Ruminations of an Expatriate

I’ll be back in a month.  Perhaps I will be able to put up a post or two, but will mostly be out of touch.

At least he provides plenty of material for late night comics.

From the White House web site. To which I was led by a report at Huffington Post.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Madam President, it is a pleasure to welcome you back to the Oval Office. We have just had a very constructive dialogue. First, I want to tell you how proud I am to be the President of a nation that — in which there’s a lot of Philippine-Americans. They love America and they love their heritage. And I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the — of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House.

(Laughter.)

PRESIDENT ARROYO: Yes.

PRESIDENT BUSH: And the chef is a great person and a really good cook, by the way, Madam President.

PRESIDENT ARROYO: Thank you.

President Arroyo was later overheard asking “How in the world did that vacuous frat boy ever become elected president?”

Scott Shane has a fascinating report of CIA interrogation and torture in the CIA’s secret site near Warsaw.

Perhaps this is old news to some of you, but just today I ran across Foxfire Portable Edition, which one may load onto a portable device, such as a hard drive, cd, or USB device. The same for Thunderbird, the Mozilla email client I use. The portable edition will enable me to avoid using web mail, which I pretty much detest. The other benefit of the portable programs is that all of one’s personal information is contained on the portable device one uses so none remains with an internet cafe computer.

I have loaded both programs onto a portable hard drive which I can take with me while traveling, plug into a computer at an internet cafe, and be able to use Firefox (most cafes I think use Microsoft IE) and have all of my bookmarks. Speaking of bookmarks, if you’re using Firefox and haven’t yet come across Foxmarks, it is a nifty add-on which enables one to synchronize ones bookmarks amongst the various computers one might use.

I have synchronized my bookmarks to the Firefox Portable Edition and configured Thunderbird Portable on my portable hard drive. So I’m ready for the road, which I will be hitting Thursday when I leave for a month at the homes of friends in Pons, Pinar del Rio, Cuba. I will be pretty much out of touch for the month, as the nearest internet cafe is twenty minutes from Pons in Vinales and which I don’t expect to visit more than once a week or so.

The programs and lots of portable programs, including Open Office, may be found at PortableApps.com.

I came across this video of a Tom Waits press conference at Ben Smith’s Politico blog. Smith calls it the “best press conference ever”.

I will be returning to Pinar del Rio at the end of the month and will again attend Katiuska’s birthday party, where dirty dancing will again, no doubt, ensue.

Likewise, I’ve posted this video before.

More practice. This time a bit of the boat parade I would watch each morning last July from the patio of the house in Playa Baracoa.

The plugin works as advertised.  Yahoo, I no longer must use YouTube to post videos.

I previously posted this video through YouTube. I have just uploaded a WordPress video plugin, which eliminates the need to use YouTube, and am trying it out.

I worked for local governments, primarily small cities, for most of my working career, and amongst my duties was to act as the cities’ risk manager relative to their participation in a cooperative local government self-insurance program. Thus, I notice things such as curb heights not within the standard range, construction sites not properly guarded, and other sources of liability exposure for which local governments often pay.

While walking through Ixtapa, Mexico in 1997 I noticed a large hole had been excavated in the street, apparently to repair a sewer collection main. The excavation was completely unguarded. No warning signs nor barricades warned folks of the hole. I remember thinking of the liability exposure that such an unguarded excavation would present the cities for which I worked. It was then I realized one important difference between Mexico and the USA. Similarly, I have often noted here that the conditions of sidewalks here in Xalapa, and in Merida, require one to engage in “purposeful walking”, as the sidewalks include such defects for which the injuries of even a stumbling drunk would be indemnified in the USA.

Due, largely, to development of case law related to tort claims in the USA, things must be made “idiot proof”, as a state department of transportation engineer once put it, as must be made the process of constructing those things. Thus protecting the stupid and careless from their stupidity and carelessness. Please understand I do not exclude myself from either category. I have committed many stupid and careless acts during my life which, but for dumb luck, rightfully should have been my end.

Sometime after my Ixtapa visit it occurred to me that folks in the USA, in the aggregate, are becoming stupider, and were becoming so for two primary reasons. One, all of the safety rules were preventing the selection of the more careless and less intelligent from the gene pool; and, two, TV. The purpose of TV is to serve as a sales medium, the programming intended to simply hold folks’ attention between commercials. To appeal to the widest market TV must aim for the lowest common denominator in is programming, thus the steady decrease in programming that requires thought from the audience.

I have shared this theory with friends, somewhat in jest; but to this point have not broadcast it. I should note that the theory is based upon absolutely nothing but the intuition of this aging hippie, whose ideas are often greeted with a rolling of the eyes.

This week a gringo who lives in my apartment building six months of each year returned and brought me a book he thought I might enjoy, Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Diamond, a “professor of physiology at UCLA School of Medicine, began his career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography.”

Diamond, in the book, seeks to answer a question posed to him on a New Guinea beach in 1972 by Yali, “a remarkable local politician”. “Why is it”, Yali asked, “that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Cargo being the New Guinea reference to tools, medicines, consumer goods, and the other products of more developed technology and economies. Thus the purpose of Diamond’s book, to answer Yali’s question.

My gringo neighbor was correct. I find the book fascinating, though I have thus far plumbed only its first fifty pages, so don’t yet know Diamond’s answer to Yali’s question..

Early in the book, Diamond, in explaining his perception that folks in New Guinea “impressed me as being on average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is”, writes:

My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.

It’s easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct. First, Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central governments, police, and judiciaries. In those societies, infectious epidemic diseases of dense populations (such as smallpox) were historically the major cause of death, while murders were relatively uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule. Most Europeans who escaped fatal infections also escaped other potential causes of death and proceeded to pass on their genes. Today, most live-born Western infants survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have been living in societies where human numbers were too low for epidemic diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional New Guineans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food.

Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or 0 have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.

Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern Euroopean and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the supeerior average mental function displayed by New Guineans.

That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. Certainly, there is no hint at all of any intellectual disadvantage of New Guineans that could serve to answer Yali’s question.

This aging hippie is feeling a bit smug.

Perhaps you read this piece of fantastical nonsense by Edward Luttwak, which appeared as an op-ed in the New York Times on May 12. If so, then amongst Luttwak’s offering you found these gems of delusion.

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)

——–

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

I had not heard of, let alone read, Luttwak’s delusional offering until I ran across a reference, in one of the news blogs I frequent, to the New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt’s June 1 denunciation of Luttwak’s nonsense, in which he criticized the NYT editors for running the piece without a review of Luttwak’s contentions related to Islamic law or unaccompanied by contrary commentary. Hoyt, in part, provides.

I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong.

Interestingly, in defense of his own article, Luttwak sent me an analysis of it by a scholar of Muslim law whom he did not identify. That scholar also did not agree with Luttwak that Obama was an apostate or that Muslim law would prohibit punishment for any Muslim who killed an apostate. He wrote, “You seem to be describing some anarcho-utopian version of Islamic legalism, which has never existed, and after the birth of the modern nation state will never exist.”

——-

Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said he regretted not urging Luttwak to soften his language about possible assassination, given how sensitive the subject is. But he said he did not think the Op-Ed page was under any obligation to present an alternative view, beyond some letters to the editor.

I do not agree. With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view. When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.

Still, even after reading of Hoyt’s denunciation, I had read neither Luttwak’s commentary nor Hoyt’s denunciation, until today after reading this fascinating piece on Luttwak by Laura Rozen, one of the country’s few remaining real journalists, after running across excerpts at her excellent blog, War and Piece.

Reading Rozen’s piece has caused me to further wonder how many Edward Luttwaks and Michael Ledeens (a former Luttwak partner, the guy who called the Pearl harbor attack “lucky”, who was involved in the Inran-Contra affair, and who was likely behind the forged Niger uranium documents) are lurking amongst the plausibly deniable shadows of officialdom, doing its dirtiest of dirty work. And how it is that such psychopaths are allowed even into the shadows.

Neil Sinhababu posting at The Washington Monthly blog reminds us of what Obama had to say in 2002 relative to the Cheney administration’s plan to subjugate Iraq. Obama’s entire speech may be found here.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

Obama, an Illinois legislator at the time, was able to understand in 2002 the results of a USA invasion of Iraq. Why were there so many congresspersons who could not?

The BBC reports that “More than 100 nations have reached an agreement on a treaty which would ban current designs of cluster bombs.”

Cluster bombs “are made up of a big container which opens in mid-air, dropping hundreds of smaller individual sub-munitions, or ‘bomblets’, across a wide area.”

“Countries like the US, India, Pakistan and Israel claim such munitions are highly useful on the battlefield, but opponents say that where the bomblets fail to explode they leave a deadly legacy for civilians.

——-

“But in a statement, the Pentagon stood firm, saying: ‘While the United States shares the humanitarian concerns of those in Dublin, cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility, and their elimination from US stockpiles would put the lives of our soldiers and those of our coalition partners at risk.’”

Some of the bomblets often don’t explode, leaving an explosive attractive to curious children, whose curiosity has killed and maimed many.

Once again the USA government opts for profits over humanitarian considerations.

Just in case you missed Borat’s interview of Bob Barr, the Libertarian party presidential candidate and former congressman from Georgia.

I just realized that this past Sunday was the third anniversary of Ruminations of an Expatriate.  October 1 will be my third anniversary of expatriation.

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, a real journalist I think, reports on the release of a Simon Fraser University analysis that finds that “terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years.”

As Zakaria reports:

The Simon Fraser analysis “explains that there is a reason you’re scared. The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.

“The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, “Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups—and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START—it was almost never described as such.” To take just two examples, Mack pointed out that in 2004, the Janjaweed militia killed at least 723 civilians in Sudan (as documented by independent studies). The MIPT recorded zero deaths in Sudan from terrorism that year; START counted only 17. In Congo in 1999, independent studies identified hundreds killed by militia actions. The MIPT notes zero deaths that year from terrorism; and START, seven.

“Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined “significant” attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islamist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.”

It appears that the USA government really is trying to keep us scared.

I ran across the following today at this page of the Federation of American Scientists Military Analysis Network site.

You may remember my post last March related to John Perkins book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, which Smedley’s comments brought to mind.

Smedley Butler on Interventionism

– Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

May I gratuitously note that my Spanish speaking has progressed to the point to which I no longer must travel with a Spanish/English dictionary. I did not take my dictionary along on my recent two week visit to Cuba, nor on my previous trips to Puerto Escondido and Oaxaca.

I arrived at the Veracruz airport early this afternoon to learn from the Mexicana folks that my flight had been canceled. I never did quite understand why. I did, however make it quite clear that I thought it quite bad form that the Mexicana folks hadn’t called me to let me know, since I had given the folks in the Xalapa office my number.

If the USA government policy relative to travel to Cuba wasn’t dictated by the rich Cuban expatriates in Florida and New Jersey, who give lots of money to politicians, I could have purchased my airline ticket online with my USA credit card and would have received notice of the canceled flight.

Oh well, here I am spending the night in Veracruz, with my hotel and taxi fare, to and from, the airport paid by Mexicana.

The only problem is my three friends who I was supposed to rendezvous with in Cancun who have never been to Cuba before.

Please keep in mind I am posting with my “smart phone”, which is not yet smart enough to include a spell checker. So I ask you forgive my editing errors.

Though I’ve had a very pleasant afternoon, of which I will post more later, it’s really hot and humid here.

I leave tomorrow morning for two weeks, during which I will be without  a computer.