewer ponds went into it, or Sweetwater Creek, again because the waste water from the sewer ponds went into it), which flowed along the southern edge of town.
Sweetwater Creek was small. You could step across it in most places. Its banks were well protected with stinging nettles growing amongst the thick willows. About two-thirds of the way up Mill Street the creek went over a small falls, only about a three-foot drop, but that was enough to stop the trout from going further upstream.
We soon stopped fishing further upstream and just concentrated on a half-mile stretch from the falls to where Soldani’s cattle made a crossing about a hundred yards from the sewer ponds. At that point there was still over a half mile of creek between the sewer ponds and the ocean, but we never fished down there.
I guess the thought of catching fish swimming amongst sewer pond overflow put us off.
We never talked about it, we just never went there.
The trout fishing was pretty good without expanding our territory.
We outfitted ourselves with wrapping string for fish line that we begged from whoever was working the counter at Gilmore and Stornetta’s General Merchandise Store. In the 1950s, many of the things we bought at the store were wrapped in paper and tied with string. We would tie the string to a four to five-foot willow pole, tie a leader with hook to the string, and as soon as we dug a couple of dozen worms we were ready to fish.
A note for the historical record.
Usually it was Jackie Gilmore or his wife, Sue, or my buddy Bob Seymour’s mother, Floe, working the cash register. For several years, Taylor and Doris York, the parents of my fishing buddy, Chuck York, worked in the store before they took over running Titus’ Sweet Shop. Doris was one of Jackie’s older sisters. Her sister Merle, and Merle’s husband Wendy May, also worked in the store. Now and then we would be waited on by one of Jackie’s parents, Orin or Leona Gilmore, although they owned the store and spent most of their time in the raised office area a third of the way in on the right-hand side.
In those days, in the little town of Point Arena, this small general merchandise store provided the total financial support for four or five families. Then there was the McMillen General Store just down the street, and it supported another four families. As times passed, and their competition became the national retailers in Santa Rosa seventy-five miles away (almost a two-hour drive), profit margins were squeezed and eventually the two stores barely supported one family each as owner/operators. Finally the out-of-area big stores like Costco, then the added competition of the Internet, only left a market big enough for one store to survive, and Jackie and Sue closed Gilmore’s, then later sold it and the building was converted into the Coast Community Library.
Back to fishing.
Most of the good fishing spots on Sweetwater Creek were easy to reach, particularly when we were careful not to brush the stinging nettles. We approached each fishing hole quietly. Most of them weren’t much bigger than a large bathtub. We put a worm on the hook, and then tossed it into the water. Usually something happened immediately.
Often our worm would be swarmed by sticklebacks, minnow-sized fish with three needle-sharp spines on their backs that would nibble and worry the worm until it was torn from the hook. When it looked like stickleback were hitting the worm, we would pull it out of the water, usually with a stickleback or two hanging on, and let the sticklebacks fall off on the ground, and eventually die.
We would toss the worm back in, or rebait our hook if necessary, and hope that a trout would get to it first instead of the sticklebacks. As soon as a trout struck the bait, we would bring the tip of our willow pole fishing rod up to set the hook, because the trout would spit the worm out immediately otherwise.
If we were successful hooking the trout, a short battle would ensue. Our main concern was keeping the trout from wrapping the line around underwater roots, while also keeping it from catching in the branches above. If we could prevent entanglements, the trout was quickly ours.
As much as we learned stalking the wily trout, our real education began with ocean fishing, usually from the Point Arena Wharf or the rocks north of the wharf. We usually caught perch or greenling (sea trout) from the wharf, and perch, greenling, and cabazone or the occasional ling cod from the rocks.
Our fishing gear was very inexpensive because of the continuing chronic cash shortages. Our biggest investment was a 100-yard ball of braided cotton line (90¢), and a dozen leaderless 6/0 black hooks (25¢). Bait was abalone guts and trimmings preserved with rock salt we collected and stored in a large crock, and took fishing in a coffee can. For sinkers we went to the local gas service stations. The mechanic at Pelascio’s Union 76 station, the late Jimmy Morrison, would toss old spark plugs replaced during engine tune-ups into a box in the garage, and we took what we needed for sinkers. Our tackle boxes were gunny sacks, and the only additional gear we needed we found on the rocks, pieces of drift wood to wrap our lines.
Casting our lines was simple. We would unwind line from the stick, being careful not to tangle or catch in on the rocks or around our feet, then swing the line with hook, bait, and sinker over our heads, then release it hopefully to fly out and land where we intended. We tried to hit deeper holes between patches of seaweed, and if we were successful we would take in the slack and hold the line in our hand and wait.
As soon as we felt a couple of sharp tugs, we would yank the line back to set the hook, then pull it in hand over hand, dragging the fish over and through the seaweed. If all went well we would pull in a flopping fish. After we took it off the hook, which sometimes was quite a chore if the fish swallowed the bait and was hooked deeply, we put the fish in a small tide pool to keep it fresh while we continued fishing.
It was on these fishing trips on the rocks where we gained the wisdom that has guided our lives so well. Our first lesson was that whatever we needed for a successful fishing trip we had to plan and bring with us. We didn’t have a car in those days, and anything we forgot or didn’t think of was at least a round-trip hour’s walk away. The other side of the issue, of course, was that anything we brought with us we had to carry in our gunny sacks on our long walk to and from the rocks. If we had a good day fishing, the weight of the fish would be added to the weight in our sacks, so in packing to go fishing we had to make allowances for possible success and the weight of fish in our sacks.
We realized that for an overall satisfying fishing experience, we didn’t want to take everything with us, just the right things.
This then led us to the learning process we soon labeled, “If, maybe, and next time.” While we were fishing, killing time listening to the Giants on my transistor radio, or eating our lunches/snacks, while waiting for a bite, we would often remark about something: for instance, “If we carried some water with us, we sure wouldn’t be so thirsty right now.”
“Maybe we can find some bottles to fill with water.”
“Next time we’ll have water with us when we feel thirsty.”
One time we caught our late friend, Jimmy Hedden, eating our frozen bait shrimp raw.
“If we always brought a tin of kippered herring with us, maybe next time Jimmy will leave the bait shrimp alone.”
Our assumption was that we would remember to bring water in bottles, or kipper snacks, or whatever, the next time. The reality was that we would often forget what we planned, and when we were thirsty again, or run out of bait, then we would remember.
“If we would bring a piece of paper and a pencil every time, and write stuff down, then maybe we would remember it the next time.”
What this did, of course, was give us the opportunity to add a pencil and paper to the growing list of things to forget the next time.
However, as our youth passed slowly and unhurriedly, and we joked about “if, maybe, and next time,” I think we learned a lot about other people and ourselves out of the independence and challenges of our fishing experiences.
But I can hear protests from those who read this far: “My husband/significant other/boyfriend, Gavin, has started going fishing with his friends, and he isn’t acting any wiser. In fact, he seems dumber.”
I can see the problems already. Anyone named Gavin is from a generation or two after mine. Gavin and his friends were never allowed to just go fishing by themselves. They didn’t have an opportunity to scrape together a buck or two and rig a fishing outfit, then walk a mile or two to the ocean by themselves.
Gavin and his friends were organized, supervised, and authorized to go fishing. They didn’t have the exertion of walking a mile or two carrying their fishing gear, then the frustration of finding they had forgotten something, then the satisfaction of figuring how to work around whatever was forgot, the elation of doing it all themselves, and increased confidence from being at the ocean on their own.
I’ve seen fishermen who have started fishing later in life. They buy expensive, very powerful boats, outfitted with every convenience known to man, and space age fishing gear. Fishing just becomes another competition: bigger, faster, costlier – more fish are caught quicker, trophy fish are sought – and a day fishing is anything but cheap relaxation.
If the fish aren’t biting, the day’s fishing is a failure.
When we went fishing, if the fish weren’t biting we spent the time chatting and philosophizing, and still had a great time. We didn’t rush anywhere, because there was nowhere else we had to be, and we weren’t late for anything.
We would run over the rocks because it was fun, not because we had to hurry somewhere.
Our parents trusted us not to do anything dumb enough to get ourselves killed or badly injured, and knew we would be home by suppertime.
Maybe even with some fish to add to the family food supply.
Friday, April 25, 2008
When PG&E Came to Town
Not long after we moved into the old abandoned high school building, in early 1950 Pacific Gas & Electricity (PG&E, aka Pacific Graft & Extortion) came to Point Arena in a big way. Up to that point in time the generating plant on Windy Hollow Road on the north side of Point Arena stood by itself to provide power to Point Arena only.
That all changed with the building and opening of the Point Arena Radar Station. PG&E sent in large construction crews with heavy equipment. They used the large open space on the west side of the old high school building as a parking area for the equipment. The space had been graveled at one time, but neglected, and now with the heavy equipment parked and moving over it, it soon became primarily mud and mud puddles. After a period when it went from bad to worse, PG&E brought in gravel and spread it generously on the mud and in the mud puddles. It helped. Now when we walked we crunched over gravel, instead of splashing through mud.
Our main purpose for the large, open, flat area, when it wasn’t covered with PG&E equipment, had been as a playground. In dry weather it wasn’t too bad before they put the gravel down. After the gravel, it was a worthless playground the year around. However, that didn’t stop us from trying to make it work. It was so big, so open, so flat, it was hard to give up on it.
It was good for baseball until the batter hit the ball. If it was a grounder, it would never take a straight, predictable hop. If it was a fly ball, trying to keep your eyes on the ball while running over gravel was an accident in progress. Usually a few fast running steps was all it took to lose your balance and fall onto the jagged rocks. When you took your eyes off the ball to save yourself from falling, the ball usually found you. Either way, a thoughtful friend like Bob Seymour would shout, “Way to go, Grace!” as you picked yourself up and inspected the torn knee of your pants, and the blood seeping from the cuts.
I can still see a semi-circular scar on the heel of my right palm where a sharp rock peeled the skin back when I tried to break a fall with my hand.
It didn’t take long until we gave up playing baseball on the gravel, and used the baseball diamond on the Elementary School grounds. It was actually a fair baseball field, with an ancient wooden backstop, and fragmented pieces of chicken wire occasionally stopping foul balls, wild pitches, or errant throws before they landed in the cypress trees beyond.
The faults of the school baseball field really didn’t bother us except during the rainy season. The field had been in heavy use for so long that the pitcher’s mound was a hole, the batter’s box was a hole, and the first, second, and third bases, and the basepaths, were in holes. The holes weren’t very noticeable, and weren’t problems until it rained and water accumulated. The flooding field didn’t stop our games, but we did have to improvise. The pitcher and batter would move to adjacent areas of higher ground, and if the puddles weren’t too big, the bases would move to the closest almost dry ground.
Trying to field ground balls in the mud, and chasing down fly balls was still challenging, but when you inevitably slipped and fell, landing in soft mud was much nicer than on sharp gravel.
My brother Ronald and I still played in our graveled yard when it was just the two of us. Sometimes we would disagree about whether a pitch was a strike, or how many strikes we had, or if we had struck out. Not very often, but every now and then, a disagreement would lead to a fight. Since I was much bigger than Ronald then, I would win our fights even though he was tough and scrappy.
One day I pushed him down, and started to walk away towards our house. The next thing I remember was lying face down on the ground, and the back of my head hurting quite painfully. I put my hand where it hurt, and when I brought my hand back it was covered with blood.
Even at his young age, Brother Ronald had excellent hand/eye coordination, and a good throwing arm. He invariably precisely hit whatever he was throwing at. In this case he was throwing a rock he picked up out of the gravel, and his target was my head.
When I saw the blood on my hand I let out loud cries, which brought Pop running from our room in the old high school building and to my rescue, I thought. However, he ran right past me and started spanking my brother. As I moaned and cried louder, Pop spanked Ronald harder.
About then I heard Mom call from the doorway, “Stop spanking that one and get the other one to the Medical Center before he bleeds to death.”
Pop reluctantly stopped spanking Ronald and stood me up to look at the back of my head. Mom brought a wet towel, and cleaned the blood away to uncover a shallow two-inch gash.
“It’s going to need stitches,” was Mom’s verdict, which inspired me to resume crying even more loudly, more from the thought of getting stitches than from the pain, which was already subsiding.
Pop drove me downtown to the Medical Center. We still didn’t have a doctor, but the School Nurse, Helen Greco, was on duty. She cleaned and shaved around my wound, applied a generous amount of stinging disinfectant, closed it with three stitches, and bandaged it firmly.
Pop looked me over and said, “I think you’ll live.”
I thought it would be a good time to start crying again to see if Pop would resume spanking Ronald, but Pop and Mrs. Greco were chatting with each other, and with me, and I felt the time for crying had passed.
Even if it would get Pop to spank my brother some more.
That all changed with the building and opening of the Point Arena Radar Station. PG&E sent in large construction crews with heavy equipment. They used the large open space on the west side of the old high school building as a parking area for the equipment. The space had been graveled at one time, but neglected, and now with the heavy equipment parked and moving over it, it soon became primarily mud and mud puddles. After a period when it went from bad to worse, PG&E brought in gravel and spread it generously on the mud and in the mud puddles. It helped. Now when we walked we crunched over gravel, instead of splashing through mud.
Our main purpose for the large, open, flat area, when it wasn’t covered with PG&E equipment, had been as a playground. In dry weather it wasn’t too bad before they put the gravel down. After the gravel, it was a worthless playground the year around. However, that didn’t stop us from trying to make it work. It was so big, so open, so flat, it was hard to give up on it.
It was good for baseball until the batter hit the ball. If it was a grounder, it would never take a straight, predictable hop. If it was a fly ball, trying to keep your eyes on the ball while running over gravel was an accident in progress. Usually a few fast running steps was all it took to lose your balance and fall onto the jagged rocks. When you took your eyes off the ball to save yourself from falling, the ball usually found you. Either way, a thoughtful friend like Bob Seymour would shout, “Way to go, Grace!” as you picked yourself up and inspected the torn knee of your pants, and the blood seeping from the cuts.
I can still see a semi-circular scar on the heel of my right palm where a sharp rock peeled the skin back when I tried to break a fall with my hand.
It didn’t take long until we gave up playing baseball on the gravel, and used the baseball diamond on the Elementary School grounds. It was actually a fair baseball field, with an ancient wooden backstop, and fragmented pieces of chicken wire occasionally stopping foul balls, wild pitches, or errant throws before they landed in the cypress trees beyond.
The faults of the school baseball field really didn’t bother us except during the rainy season. The field had been in heavy use for so long that the pitcher’s mound was a hole, the batter’s box was a hole, and the first, second, and third bases, and the basepaths, were in holes. The holes weren’t very noticeable, and weren’t problems until it rained and water accumulated. The flooding field didn’t stop our games, but we did have to improvise. The pitcher and batter would move to adjacent areas of higher ground, and if the puddles weren’t too big, the bases would move to the closest almost dry ground.
Trying to field ground balls in the mud, and chasing down fly balls was still challenging, but when you inevitably slipped and fell, landing in soft mud was much nicer than on sharp gravel.
My brother Ronald and I still played in our graveled yard when it was just the two of us. Sometimes we would disagree about whether a pitch was a strike, or how many strikes we had, or if we had struck out. Not very often, but every now and then, a disagreement would lead to a fight. Since I was much bigger than Ronald then, I would win our fights even though he was tough and scrappy.
One day I pushed him down, and started to walk away towards our house. The next thing I remember was lying face down on the ground, and the back of my head hurting quite painfully. I put my hand where it hurt, and when I brought my hand back it was covered with blood.
Even at his young age, Brother Ronald had excellent hand/eye coordination, and a good throwing arm. He invariably precisely hit whatever he was throwing at. In this case he was throwing a rock he picked up out of the gravel, and his target was my head.
When I saw the blood on my hand I let out loud cries, which brought Pop running from our room in the old high school building and to my rescue, I thought. However, he ran right past me and started spanking my brother. As I moaned and cried louder, Pop spanked Ronald harder.
About then I heard Mom call from the doorway, “Stop spanking that one and get the other one to the Medical Center before he bleeds to death.”
Pop reluctantly stopped spanking Ronald and stood me up to look at the back of my head. Mom brought a wet towel, and cleaned the blood away to uncover a shallow two-inch gash.
“It’s going to need stitches,” was Mom’s verdict, which inspired me to resume crying even more loudly, more from the thought of getting stitches than from the pain, which was already subsiding.
Pop drove me downtown to the Medical Center. We still didn’t have a doctor, but the School Nurse, Helen Greco, was on duty. She cleaned and shaved around my wound, applied a generous amount of stinging disinfectant, closed it with three stitches, and bandaged it firmly.
Pop looked me over and said, “I think you’ll live.”
I thought it would be a good time to start crying again to see if Pop would resume spanking Ronald, but Pop and Mrs. Greco were chatting with each other, and with me, and I felt the time for crying had passed.
Even if it would get Pop to spank my brother some more.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Politically Incorrect Songs Mom Taught Me
The news the other day featured the huge, million-dollar mansion his parishioners were building Reverend Jeremiah Wright in Chicago, and it reminded my of a song my late mother wrote sixty years ago. It was a rousing pseudo-Negro spiritual she titled: “Sho’ Do Pay.” (Translation: It sure does pay).
The following is my best effort to reconstruct it from my memories of sixty years ago. I’m sure that somewhere in our boxes of family memorabilia I’ll find a copy of the words and music, but until then, this will have to do.
Mom’s allusions to Negro gambling, laziness, and religious cynicism would not play well in our politically correct world today, but were accepted as stereotypical humor then. You can mentally substitute Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, or other get-rich-quick televangelists, and get the same effect. Without worrying about political correctness either, because white Christians are always fair game.
Just don’t mess with New Agers like Tony Robbins.
Mom was ahead of her time in commemorating in song the sordid wealth that would be showered on slick religious hypocrites. At the time she wrote this song, she may have read Sinclair Lewis’ “Elmer Gantry,” and probably read about Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson, but most probably she had heard of and observed things associated with religious revival meetings, and noted their similarities to the carnival sideshows and Snake Oil salesmen of her time.
And had she lived longer, to the Rev. Jeremiah Wrights of our time.
The following is my best effort to reconstruct it from my memories of sixty years ago. I’m sure that somewhere in our boxes of family memorabilia I’ll find a copy of the words and music, but until then, this will have to do.
Sho’ Do Pay
(To be sung in dialect with religious
fervor)
I got myself religion
The other day
Went down to the church house
And learned to pray
But there’s just one thing about it
I’d like to say
Oh Brothers and Sisters
Does it pay?
You can talk about your Moses
And you can talk about your Josephs
You can learn all the
Good Book has to say
Then you start in a cryin’
Lordy there’s no denying
That old time religion sho’ do pay.
We’ll roll mostly sevens
Way up thar in the Heavens
And we won’t have to work a single day
There’ll be ham and fried chicken
There’ll be no more pot lickin’
And Saint Pete will double all our pay.
So I’ll get me a Bible
And I’ll get me a hymn book
And I’ll learn all the Good Book has to say
Then I’ll start in a preachin’
And I’ll have a camp meetin’
‘Cause that old time religion sho’ do pay.
God you know I’m a sinner
But I’d sure like to enter
Them beautiful Pearly Gates someday.
(This is a fragment, and I don’t know where it goes in the sequence, or what comes before or after it.)
Mom’s allusions to Negro gambling, laziness, and religious cynicism would not play well in our politically correct world today, but were accepted as stereotypical humor then. You can mentally substitute Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, or other get-rich-quick televangelists, and get the same effect. Without worrying about political correctness either, because white Christians are always fair game.
Just don’t mess with New Agers like Tony Robbins.
Mom was ahead of her time in commemorating in song the sordid wealth that would be showered on slick religious hypocrites. At the time she wrote this song, she may have read Sinclair Lewis’ “Elmer Gantry,” and probably read about Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson, but most probably she had heard of and observed things associated with religious revival meetings, and noted their similarities to the carnival sideshows and Snake Oil salesmen of her time.
And had she lived longer, to the Rev. Jeremiah Wrights of our time.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Honey, You Just Became a Lumberjack
The summer of 1949 we were living in a trailer park in Newhall, north of Los Angeles near Santa Clarita. I had no idea where the town of Newhall was in relation to our trailer park. We were surrounded by a combination of scrubby brush in what was probably a desert, or a close imitation of one. Scattered around the trailer park were drilling rigs and oil well pumps.
We arrived with less than a month of school before the summer break, and although Mom took me to the school the day after we arrived, I guess it was too close to being the end of the school year, and I wasn’t admitted. I liked school, and meeting kids and playing, so I was actually sad about not going to school in Newhall.
About half a mile from the trailer park, maybe nearer, was a railroad track which crossed a trestle bridge over a shallow stream that later in the year would probably be dry. Ronald and I, and new friends in the trailer park, rode our bikes to the stream, and competed to see who could peddle all the way across without stopping. Whether we made it all the way, or stopped, or fell off into the water, either way we got completely soaked.
Our parents didn’t mind that we got our pants or shirts wet, but getting our shoes wet was a different matter. Children’s shoes were the most relatively expensive clothing items our families owned, so most of us had only one pair. Getting our shoes soaking wet didn’t help their longevity. We usually thought about taking them off before they got wet right after we got them thoroughly wet.
On most of our trips to the stream we would see several tramps, or hoboes, camped under the trestle, usually cooking something on a small fire. We never went close to their camp, and never talked to any of them. For their part, they just ignored us as we sat on our bikes and watched them. If any of them had ever moved our way, I’m sure we would have all been off in a flash pedaling furiously back to the trailer park.
In retrospect, they probably didn’t want anything to do with us, because we would have told our parents, and they would tell the police, and the police would have made them move on. Homeless people were not a protected group in those days.
Mom listened to the radio as she worked, usually to variety shows like Hoagy Carmichael. She wrote many songs, and was always trying to get one to the attention of a famous singer to record and make her rich and famous. I still remember several of them.
(59 years have passed, but the song memory in my head tells me I got every word right. Who knows, Mom? Maybe through the wonder of the Internet hundreds or thousands of years from now someone will see this and sing your song again. I wonder if people then will be capable of feeling wistful loneliness, or if everyone will be in instant communication with whomever they want whenever they want. I hope not. Loneliness is too precious an emotion to lose. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." )
Mom had a good singing voice, and more than once she went to Hollywood on the bus and appeared on the Hoagy Carmichael Show. I'm sure “Moon Shining Down on the Chaparral” was one of the songs she sang on his show, and I think she got $20 and an orchid. Mom kept the orchid in our refrigerator for a long time.
In August we got a letter from Uncle Walter, the second oldest of my thirteen Combs uncles and aunts. Pop was youngest of Grandma and Grandpa’s seven sons, and next to the youngest of fourteen siblings.
Uncle Walter had moved to Gualala, on the coast in northern California, a couple of years earlier. His letter was probably very chatty about his wife Ruth and their five daughters. Even though Pop’s family was huge – I was the 42nd grandchild, brother Ronald born eleven months and four days later was the 44th – the family had concentrated around Bakersfield, and everyone stayed in touch.
Pop was very interested in his relatives, and what they were doing, and had a remarkable memory for names, dates, and events. He wrote many letters, and more than any other family member, kept family members up to date on what the rest of the family was doing.
Taking all that in, out of that particular letter, one part was memorable and became part of our family legend. Near the end of the letter, Uncle Walter wrote: “You ought to come up here. The sawmills are hiring.”
When Mom read that, she turned to Pop and said: “Honey, you just became a lumberjack.”
Mom was weary from the moving every few months, chasing oil wells from one dusty southern California town to the next. She said, “I’m tired of planting flower gardens for someone else to enjoy.” I remember her planting flower seeds at the trailer parks, the seeds sprouting and flowers blooming, then Pop hooking up the trailer to our old Buick and heading off to the next trailer park.
Mom was ready to settle down.
Pop hooked up the trailer for what turned out to be its last long journey. It’s about five hundred miles from Newhall to Point Arena, which Uncle Walter said was about fifteen miles north of Gualala, and would be better for us than Gualala where he lived, because Point Arena had the schools. Five hundred miles is a long day’s journey today, but in those days, and pulling a trailer, it was an odyssey. I think the trip took us four or five days, and several tires – I remember Pop saying that even with the war over for four years, you still couldn’t get decent tires.
When we got to the Jenner Grade north of the Russian River, where Highway 1 was (and is) a narrow winding road tentatively clinging to the steep hillsides above the crashing waves of the Pacific far below, Mom was overcome by looking at the narrow road, the steep cliffs, and Pop working the car and trailer around the sharp turns. Mom told Pop to stop and let her and Ron and me out, then she took Ron and me firmly by the hand, and for the next hour or two we walked over the worst parts of Jenner Grade.
Pop and the trailer were waiting for us where the road finally got better, and we got back in the Buick and completed our journey to our new life. When we got to Point Arena, Pop arranged with the property owner, old Jack Pelascio, for us to park our trailer on a former tennis court next to the old abandoned high school building, where we could easily hook up to electricity, water, and the sewer.
Mom liked the location because we were only a hundred yards from the four-room Point Arena Elementary School.
We arrived on a Saturday, September 10, 1949. The following Monday Ronald and I were in school, with about 28 other students in the combined 1st and 2nd grade class taught by Mrs. Mae Phillips.
While we were in school, Pop visited Uncle Walter, who lived in the Old Milano Hotel (since burned down) on the north side of Gualala, and owned and operated a small general store (since burned down too) on the bluff above the Gualala River just south of today’s Oceansong Restaurant.
Uncle Walter introduced Pop to the manager of the Empire Lumber Company which was located less than a mile further up the Gualala River, and the following day Pop had a job working in the woods setting chokers near the Wheatfield Forks on the south fork of the Gualala.
We were home.
We arrived with less than a month of school before the summer break, and although Mom took me to the school the day after we arrived, I guess it was too close to being the end of the school year, and I wasn’t admitted. I liked school, and meeting kids and playing, so I was actually sad about not going to school in Newhall.
About half a mile from the trailer park, maybe nearer, was a railroad track which crossed a trestle bridge over a shallow stream that later in the year would probably be dry. Ronald and I, and new friends in the trailer park, rode our bikes to the stream, and competed to see who could peddle all the way across without stopping. Whether we made it all the way, or stopped, or fell off into the water, either way we got completely soaked.
Our parents didn’t mind that we got our pants or shirts wet, but getting our shoes wet was a different matter. Children’s shoes were the most relatively expensive clothing items our families owned, so most of us had only one pair. Getting our shoes soaking wet didn’t help their longevity. We usually thought about taking them off before they got wet right after we got them thoroughly wet.
On most of our trips to the stream we would see several tramps, or hoboes, camped under the trestle, usually cooking something on a small fire. We never went close to their camp, and never talked to any of them. For their part, they just ignored us as we sat on our bikes and watched them. If any of them had ever moved our way, I’m sure we would have all been off in a flash pedaling furiously back to the trailer park.
In retrospect, they probably didn’t want anything to do with us, because we would have told our parents, and they would tell the police, and the police would have made them move on. Homeless people were not a protected group in those days.
Mom listened to the radio as she worked, usually to variety shows like Hoagy Carmichael. She wrote many songs, and was always trying to get one to the attention of a famous singer to record and make her rich and famous. I still remember several of them.
There’s a moon shining down on the chaparral,
Moonlight casts its spell,
On the old ranch well.
And the quaint pepper trees
By the big corral,
Lacey shadows weave
Like a wedding veil.
Although I’m alone
In this moonlit wonderland
I still feel your kiss
And the touch of your hand.
So I’ll hold you again
As the shadows fall
And the moonbeams dance
On the chaparral.
(59 years have passed, but the song memory in my head tells me I got every word right. Who knows, Mom? Maybe through the wonder of the Internet hundreds or thousands of years from now someone will see this and sing your song again. I wonder if people then will be capable of feeling wistful loneliness, or if everyone will be in instant communication with whomever they want whenever they want. I hope not. Loneliness is too precious an emotion to lose. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." )
Mom had a good singing voice, and more than once she went to Hollywood on the bus and appeared on the Hoagy Carmichael Show. I'm sure “Moon Shining Down on the Chaparral” was one of the songs she sang on his show, and I think she got $20 and an orchid. Mom kept the orchid in our refrigerator for a long time.
In August we got a letter from Uncle Walter, the second oldest of my thirteen Combs uncles and aunts. Pop was youngest of Grandma and Grandpa’s seven sons, and next to the youngest of fourteen siblings.
Uncle Walter had moved to Gualala, on the coast in northern California, a couple of years earlier. His letter was probably very chatty about his wife Ruth and their five daughters. Even though Pop’s family was huge – I was the 42nd grandchild, brother Ronald born eleven months and four days later was the 44th – the family had concentrated around Bakersfield, and everyone stayed in touch.
Pop was very interested in his relatives, and what they were doing, and had a remarkable memory for names, dates, and events. He wrote many letters, and more than any other family member, kept family members up to date on what the rest of the family was doing.
Taking all that in, out of that particular letter, one part was memorable and became part of our family legend. Near the end of the letter, Uncle Walter wrote: “You ought to come up here. The sawmills are hiring.”
When Mom read that, she turned to Pop and said: “Honey, you just became a lumberjack.”
Mom was weary from the moving every few months, chasing oil wells from one dusty southern California town to the next. She said, “I’m tired of planting flower gardens for someone else to enjoy.” I remember her planting flower seeds at the trailer parks, the seeds sprouting and flowers blooming, then Pop hooking up the trailer to our old Buick and heading off to the next trailer park.
Mom was ready to settle down.
Pop hooked up the trailer for what turned out to be its last long journey. It’s about five hundred miles from Newhall to Point Arena, which Uncle Walter said was about fifteen miles north of Gualala, and would be better for us than Gualala where he lived, because Point Arena had the schools. Five hundred miles is a long day’s journey today, but in those days, and pulling a trailer, it was an odyssey. I think the trip took us four or five days, and several tires – I remember Pop saying that even with the war over for four years, you still couldn’t get decent tires.
When we got to the Jenner Grade north of the Russian River, where Highway 1 was (and is) a narrow winding road tentatively clinging to the steep hillsides above the crashing waves of the Pacific far below, Mom was overcome by looking at the narrow road, the steep cliffs, and Pop working the car and trailer around the sharp turns. Mom told Pop to stop and let her and Ron and me out, then she took Ron and me firmly by the hand, and for the next hour or two we walked over the worst parts of Jenner Grade.
Pop and the trailer were waiting for us where the road finally got better, and we got back in the Buick and completed our journey to our new life. When we got to Point Arena, Pop arranged with the property owner, old Jack Pelascio, for us to park our trailer on a former tennis court next to the old abandoned high school building, where we could easily hook up to electricity, water, and the sewer.
Mom liked the location because we were only a hundred yards from the four-room Point Arena Elementary School.
We arrived on a Saturday, September 10, 1949. The following Monday Ronald and I were in school, with about 28 other students in the combined 1st and 2nd grade class taught by Mrs. Mae Phillips.
While we were in school, Pop visited Uncle Walter, who lived in the Old Milano Hotel (since burned down) on the north side of Gualala, and owned and operated a small general store (since burned down too) on the bluff above the Gualala River just south of today’s Oceansong Restaurant.
Uncle Walter introduced Pop to the manager of the Empire Lumber Company which was located less than a mile further up the Gualala River, and the following day Pop had a job working in the woods setting chokers near the Wheatfield Forks on the south fork of the Gualala.
We were home.
There Goes Nutty Jimmy Carter Again
Jimmy Carter continues to demonstrate the lack of abilities he displayed so prominently when he was president. In his latest foray into ineptitude, he honored Hamas while believing their transparent lies that they would recognize Israel's right to exist if such a deal was approved by a Palestinian vote.
Carter, naïve and gullible as ever, trumpeted to the world he had the framework of a peace agreement between Hamas and Israel, while at the same moment Meshaal, the Hamas leader in exile in Syria, told a press conference in Damascus that Hamas would not recognize the Jewish state and would insist on the right of return for 4.5 million Palestinian refugees.
Further analysis of the details showed that Hamas had placed an impossible condition on conducting a Palestinian vote that Carter should have recognized immediately, that the voting include all Palestinian refugees worldwide.
Apparently Jimmy Carter has difficulties in understanding discussions he is a party to. He denies that the State Department told him that the United States would not deal with Hamas and, as Secretary of State Rice commented, "we certainly told president Carter that we didn't think meeting with Hamas was going to help the Palestinians who (are) actually devoted to peace."
Aside from the fact that it is the long standing and clearly stated policy of the United States, since at least 1999 during the Clinton administration, that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and that the United States won’t deal with terrorist organizations, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "We stand by (Secretary Rice’s statements) as statements of fact."
So there he goes again. Jimmy Carter reports one thing, just as Hamas denies it. Jimmy Carter says no one cautioned him about meeting with Hamas, when that has been United States policy concerning Hamas for at least a decade, whether a Democrat or a Republican was president.
Jimmy, those goobers aren’t the only nuts on your Georgia farm.
Carter, naïve and gullible as ever, trumpeted to the world he had the framework of a peace agreement between Hamas and Israel, while at the same moment Meshaal, the Hamas leader in exile in Syria, told a press conference in Damascus that Hamas would not recognize the Jewish state and would insist on the right of return for 4.5 million Palestinian refugees.
Further analysis of the details showed that Hamas had placed an impossible condition on conducting a Palestinian vote that Carter should have recognized immediately, that the voting include all Palestinian refugees worldwide.
Apparently Jimmy Carter has difficulties in understanding discussions he is a party to. He denies that the State Department told him that the United States would not deal with Hamas and, as Secretary of State Rice commented, "we certainly told president Carter that we didn't think meeting with Hamas was going to help the Palestinians who (are) actually devoted to peace."
Aside from the fact that it is the long standing and clearly stated policy of the United States, since at least 1999 during the Clinton administration, that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and that the United States won’t deal with terrorist organizations, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "We stand by (Secretary Rice’s statements) as statements of fact."
So there he goes again. Jimmy Carter reports one thing, just as Hamas denies it. Jimmy Carter says no one cautioned him about meeting with Hamas, when that has been United States policy concerning Hamas for at least a decade, whether a Democrat or a Republican was president.
Jimmy, those goobers aren’t the only nuts on your Georgia farm.
Unintended Environmental Consequences of Liberalism
The world is filled with solutions to human suffering that Liberals won’t allow. In fact, many of Liberals' pet programs add immeasurably to human suffering.
Examples abound. The most recent is rampant world hunger. What have Liberals done to make it worse?
Liberals vain fight against global warming is the prime self-inflicted wound on the poor people of the world. The quest for alternative fuels is literally taking food out of the mouths of babes, while at the same time causing a net increase in greenhouse gases that will take a century or more to overcome. Biofuels are a horrible idea whose time should never come.
The only reason that Liberals are so hot to find alterative energy sources is because they are totally focused in opposition to the only viable, nonpolluting, environmentally friendly answer to world energy needs, nuclear power. Solar, wind, wave, hydroelectric, biomass – most of these generation methods require huge government subsidies, and even then are only marginally economical when the price of oil is at record highs.
(UPDATE: Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore agrees we must develop nuclear energy, and that alternative power generating systems can't satisfy world energy needs.)
Beside high costs, the alternative energy sources are also incredibly polluting to the environment. I laughed when I read of environmentalists protesting fencing along the United States/Mexico border, and not the plans for huge solar and wind power installations in pristine desert and mountain habitats. The only nonpolluting power source that is economical without massive subsidies is hydroelectric, and it causes unbelievable damage to fisheries and loss of natural rivers and habitat.
Besides diverting government resources from better uses and increasing environmental pollution, the environmentalists’ opposition to nuclear energy has had an enormous unintended consequence: an enormous increase in burning coal, oil, and natural gas to meet the phenomenal growth in world energy needs. If nuclear energy was given the political and economic support it deserves, there would have already been great progress in design improvement and the construction of nuclear power plants. In the absence of support for nuclear energy, the only feasible option for meeting world power requirements has been the wholesale addition of coal, oil, and natural gas generating plants.
Liberals have shown the same genius for fouling things up with food itself, the shortage of which is now causing hunger and death daily at an ever increasing rate. Their opposition to genetically modified foods is a marvel of ignorance and shortsightedness. Plants have already been modified for greatly increased yields per acre, using less water, less fertilizer, and less pesticides, while also providing essential nutrients that eliminate serious health problems like child blindness.
European Liberals, exercising their misguided elitism, call them “Franken foods” and ban them from both production and consumption. How does that protect the environment? Liberals say it prevents the genetically modified plants from crossing with native or natural species, as if species purity was sufficient justification for the ban.
However, besides worsening world hunger, their ban continues the pressure on burgeoning water shortages, causes more air pollution from using natural gas to make fertilizer, requires the use of pesticides and chemicals because natural plants are not as insect and disease resistant as genetically modified ones, and increases water pollution from the pesticide and chemical runoff from farms into streams.
Liberal efforts to combat global warming provides material for a large book to chronicle the messes it is creating for current and future generations. Laying aside the fact that global warming is natural, not caused by man, the solutions that Liberals propose all arrive at the same end: enormous amounts of resources are expended in a doomed, vain attempt to reverse natural climate change. The bottom line on such efforts is very clear. The climate will change, just as it has hundreds of times before for hundreds of thousands of years. Along the way, the economic progress of billions of poor people will be slowed or reversed, and they will be constrained to living short, brutish lives of poverty and deprivation. In turn, this will create more social and political unrest, with resulting wars of revolution fueled by inequality and discontent.
If those same resources were consumed in increasing economic activity, and resultant prosperity and accumulation of wealth, the formerly poor of the world would be able to adapt readily to warming, cooling (very likely, and much more damaging), or any thing else that nature throws their way.
With prosperity, and abundant energy from nuclear power, the formerly poor can do what the citizens of the developed world already do: modify their environment to fit their needs and desires, just as Americans have been doing for decades.
Why are the populations of the southern parts of the United States increasing faster than the more northerly? Because Americans have been voting with their feet for “warmer” ever since air conditioning made comfortable living further south possible. At the same time, better heating, insulation, and air conditioning have also made living and working in the more extremely variable northern climates more bearable.
These are just a few of the many ways Liberal policies create enormous unintended negative consequences, and the ways that economic progress and resulting prosperity would solve even the messes Liberalism causes.
Even as Liberals work their butts off to try and really foul things up.
Examples abound. The most recent is rampant world hunger. What have Liberals done to make it worse?
Liberals vain fight against global warming is the prime self-inflicted wound on the poor people of the world. The quest for alternative fuels is literally taking food out of the mouths of babes, while at the same time causing a net increase in greenhouse gases that will take a century or more to overcome. Biofuels are a horrible idea whose time should never come.
The only reason that Liberals are so hot to find alterative energy sources is because they are totally focused in opposition to the only viable, nonpolluting, environmentally friendly answer to world energy needs, nuclear power. Solar, wind, wave, hydroelectric, biomass – most of these generation methods require huge government subsidies, and even then are only marginally economical when the price of oil is at record highs.
(UPDATE: Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore agrees we must develop nuclear energy, and that alternative power generating systems can't satisfy world energy needs.)
Beside high costs, the alternative energy sources are also incredibly polluting to the environment. I laughed when I read of environmentalists protesting fencing along the United States/Mexico border, and not the plans for huge solar and wind power installations in pristine desert and mountain habitats. The only nonpolluting power source that is economical without massive subsidies is hydroelectric, and it causes unbelievable damage to fisheries and loss of natural rivers and habitat.
Besides diverting government resources from better uses and increasing environmental pollution, the environmentalists’ opposition to nuclear energy has had an enormous unintended consequence: an enormous increase in burning coal, oil, and natural gas to meet the phenomenal growth in world energy needs. If nuclear energy was given the political and economic support it deserves, there would have already been great progress in design improvement and the construction of nuclear power plants. In the absence of support for nuclear energy, the only feasible option for meeting world power requirements has been the wholesale addition of coal, oil, and natural gas generating plants.
Liberals have shown the same genius for fouling things up with food itself, the shortage of which is now causing hunger and death daily at an ever increasing rate. Their opposition to genetically modified foods is a marvel of ignorance and shortsightedness. Plants have already been modified for greatly increased yields per acre, using less water, less fertilizer, and less pesticides, while also providing essential nutrients that eliminate serious health problems like child blindness.
European Liberals, exercising their misguided elitism, call them “Franken foods” and ban them from both production and consumption. How does that protect the environment? Liberals say it prevents the genetically modified plants from crossing with native or natural species, as if species purity was sufficient justification for the ban.
However, besides worsening world hunger, their ban continues the pressure on burgeoning water shortages, causes more air pollution from using natural gas to make fertilizer, requires the use of pesticides and chemicals because natural plants are not as insect and disease resistant as genetically modified ones, and increases water pollution from the pesticide and chemical runoff from farms into streams.
Liberal efforts to combat global warming provides material for a large book to chronicle the messes it is creating for current and future generations. Laying aside the fact that global warming is natural, not caused by man, the solutions that Liberals propose all arrive at the same end: enormous amounts of resources are expended in a doomed, vain attempt to reverse natural climate change. The bottom line on such efforts is very clear. The climate will change, just as it has hundreds of times before for hundreds of thousands of years. Along the way, the economic progress of billions of poor people will be slowed or reversed, and they will be constrained to living short, brutish lives of poverty and deprivation. In turn, this will create more social and political unrest, with resulting wars of revolution fueled by inequality and discontent.
If those same resources were consumed in increasing economic activity, and resultant prosperity and accumulation of wealth, the formerly poor of the world would be able to adapt readily to warming, cooling (very likely, and much more damaging), or any thing else that nature throws their way.
With prosperity, and abundant energy from nuclear power, the formerly poor can do what the citizens of the developed world already do: modify their environment to fit their needs and desires, just as Americans have been doing for decades.
Why are the populations of the southern parts of the United States increasing faster than the more northerly? Because Americans have been voting with their feet for “warmer” ever since air conditioning made comfortable living further south possible. At the same time, better heating, insulation, and air conditioning have also made living and working in the more extremely variable northern climates more bearable.
These are just a few of the many ways Liberal policies create enormous unintended negative consequences, and the ways that economic progress and resulting prosperity would solve even the messes Liberalism causes.
Even as Liberals work their butts off to try and really foul things up.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
New Doctor in Town
One of our favorite family activities when we lived in the old abandoned high school was playing board games. Among other children we preferred “Monopoly”, but with Mom and Pop our favorite game was “Clue.” We all became adept at stratagems, such as calling out items in our own hands to determine the murder, murder weapon, and murder room, without tipping off the others.
“Miss Scarlett with a knife in the Billiard Room.”
One evening while the four of us were playing Clue on our dinner table in the center of the room that was kitchen, dining room, living room, and bedrooms, Mom fainted and fell from her chair.
A doctor had just moved into town, and lived in Ed McMillen’s old house. After his wife, Myrtle died of cancer, Ed moved into an attic room and rented the rest of his house to the new doctor. Pop sent me to hurry and bring back the doctor.
I ran as fast as I could and banged on his door. It was about seven in the evening, and he answered the door immediately. I told him to come quickly, my mother was unconscious.
The doctor told me to contact our family doctor, and have him take care of Mom.
We didn’t have a family doctor. The only doctor in the area was old Doc Huntley, and he lived in the country on Mountain View Road towards Manchester, over five miles away, and had been retired for years.
I ran back home to tell Pop the doctor wouldn’t come.
Without a word, he stood up, and walked quickly out the door and down the street to the doctor’s house, with me running behind. When he reached the house, Pop banged on the door, and then threw it open. The doctor was standing just inside, and Pop barked out, “My wife needs a doctor.”
“I’m not her doctor.”
“Get your bag.”
The doctor didn’t move, so Pop looked around and spotted a black bag on the table. “Is that your bag?”
“Yes.”
Pop grabbed the bag with one hand, and the doctor’s arm with the other, and pulled him out the door and up the street to our home without saying another word. Pop walked fast, holding the shorter, slightly built doctor under the doctor's arm, and it seemed to lift and propel him forward as they went. I could barely keep up.
Pop pulled the doctor into our one-room home, and finally let him loose when they reached Mom, still lying on the floor. The doctor checked Mom’s pulse, and her eyes, and her chest with his stethoscope, and said: “She’s OK. She should come around soon.”
He propped her legs up, and made her comfortable, and soon her eyes opened, and Mom started to sit up.
The doctor told her not to sit up yet, to just stay down and relax, and then told Pop that she didn’t seem to be sick, that she must have fainted.
Pop asked what to do next, and the doctor said probably nothing, just let Mom take things easy for a couple of days, and see how it went.
Pop asked the doctor what he owed him, and the doctor shrugged his shoulders, so Pop pulled out a five dollar bill. The doctor still didn’t do or say anything, so Pop put it in his bag, and handed the bag to the doctor.
Without another word the doctor left.
A couple of weeks later Pop was in McMillen’s General Store, where the widower Ed, Ralph and his wife Sadie, and Lloyd McMillen all worked. Pop asked Ed how the new doctor was doing, and Ed said that he had moved out and left the area. Apparently he never had any time to himself, day or night, when he wouldn’t be interrupted to make a house call or take care of some emergency. Being the only active doctor within forty miles was too much of a strain, so he had decided to go back to the city and work in a hospital.
Pop asked if Ed had found a new tenant, and when Ed said he hadn’t, Pop negotiated a lease for us on the spot. Within a week we had packed all our meager belongings and moved them into the Ed McMillen house, and parked our trailer nearby next to the clothes line.
Being in a real house again was nice, and quite a change after living a year and a half in the trailer in Lawndale, Carpentaria, Newhall, and Fosters Park, going to two schools in the First grade, and then living in the abandoned high school for three years.
All in all though, my brother Ron and I had enjoyed our travels and the adventure of living in a large abandoned high school. I think Mom was the most appreciative of moving into a real house. We now had a kitchen, dining room, living room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom, instead of areas within a large room. We had a normal hot water heater, instead of water lines running through the firebox of the old wood burning cook stove. Mom had an electric stove, and an oil-fired heater instead of using the wood cook stove for cooking and heat too.
Civilization had overtaken the Combs family.
“Miss Scarlett with a knife in the Billiard Room.”
One evening while the four of us were playing Clue on our dinner table in the center of the room that was kitchen, dining room, living room, and bedrooms, Mom fainted and fell from her chair.
A doctor had just moved into town, and lived in Ed McMillen’s old house. After his wife, Myrtle died of cancer, Ed moved into an attic room and rented the rest of his house to the new doctor. Pop sent me to hurry and bring back the doctor.
I ran as fast as I could and banged on his door. It was about seven in the evening, and he answered the door immediately. I told him to come quickly, my mother was unconscious.
The doctor told me to contact our family doctor, and have him take care of Mom.
We didn’t have a family doctor. The only doctor in the area was old Doc Huntley, and he lived in the country on Mountain View Road towards Manchester, over five miles away, and had been retired for years.
I ran back home to tell Pop the doctor wouldn’t come.
Without a word, he stood up, and walked quickly out the door and down the street to the doctor’s house, with me running behind. When he reached the house, Pop banged on the door, and then threw it open. The doctor was standing just inside, and Pop barked out, “My wife needs a doctor.”
“I’m not her doctor.”
“Get your bag.”
The doctor didn’t move, so Pop looked around and spotted a black bag on the table. “Is that your bag?”
“Yes.”
Pop grabbed the bag with one hand, and the doctor’s arm with the other, and pulled him out the door and up the street to our home without saying another word. Pop walked fast, holding the shorter, slightly built doctor under the doctor's arm, and it seemed to lift and propel him forward as they went. I could barely keep up.
Pop pulled the doctor into our one-room home, and finally let him loose when they reached Mom, still lying on the floor. The doctor checked Mom’s pulse, and her eyes, and her chest with his stethoscope, and said: “She’s OK. She should come around soon.”
He propped her legs up, and made her comfortable, and soon her eyes opened, and Mom started to sit up.
The doctor told her not to sit up yet, to just stay down and relax, and then told Pop that she didn’t seem to be sick, that she must have fainted.
Pop asked what to do next, and the doctor said probably nothing, just let Mom take things easy for a couple of days, and see how it went.
Pop asked the doctor what he owed him, and the doctor shrugged his shoulders, so Pop pulled out a five dollar bill. The doctor still didn’t do or say anything, so Pop put it in his bag, and handed the bag to the doctor.
Without another word the doctor left.
A couple of weeks later Pop was in McMillen’s General Store, where the widower Ed, Ralph and his wife Sadie, and Lloyd McMillen all worked. Pop asked Ed how the new doctor was doing, and Ed said that he had moved out and left the area. Apparently he never had any time to himself, day or night, when he wouldn’t be interrupted to make a house call or take care of some emergency. Being the only active doctor within forty miles was too much of a strain, so he had decided to go back to the city and work in a hospital.
Pop asked if Ed had found a new tenant, and when Ed said he hadn’t, Pop negotiated a lease for us on the spot. Within a week we had packed all our meager belongings and moved them into the Ed McMillen house, and parked our trailer nearby next to the clothes line.
Being in a real house again was nice, and quite a change after living a year and a half in the trailer in Lawndale, Carpentaria, Newhall, and Fosters Park, going to two schools in the First grade, and then living in the abandoned high school for three years.
All in all though, my brother Ron and I had enjoyed our travels and the adventure of living in a large abandoned high school. I think Mom was the most appreciative of moving into a real house. We now had a kitchen, dining room, living room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom, instead of areas within a large room. We had a normal hot water heater, instead of water lines running through the firebox of the old wood burning cook stove. Mom had an electric stove, and an oil-fired heater instead of using the wood cook stove for cooking and heat too.
Civilization had overtaken the Combs family.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
John McCain’s Taxes - New York Times Still Can’t Get It Right
This is the sort of story that even The Times couldn’t mess up, especially when they assign it to a veteran reporter supported by an army of experienced, highly paid editors. All it involves is John McCain – more probably his tax accountant – giving The New York Times copies of McCain’s 2006 and 2007 tax returns, and then the veteran reporter and supporting army of editors turns out the story.
What could be simpler?
This is the story. McCain releases tax returns - Papers for wealthy wife, who files separately, aren't made public, Barry Meier, New York Times, Saturday, April 19, 2008.
Apparently nothing is simple enough for The New York Times. Although The Times reports that John McCain released his 2006 and 2007 income tax returns, The Times chose to report totals for the two years instead of the individual amounts for each tax year. Fair enough. I can handle that, although it did make me scratch my head a bit when McCain’s Navy pension was reported as $114,854.
Whoa, I said. I knew Navy Captain McCain had served about a year longer than the 21.5 years I served in the Air Force, and that he retired as a Captain (O-6) whereas I retired as a Major (O-4), but that wouldn’t make his retired pay triple mine. I checked another source and found it was only $58,358 in 2007, substantially but reasonably higher than mine.
Why did The Times choose to lump two tax years together? It makes no sense to me.
But then I read the clinker in The New York Times report. To quote The Times, “He had additional untaxed income, including $114,854 from his Navy pension.” (Italics and bold print courtesy of me)
What could be simpler?
This is the story. McCain releases tax returns - Papers for wealthy wife, who files separately, aren't made public, Barry Meier, New York Times, Saturday, April 19, 2008.
Apparently nothing is simple enough for The New York Times. Although The Times reports that John McCain released his 2006 and 2007 income tax returns, The Times chose to report totals for the two years instead of the individual amounts for each tax year. Fair enough. I can handle that, although it did make me scratch my head a bit when McCain’s Navy pension was reported as $114,854.
Whoa, I said. I knew Navy Captain McCain had served about a year longer than the 21.5 years I served in the Air Force, and that he retired as a Captain (O-6) whereas I retired as a Major (O-4), but that wouldn’t make his retired pay triple mine. I checked another source and found it was only $58,358 in 2007, substantially but reasonably higher than mine.
Why did The Times choose to lump two tax years together? It makes no sense to me.
But then I read the clinker in The New York Times report. To quote The Times, “He had additional untaxed income, including $114,854 from his Navy pension.” (Italics and bold print courtesy of me)
(UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times finally showed a hint of a nose for news by investigating and disclosing the nature of John McCain's tax-free Navy pension, and that it was determined based on the injuries and torture he suffered at the hands of the barbaric North Vietnamese - wasn't there a Geneva Convention issue invoved in their treatment of POWs? Or does that only apply to the United States and unlawful combatants? The New York Times, meanwhile, amply demonstrated profound ignorance of military matters to go with its shocking lack of news sense.)
(Please read the comments following this post to see the correction to my statement a reader provided. John McCain did report that his Navy pension was tax free. However, The Times did not follow up to find out and explain why normally taxed income was tax free. The commenter suggests it has something to do with McCain's injured and/or POW status, and he has been proven correct. In any case, there is a story here that The Times missed because of their ignorance of military issues. Their reporting of this issue still leaves its readers with more questions than answers.)
No wonder civilians think we retired military have it soft. Ignorant reporters and editors give their overwhelmingly civilian readership the impression that military retirement income is untaxed, when it is taxed just like any other income. The only untaxed income some military retirees will receive is Social Security, and even that is taxed if we dare to have other earned income before reaching full Social Security entitlement age.
The Times reporter and editors are not the only egregiously military-ignorant people in influential places. A few years ago California had a cadaverous Senator named Alan Cranston. One slow news day Senator Cranston decided he should grab a headline, so at a news conference he loudly bemoaned and protested military “double dippers.” According to Senator Cranston, it was almost criminal that military members would serve to retirement, retire, draw retirement pay, get a civilian job and finally pay into Social Security, and then retire from that job and draw both Social Security and military retirement; ergo the label “double dipper.”
What Senator Cranston did not know, secure in his cocoon of ignorance of the military, was that the military members paid into Social Security their entire careers, and that it was the Federal civilian employees who didn’t. Federal civilian employees would earn a civil service retirement, all the while not paying into Social Security, then get a civilian job, pay Social Security, retire from it, and then draw both a government pension and Social Security.
Dumb Democrat Cranston, sanctimoniously trying to point criticism at the Liberal-despised military, was actually casting stones at one of the most loyal Democrat constituencies, public service employees. Today, 29 percent of state and local government employees, and most Federal civilian workers hired before 1984, are still not in Social Security. All the military, going back to 1957, paid into Social Security.
Congress finally woke up long enough to throw Federal employees hired after 1984 into Social Security. Those Federal employees hired before 1984 knew a bad deal when they saw it, and most wanted no part of Social Security, even though it is a Federal government program, and they were Federal government employees.
Given this vast trove of Liberal ignorance of the military, it’s no surprise that The Times messed up a simple report about John McCain’s taxes. Just like they messed up on military murder rates, and CBS News messed up on reporting veteran suicides.
To Liberals, ignorance of the military is bliss, and they are nothing if not blissful.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Invisible Wounds of War - Self-Inflicted
“Maybe you'll believe Rand Corp. The lifetime incidence for Major Depression is 20% in the general population. 20% in the Vet population is certainly an anomaly.”
So e-mailed a reader of Strong as an Ox etc.
Apparently he was reacting to something I wrote, possibly to my post debunking CBS’s fallacious report on an epidemic of military suicides, when I found that United States military members have a lower suicide rate than that of entire nations, and lower than the same sex, same age group of Americans.
Then there was the equally fraudulent study by the New York Times of a supposedly high veteran murder rate, which turned out to be far lower than the rates for most major United States cities.
I probably annoyed the reader with my smug certainty about how poorly these studies were constructed and supported. Drawing my attention to this Rand study of military depression is probably his way of rubbing my nose in the damages wrought by our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The study the reader draws my attention to, Invisible Wounds of War, was produced by the Rand Corporation, and publicized by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Since I’m not a mental health professional, and since I’m not an actor and have never played a mental health expert (and therefore won’t be called to testify about mental health before a fawning Congress), I’m at a distinct disadvantage in reviewing the work of the highly credentialed preparers of this report.
Except I can draw on old adages, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Also, “The certitude of the summary usually doesn’t reflect the ambiguities of the details.”
I just made up that last old adage.
As I look at this RAND study I am struck that it raises more questions than answers. For example, from its sample of 1,965 service members from 24 communities across the country, RAND concluded that 300,000 of the 1.6 million who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or major depression.
Is reporting symptoms the same as having it?
Apparently NAMI thinks so.
Are the members in the 24 communities across the country representative of the 1.6 million that served in the war zone?
Did the millions who served during World War II, who experienced more dying, deprivation, suffering, and separation than our troops today, exhibit the same levels of depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? If they did, where did they find the strength of character to become “The Greatest Generation”?
First, I need to put the findings in some sort of context. When I debunked the military suicides and murders studies, it was very easy and straightforward to establish their contexts: I was able to find many tables of suicide statistics by gender, age, and nationality, and murder rates by gender, age, and American city or locality. In both studies these provided objective and easily demonstrated proofs that the veteran suicide and murder rates were not only normal and expected for predominantly young American males, but were lower than their civilian counterparts and, for suicides, much lower than the rates for all sexes and all ages of entire countries – Japan, to name one of several.
What causes depression? Do we know? According to the prestigious Mayo Clinic, we don’t know specifically.
What can depression be related to? Occupation, for one.
However, being unemployed was most depressing, and being fully employed least depressing.
Do all of these studies diagnose depression the same way?
The study cited above uses the definition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV), which specifies a period of 2 weeks or longer during which there is either depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure and at least four other symptoms that reflect a change in functioning, including problems with sleep, eating, energy, concentration, and self-image.
Does depression persist when factors change, such as leaving a stressful environment like a war zone?
I’ve looked at expert information about depression, and have come away with the impression that there are many factors causing and involved in it, and of course there are varying degrees of depression.
The Rand Corporation appears to be breaking new ground with this study. To me that means it should be taken with a grain of salt.
The RAND study contains estimates that state the high end of expected costs, and the high end of expected benefits. I think there is probably a big difference between “could save close to $2 billion in two years” and what it “would save in two years.”
Apparently the cost of suicides is about $1.1 billion per year for the Iraqi and Afghanistan veteran group (using the RAND numbers above gives $6.2 billion minus $4 billion divided by two years equals $1.1 billion).
According to CBS News, the veteran suicide rate is 19 per 100,000 per year, while the active military suicide rate is 11 per 100,000 per year. Instead of an “epidemic of veteran suicides” as reported by CBS News and Perky Katie Couric, veterans match the rate for same-age males; the suicide rate among active military is about half of the general population rate; forty nations have higher male suicide rates than our veterans; and the overall veterans’ rate of 19 is the same or lower than the rate for BOTH SEXES in Japan (24.0), Belgium (21.1), Finland (20.3), Cuba (18.3), and France, Austria, Korea, and Switzerland.
The question then becomes, so where is the $2 billion in savings coming from? If exposure is causing depression in veterans of war, resulting in increased suicides, then why doesn’t the veteran suicide rate show that? If such exposure is causing suicides in the active military, why is their suicide rate half that of same-age civilian males?
According to the numbers, there would be about 240 suicides per year from amongst the 1.6 million veterans exposed to war. If the 1.6 million were predominantly young males who had never served in the military, there would be about 304 suicides, or 64 more per year. If we made a comparison to 1.6 million Frenchmen of all ages (including children), there would be 440 suicides, or 200 more per year.
At this point I’m left wondering what was the point of this study? War is traumatic. Many terrible things happen. Our diagnoses and treatments of mental problems among military members is not perfect. However, based on the numbers I have seen, it is probably better than the mental health services that most Americans, and from the suicide statistics, most foreign citizens receive.
I question the methods and conclusions, particularly if the bottom line is, as it appears to be, that reporting symptoms of depression resulted in the military member being classified as if diagnosed with depression. From that point projections of mental health care costs and indirect costs from lower productivity and suicides were calculated, and from the same spurious information savings were projected.
And above and beyond all else, there are ample statistics from over five years of fighting that would indicate whether or not the expected problems were appearing and being identified.
I’m not denying that our military members have suffered, and some have problems. Combat fatigue has been noted in many wars in many places. When we invaded Iwo Jima, over 21,000 Japanese and 6,800 Americans – more than in five years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan - died in a month in 1945. A few months before, 135,000 Germans perished in the firestorms resulting from three days of fierce Allied aerial bombardment. After all that, and a lot more, America, Germany, Japan, and Britain gave the world half a century of the high achievement and progress.
Now we have RAND going where more and more are going.
Imagined problems, imagined solutions, imagined costs, imagined savings.
It’s a virtual study in a virtual world.
So e-mailed a reader of Strong as an Ox etc.
Apparently he was reacting to something I wrote, possibly to my post debunking CBS’s fallacious report on an epidemic of military suicides, when I found that United States military members have a lower suicide rate than that of entire nations, and lower than the same sex, same age group of Americans.
Then there was the equally fraudulent study by the New York Times of a supposedly high veteran murder rate, which turned out to be far lower than the rates for most major United States cities.
I probably annoyed the reader with my smug certainty about how poorly these studies were constructed and supported. Drawing my attention to this Rand study of military depression is probably his way of rubbing my nose in the damages wrought by our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The study the reader draws my attention to, Invisible Wounds of War, was produced by the Rand Corporation, and publicized by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Since I’m not a mental health professional, and since I’m not an actor and have never played a mental health expert (and therefore won’t be called to testify about mental health before a fawning Congress), I’m at a distinct disadvantage in reviewing the work of the highly credentialed preparers of this report.
Except I can draw on old adages, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Also, “The certitude of the summary usually doesn’t reflect the ambiguities of the details.”
I just made up that last old adage.
As I look at this RAND study I am struck that it raises more questions than answers. For example, from its sample of 1,965 service members from 24 communities across the country, RAND concluded that 300,000 of the 1.6 million who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or major depression.
Is reporting symptoms the same as having it?
Apparently NAMI thinks so.
Are the members in the 24 communities across the country representative of the 1.6 million that served in the war zone?
Did the millions who served during World War II, who experienced more dying, deprivation, suffering, and separation than our troops today, exhibit the same levels of depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? If they did, where did they find the strength of character to become “The Greatest Generation”?
First, I need to put the findings in some sort of context. When I debunked the military suicides and murders studies, it was very easy and straightforward to establish their contexts: I was able to find many tables of suicide statistics by gender, age, and nationality, and murder rates by gender, age, and American city or locality. In both studies these provided objective and easily demonstrated proofs that the veteran suicide and murder rates were not only normal and expected for predominantly young American males, but were lower than their civilian counterparts and, for suicides, much lower than the rates for all sexes and all ages of entire countries – Japan, to name one of several.
What causes depression? Do we know? According to the prestigious Mayo Clinic, we don’t know specifically.
Causes
It's not known specifically what causes depression. As with many mental illnesses, it's thought that a variety of biochemical, genetic and environmental factors may cause depression:
Biochemical. Some evidence from high-tech imaging studies indicates that people with depression have physical changes in their brains. The significance of these changes is still uncertain but may eventually help pinpoint causes. The naturally occurring brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, which are linked to mood, also may play a role in depression. Hormonal imbalances also could be a culprit.
Genes. Some studies show that depression is more common in people whose biological family members also have the condition. Researchers are trying to find genes that may be involved in causing depression.
Environment. Environment is also thought to play a causal role in some way. Environmental causes are situations in your life that are difficult to cope with, such as the loss of a loved one, financial problems and high stress.
Although the precise cause of depression isn't known, researchers have identified certain factors that seem to increase the risk of developing or triggering depression, including:
Having other biological relatives with depression
Having family members who have taken their own life
Stressful life events, such as the death of a loved one
Having a depressed mood as a youngster
Illness, such as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's or HIV/AIDS
Long-term use of certain medications, such as some drugs used to control high blood pressure, sleeping pills or, occasionally, birth control pills
Certain personality traits, such as having low self-esteem and being overly dependent, self-critical or pessimistic
Alcohol, nicotine and drug abuse
Having recently given birth
Being in a lower socioeconomic group
What can depression be related to? Occupation, for one.
Among the 21 major occupational categories, the highest rates of experiencing a major depressive episode (MDE) among full-time workers aged 18 to 64 were found in the personal care and service occupations (10.8 percent) and the food preparation and serving related occupations (10.3 percent). The occupational categories with the lowest rates of past year MDE were engineering, architecture, and surveying (4.3 percent); life, physical, and social science (4.4 percent); and installation, maintenance, and repair (4.4 percent).
However, being unemployed was most depressing, and being fully employed least depressing.
Combined data from 2004 to 2006 indicate that the prevalence of past year MDE among adults aged 18 to 64 was higher among the unemployed and those of "Other" employment status than among persons employed part time or full time. Among adults aged 18 to 64, an estimated 12.7 percent of those who were unemployed and 12.7 percent of those in the "Other" group experienced an MDE in the past year compared with 9.3 percent of those employed part time and 7.0 percent of those employed full time.
Do all of these studies diagnose depression the same way?
The study cited above uses the definition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV), which specifies a period of 2 weeks or longer during which there is either depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure and at least four other symptoms that reflect a change in functioning, including problems with sleep, eating, energy, concentration, and self-image.
Does depression persist when factors change, such as leaving a stressful environment like a war zone?
I’ve looked at expert information about depression, and have come away with the impression that there are many factors causing and involved in it, and of course there are varying degrees of depression.
The Rand Corporation appears to be breaking new ground with this study. To me that means it should be taken with a grain of salt.
In the first analysis of its kind, researchers estimate that post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression among returning service members will cost the nation as much as $6.2 billion in the two years following deployment — an amount that includes both direct medical care and costs for lost productivity and suicide. Investing in more high-quality treatment could save close to $2 billion within two years by substantially reducing those indirect costs, the 500-page study concludes.
The RAND study contains estimates that state the high end of expected costs, and the high end of expected benefits. I think there is probably a big difference between “could save close to $2 billion in two years” and what it “would save in two years.”
The RAND study estimates the societal costs of PTSD and major depression for two years after deployment range from about $6,000 to more than $25,000 per case. Depending whether the economic cost of suicide is included, the RAND study estimates the total society costs of the conditions for two years range from $4 billion to $6.2 billion.
Apparently the cost of suicides is about $1.1 billion per year for the Iraqi and Afghanistan veteran group (using the RAND numbers above gives $6.2 billion minus $4 billion divided by two years equals $1.1 billion).
According to CBS News, the veteran suicide rate is 19 per 100,000 per year, while the active military suicide rate is 11 per 100,000 per year. Instead of an “epidemic of veteran suicides” as reported by CBS News and Perky Katie Couric, veterans match the rate for same-age males; the suicide rate among active military is about half of the general population rate; forty nations have higher male suicide rates than our veterans; and the overall veterans’ rate of 19 is the same or lower than the rate for BOTH SEXES in Japan (24.0), Belgium (21.1), Finland (20.3), Cuba (18.3), and France, Austria, Korea, and Switzerland.
The question then becomes, so where is the $2 billion in savings coming from? If exposure is causing depression in veterans of war, resulting in increased suicides, then why doesn’t the veteran suicide rate show that? If such exposure is causing suicides in the active military, why is their suicide rate half that of same-age civilian males?
According to the numbers, there would be about 240 suicides per year from amongst the 1.6 million veterans exposed to war. If the 1.6 million were predominantly young males who had never served in the military, there would be about 304 suicides, or 64 more per year. If we made a comparison to 1.6 million Frenchmen of all ages (including children), there would be 440 suicides, or 200 more per year.
At this point I’m left wondering what was the point of this study? War is traumatic. Many terrible things happen. Our diagnoses and treatments of mental problems among military members is not perfect. However, based on the numbers I have seen, it is probably better than the mental health services that most Americans, and from the suicide statistics, most foreign citizens receive.
I question the methods and conclusions, particularly if the bottom line is, as it appears to be, that reporting symptoms of depression resulted in the military member being classified as if diagnosed with depression. From that point projections of mental health care costs and indirect costs from lower productivity and suicides were calculated, and from the same spurious information savings were projected.
And above and beyond all else, there are ample statistics from over five years of fighting that would indicate whether or not the expected problems were appearing and being identified.
I’m not denying that our military members have suffered, and some have problems. Combat fatigue has been noted in many wars in many places. When we invaded Iwo Jima, over 21,000 Japanese and 6,800 Americans – more than in five years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan - died in a month in 1945. A few months before, 135,000 Germans perished in the firestorms resulting from three days of fierce Allied aerial bombardment. After all that, and a lot more, America, Germany, Japan, and Britain gave the world half a century of the high achievement and progress.
Now we have RAND going where more and more are going.
Imagined problems, imagined solutions, imagined costs, imagined savings.
It’s a virtual study in a virtual world.
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