Roy's Rants

2010-08-05T06:30:00.000-07:00

LAME DUCK CONGRESS
In an earlier post I said that if the Democrats lose control of Congress in the November elections, not much is likely to happen until after the 2012 presidential election.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer is not so sure. In his Washington Post column of July 26, 2010, he says if we have a lame duck Congress composed of a lot of defeated or retiring Democrats, we should be afraid. We should be very afraid. He says that the losing Democrats are likely to violate the basics of democracy.
Krauthammer says that if the Republicans actually gain control of Congress in the November elections, a lame-duck Congress is likely to be called back into session between the November elections and the swearing-in of the 112th Congress next January.
This will freeze in place the lopsided Democratic majorities of the November 2008 elections. It will be populated by dozens of Democratic members who had lost re-election in addition to those retiring. They could then vote for anything because they would have nothing to lose.
Krauthammer says the only thing holding the Democrats back would be shame, a Washington commodity in chronically short supply. Passing such unpopular legislation as card check, budget balancing through major tax hikes, and climate change legislation (cap and tax) in such a fashion "would be an egregious violation of elementary democratic norms."
Krauthammer says the only way to prevent this is to bring up the unpopular legislation now and obtain a sense of the people's will before it disappears the morning after Election Day. Then, he says, extract a promise from each lame-duck member that he or she will not vote against the expressed will of the people in any legislation introduced during the lame-duck session.

Well, good luck with that. What could possibly go wrong?

2010-07-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

MISGUIDED LEGISLATION

"Conflict minerals" refers to minerals mined in conditions of armed conflict and human rights abuse, notably in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, by the Congolese National Army and various armed rebel groups, including the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda. The profits from the sale of these minerals are said to finance continued fighting in the Second Congo War, and control of lucrative mines becomes a focus of the fighting as well. The most commonly mined minerals are cassiterite, wolframite, coltan, and gold, which are extracted from the eastern Congo, and passed through a variety of intermediaries before being purchased by multinational electronics companies. These minerals are essential in the manufacture of a variety of devices, like cell phones, laptops, and MP3 players.(Source: Wikipedia)
Although it has nothing to do with financial reform, a bill requiring companies to certify that their products are free of conflict minerals was attached to the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act that President Obama signed into law last week. Companies must file an annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Penalties for not filing have not been established as yet. The SEC was directed to promulgate necessary regulations within nine months. Find more info about conflict minerals on the Internet by going to Wikipedia and searching for "conflict minerals."
Coltan is a colloquial African term for the metal ore from which the element tantalum is extracted. Electronic capacitors are made from tantalum. Such capacitors are used many electronic products; hearing aids, pacemakers, GPS devices, ignition systems and anti-lock braking systems in automobiles, laptop computers, mobile phones, video game consoles, video cameras and digital cameras.
Cassiterite is the chief ore needed to produce tin, essential for the production of tin cans and solder for use on electronic equipment circuit boards.
Wolframite is an important source of the element tungsten. Tungsten is used in machine tools and hand tools. It also is used as a substitute for lead in "green ammunition."
The reporting provision in the financial regulation bill requires that U.S. companies that import products containing certain minerals to file an annual report declaring whether they source their minerals from Congo or one of the nine surrounding countries, since much of Congo's mineral wealth is smuggled out of the region through its neighbors. If a company declares that is supply chain passes through the region, it will have to report what steps it is taking to trace the origin of the minerals and ensure that its purchases don't fund armed groups responsible for atrocities in eastern Congo.
As laudable as the activities of the human rights advocates have been in getting attention focused on the Congo situation, critics say that the recent U.S. conflict minerals legislation may not help the situation. For sure, the legislation will require additional hours spent by companies required to do the reporting. Or, more likely, companies will avoid using minerals from the Congo and seek other sources.
Human rights activists expect there to be three positives from the new legislation.
1. Monitoring supply chains and pushing companies to avoid using conflict minerals will cut armed groups off from their primary sources of revenue.
2. Without the revenue gained from mineral extraction and/or taxing the mineral trade, armed groups will not be able to purchase weapons, ammunition, and other necessary supplies to continue fighting.
3. The effects of the lack of revenue will eventually be a factor that forces the armed groups to the negotiating table, where a peace process can be worked out.
These may be hoped-for outcomes but they are not likely to happen.
1. The mineral trade is not the only source of revenue for rebels in the Kivus.
2. The conflict minerals legislation will not leave the most significant rebel groups destitute. Alternative revenue sources will continue to fund the rebel activity. Some rebel groups derive revenue from taxing trade and transport through the areas they control, the timber industry, charcoal production and interests in plantations and cattle ranches. Some militias get backing from prominent businessmen in the region. Without functioning public security institutions,
no one can stop them.

3. Even if they lose all funding, armed groups are unlikely to stop terrorizing the population. Armed groups in the Kivus don't need to buy weapons to attack the population. The patterns by which violence happens in the Kivus do not always involve guns. Many rapes are committed by groups of men who attack young girls and women as they are on their way to work in the fields, or while they'r fetching the day's water. This type of violence is likely to continue because there is no one to prevent it from happening.
Actually, it is cruel to offer those unfortunate Congolese people hope that an unworkable piece of U.S. legislation is going to protect them from the rape and murder that is rampant in their country. It is not just unfortunate. It is
unconscionable for our Congress to pass such legislation and then pat themselves on the back thinking they have done a good deed.

2010-07-23T18:21:00.000-07:00

BLOWING SMOKE

Thank goodness, cap and trade legislation is dead for this session of Congress. Oh, after the November elections, the lame duck Congress may try to revive it but the same Senate Democrats who did not support it last week will not have changed their stance after what stacks up to be a close election. Of course, if the November elections result in the Republicans gaining control of Congress, then cap and tax is a dead issue anyway.

One thing that has not been so apparent in the ecoguilt that has been thrown around in support of cap and tax is the number of scams that have arisen. Many people have discovered that the carbon offsets they bought to neutralize their carbon footprint have been "junk." Most of these scams have been happening outside the U.S. It's a new market, so it's in its formative stage. Consumers don't know much about it. They become emotionally drawn towards buying products with sustainable attributes. This means that the market is potentially open to abuse.

Many voluntary carbon offsets are sold online through retailers with eco-friendly names. Others are sold as ad-ons: Travel companies allow customers to "fly green," UPS customers can offset the cost of shipping packages, Ford car buyers can drive "carbon neutral" for $29.95 per year, and the Harvard Law School urges students to buy offsets when they travel for job interviews.

Saab Australia has been taken to court by the Australian government for suggesting that the planting of 17 native trees would offset the lifetime emissions of a new car. The Aussie government also has warned consumers to "hang up" if they get calls from a Japan-based offset promoter.

In 2007 Cardinal Paul Poupard participated in a photo-op in the Vatican during which he accepted a gold-framed certificate declaring the papal city the "first carbon-neutral sovereign state." The Vatican was negating all its greenhouse-gas emissions with carbon offsets presented to the Holy See by a company called KlimaFa. The new company planned to plant thousands of trees near the scratch-poor farming village of Tiszakeszi in the Hungarian plains. It did not happen. However KlimaFa used the publicity about the not-existent "Vatican Forest" to sell offsets on the Internet.

Here in the U.S. NativeEnergy is the celebrities' choice in offset providers. However, even the stars don't know what they are getting for their money. The company is a darling of many environmentalists also. The company's model is unique. It mostly sells offsets for projects that have yet to happen or are only in the works.

Some consumers are becoming wary. The U.S. House of Representatives dropped plans to make its Capitol offices carbon neutral last year after spending $89,000 on offsets. The U.S. government Accountability Office (GAO) found "limited assurance of credibility" in voluntary offsets. Let the buyer beware.

A four-month investigation by reporters from The Christian Science Monitor and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting revealed a number of scams involving providers.

Find out more. Watch "Buyer Beware-empty air" at: carbon offsets.

2010-07-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE

In May there was a 2-1/2 day conference on climate change held in Chicago. The 4th International Conference on Climate Change attracted nearly 800 scientists, economists, opinion leaders, and policymakers, including 80 state legislators. There were 70 speakers and experts from 23 countries. Yet, I saw nary a peep about it in the media.

The conference was sponsored by The Heartland Institute and 67 cosponsors. These groups are composed of people who dare to question the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)and former Vice President Al Gore and his followers. The attendees at the Chicago conference were composed of what Al Gore and his liberal media followers term "skeptics."

The speakers not only gave scientific proof that the IPCC reports have been inaccurate but they showed how the data have been manipulated by such shenanigans as East Angliagate, where they overlooked data that did not support their case. You remember that. East Anglia University scientists deliberately hid emails that referred to an unexpected but inconveniently inexplicable decline in global temperatures despite the reported findings of the IPCC that global temperatures are rising disastrously.

Many IPCC scientists (and followers of Al Gore) choose to ignore the Scientific Method. This method requires that a researcher follow established scientific practices, report findings in peer-reviewed journals and evaluate and investigate critical review of his or her conclusions. Many IPCC reports accept work from non-credentialed "experts."

This spouting of quasi-scientific jibber-jabber by global warming alarmists would be harmless if were limited to scholarly discussions over drinks at the faculty club. But, these "non-facts" are being used to promote such legislation as cap and trade. Such efforts at limiting greenhouse gases in the U.S. are worthless so long as countries like China are building coal-fired power generating plants as fast as they can.

We should refer to cap and trade as cap and tax because that is what it is. It's not about limiting GHGs. It is a part of the President's plan to redistribute the wealth in America. As Dear Abby used to say "Wake up, America, and smell the coffee"

The proceedings of the conference are online including PowerPoint presentations and audio and video of all the presentations. Go to conference.

2010-07-04T15:03:00.000-07:00

INDEPENDENCE DAY

Probably most of you reading this post are American citizens or at least live within the safety of the United States. We enjoy the blessing of the freedom of worship that's largely unknown throughout most of the rest of the world. Yet, we treat this blessing with little regard, claiming it as our right without remembering the high cost that was paid to secure it for us.

Some may view the prosperity of our land and the freedom we enjoy as somehow reflecting an exclusive blessing from God that He withholds from other people in other places. God's blessing on nations isn't confined to geographical, political, or ethnic boundaries. God sees His people as His nation, His kingdom wherever they live.

God's people are scattered across the earth, behind boundaries of political oppression, secluded by cultures of amoral humanism, or hidden in communities just beginning to experience His gift of liberty. May God's kingdom expand throughout the earth, blessing all those who call on Him as Lord.

Note: These words are not mine. I got them from a little daily devotional booklet I have. On this special day, we should not only pay honor to those patriots who secured our freedom and founded this great country but remember the One who has blessed us mightily.

Our nation's leaders are straining so hard to keep our government a secular one that they want to deny there was ever a place for God in its activities. The educated fool we have for a president has declared that America is not a Christian nation. He doesn't speak for me. In fact, he doesn't really speak for many Americans because he is not really an American. He was raised in foreign cultures among regimes that hate America and all it stands for. He doesn't understand our American culture nor does he try. He is an egomaniacal empty suit of a policy wonk who is trying to put into practice socialist policies that were whispered into his ear by far left wing liberal professors at Columbia and Harvard universities.

We need to get right with God and ask his help in making sure the idiot in the White House is a one-term president.

2010-06-06T16:14:00.000-07:00

* D DAY *

Sixty six years ago today, Allied troops hit the beach at Normandy in France in what was the largest invasion ever to take place. It was the beginning of the retaking of the European mainland from Nazi Germany. Many of our brave young men died on that day as well as in the subsequent fighting across France and Germany.

We need to remember them and to honor their memory. Today, we still have brave young men and women serving in foreign lands standing between us and the people who would do us harm. Please join me in a prayer for their safe return to our midst:

"Dear Lord, hold our troops in your loving hands. Protect them as they protect us. Bless them and their families for the selfless acts they perform for us in our time of need. Amen."

2010-06-06T15:29:00.000-07:00

*VIDEO CLIP *

This is a good video clip telling why we should get busy and begin with the November elections to take our country back! Click on
.

2010-06-01T11:09:00.000-07:00

*MEMORIAL DAY REVIEW*

It was a wonderful Memorial Day. The weather was perfect. Many, many patriotic citizens participated in the various Memorial Day events held around the area. There was lots of positive media attention to the day and its events.

The only downside for the day for me was the lack of patriotism on the part of our clueless commander in chief. He makes a habit of denigrating customs we Americans hold so dear. During the presidential campaign he refused to wear a flag in his lapel until it became an issue at some of his campaign stops. He and his wife have been pictured holding the wrong hand over the wrong breast during the playing of our national anthem. In fact, he doesn't even approve of "The Star Spangled Banner" as our national anthem. He says it is too militaristic. He says he would prefer something like "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing" as our national anthem.

I find it hard to relate to Obama. It's more than color. Our life experiences have been so different. Like most Americans, I grew up loving my country, loving my flag and loving my nation's history, flaws and all. By the time I had graduated from elementary school, I had been in many patriotic programs, probably at least one per year. Even now, I can still recite the words from the song "O Columbia The Gem Of The Ocean" which I sang in Mrs. Newland's third grade class.

By the time Obama had finished his equivalent of elementary school, he had been abandoned by three important people in his life, his father, his mother and his step-father. He had been sent to live with his white grandmother whom he described in one of his books as a bigot who said hurtful things in his presence.

If I was into pop-psychology, I would conclude that Obama suffers from self-loathing because of his early background. He tries hard enough to hide it. He constantly reinvents himself to fit the occasion. I think his life goal was to show the world that he is better and smarter than everyone else and he didn't care who he had to sell his soul to in order to achieve that goal. He had to have help from somebody to go from a nobody community organizer to a nobody U.S. senator to president. He looks more and more like the "Manchurian Candidate." I halfway expect Angela Lansbury to emerge from the background any day now and start giving him orders.

If this were simply a matter of self-aggrandizement by a political policy wonk, it would be one thing. But, Obama is ruining this country. He has no feel whatsoever for what has gone before. He has only his vision of making the U.S. more like the European countries and we know where they are headed.

Obama must be a one-term president. We can limit the damage he can do beginning with the November elections. If we can take control of the congress from the Democratic party, Obama will be severely limited in what he will be able to do as a lame duck president. The 2012 presidential election is critical for this country. If Obama is returned to office in 2012, we are headed for bankruptcy. He will take us to the point of no return at which time we will never be able to pay down our national debt.

2010-05-31T13:00:00.000-07:00

* MEMORIAL DAY *

I am pleased that so many people are recognizing Memorial Day this year for what it is - a day to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice to maintain our freedom. We must be forever vigilante to make sure that they did not die in vain.

Today we still have brave men and women of the military standing between us and the bad people. They deserve our unwavering support. I hope you will join me in a daily prayer asking God to protect them and to return them home safely.

2010-05-27T11:08:00.000-07:00

NO MORE CATCH AND RELEASE!

Near the end of the Twentieth Century, January 1992 to be exact, I wrote a piece for a rather short-lived safety newsletter distributed to employers of Texas. The subject of the newsletter article was the employer requirements of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Remember that piece of federal legislation? Its intent was to solve the illegal immigrant problem forever.

The headline for the article said "INS Focuses on Paperwork." A subhead added "Nearly 250 D/FW Firms Already Have Been fined For Poor I-9 Records."

Here is the complete article:

"Good hiring practices should be a part of every company's safety program if work injuries are to be avoided.

"The most attractive applicants are those with safe work histories. Completion of an application form, a check on an applicant's past work history and a pre-employment interview represent the minimal effort needed to get a reliable employee. Another item of paperwork now required is to have the prospective employee complete an INS Form I-9.

"A completed I-9 on each employee is a requirement of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is checking employers' I-9 files and personnel records. Citations are being issued to employers for incomplete or missing I-9 paperwork.

"So far, nearly 250 employers in the Dallas/fort Worth area have been fined. The types of companies that have run afoul of the law have been those that use minimum wage workers and have relatively higher rates of employee turnover, such as food service, health service, lodging or construction. However, all employers are subject to INS scrutiny. For instance, a Dallas veterinarian recently was cited and had to pay a $5,900 fine.

"Check your hiring procedures and your paperwork. The penalty for habitually hiring undocumented workers is very severe. The Dallas INS office has not had to file a habitual charge yet. But they're looking."

My question is, "When did we stop requiring I-9 forms to be completed, why, and who is responsible for stopping it?" Requiring the completion of the I-9 forms was not an onerous burden on employers. They were not required to authenticate the info. In fact, the Act prohibited them from doing so. Even if an employer suspected that a prospective employee's "green card" or Social Security number was false, the employer could not even report it to proper authorities.

History has shown that that attempt to control illegal immigration was not successful. It resulted in the illegals inviting the rest of their families and their neighbors to join them in this land of opportunity and freebies.

Let's don't go this route again. Let us secure the borders first, deport as many illegals as we can catch, and follow the orderly process for entry to this country that is already on the books. This "catch and release" program that we have been following for years is not working. What about the "rights" of illegal aliens? Hello! If they are illegal, they have no rights.

2010-05-08T15:43:00.000-07:00

I WAS AN ILLEGAL ALIEN IN MEXICO!

Mexican President Calderon has the gall to criticize the U.S. for not having open border immigration policies with Mexico. As though Mexico has liberal immigration policies. Their borders are tighter than a rock star's blue jeans. Just ask the Salvadorans, Guatemalans and especially the Hondurans.

I had my own experience with Mexican immigration authorities. To be truthful, I helped precipitate it, but my point is, Mexico doesn't bend their immigration rules for anybody. I originally wrote the essay that follows for a newsletter that I was editing at the time. It was considered a little humorous then but it's not all that funny now. I used to call it "Roy's Mexican Adventure."

It sounded simple enough when it all started. One Friday when I was filling in for my boss who was on vacation, his boss called me in and said he had an assignment for me. I was to fly down to one of the company's geophysical survey ships operating in the Bay of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico, take some samples of their drinking water, fly back and have it analyzed. It seemed that somehow the freshwater tank and the waste sewage holding tank on this 110 foot vessel had become cross-connected and they were not sure if the water was okay to drink.

The ship could not just stop working and go to port. Geophysical survey vessels take sound recordings in a pre-designed grid pattern. They travel back and forth in segments that may be ten miles long or longer. They do not make money while they are in port or when they are sitting still. They have service vessels that supply their needs on the go while they keep working. They take soundings via a long floating cable equipped with hydro-phones. The cable can be as long as five miles long. It takes time to deploy and retrieve it. They will "shoot" for days on end.

My boss's boss told me to take enough money to charter a helicopter if I needed to in order to reach the vessel. First bad decision. No, that's the second bad decision. The first bad decision was going in the first place.

I called Melissa and asked her to pack my garment bag with enough stuff for a weekend and that I would be by to pick it up and she would need to drive me to D/FW Airport. I assured her I would be back Sunday. Ha!

I flew to Houston but missed my Mexico City connecting flight at Houston International which meant that I would also miss my Mexico City connection to Ciudad del Carmen which is located on the Yucatan Peninsula. I knew better than to schedule an international flight with such tight connections, but the order to my boss's boss had come down from the highest echelon and I was expected to achieve the impossible. Did I mention that I was traveling on a tourist visa because there was not time to get a work visa? Bad idea! Besides that, a work visa costs a few bucks.

On the flight from Mexico City to Ciudad del Carmen I was sitting next to a Halliburton engineer who cautioned me not say I was going out to a survey vessel. Tourists normally do not visit work boats. Bad omen!

When I got off the plane at Ciudad del Carmen and entered the terminal building, the first person to greet me was an immigration officer. He was a big mean-looking Mexican who was carrying what must have been a 20 mm cannon on his hip. As he examined my tourist visa and passport, he asked me what was the purpose of my visit. I told him I was visiting friends and would leave Sunday. He put my passport in his pocket and said I could have it back Sunday when I left. I have had people tell me that when you are in a foreign country, you should never, never give up your passport. To which my reply is that they have never, never been faced with Saturday night in a small town Mexican jail which probably is 100 percent drunk tank. Ciudad del Carmen is a kidney shaped island city on the northern side of the Yucatan Peninsula. Mexico's oil production in the Gulf of Mexico has caused a ten-fold increase in population due to oil well servicing activities.

I spotted the company person who was supposed to meet me. He was hiding behind a column watching to see if I was going to get arrested in which case he would quickly and quietly leave. I had never met him before. His job with the company was to set up and maintain communication and navigation beacons for the survey vessel to use. He put me up for the night and the next morning we started a search for the Port Commandante.

Remember my instructions to charter a helicopter if I had to in order to get to the boat? Wrong. Pemex, the Mexican national oil company, controlled everything that moved. El Commandante controlled everything else. He had more power than a small town Texas sheriff. I had to get his permission just to hitch a ride on a work boat going out to my survey vessel. After a diligent search of every bar in del Carmen, we found him and got his okey-dokey.

The next morning I got on this 30-foot work boat and headed for the survey ship which was about 25 miles out in the Gulf. It's Sunday and I'm supposed to be on my way back to Dallas. I'm not even to the boat yet. I'm no sailor but the water seemed a little rough and I asked the boat operator what the deal was. He pointed to his radar and showed me a tropical storm that was moving across Yucatan headed our way. Another bad omen!

We found the survey vessel easy enough but the waves were like eight feet and higher by then. To get on the survey vessel, I'm going to have to jump from one boat to the other. The boats were going up and down and not at the same time. One was going up and the other was going down. Since then, I have been told that is one of the dumbest things a land-lubber can do.

Did I mention that the survey vessel does not stop dead in the water for anything? The two boats are going up and down, not necessarily in sync. All the while, they're moving forward. At a signal I was to jump. Hopefully, someone on the survey boat would catch me. If I fall between the boats, I'm instant ground beef. But I made it. When they found out I didn't have any mail from back home, they started to throw me back. They were looking for any excuse because people in the field do not welcome "corporate people" to their work space.

The storm kept getting closer and worse. The boat captain wanted to head for safety but the boat party manager wanted to shoot as long as possible The party manager finally agreed to reel in the cable and head for shore. By the time they get all that several miles of cable on board and stowed, the storm is really pounding us. Did I mention that the cable is abut 10 inches in diameter and is filled with kerosene to make it float. We are now a floating fire bomb waiting to go off.

It's a hurricane by now and it's become night. We can't go back to Ciudad del Carmen because that's the direction from which the hurricane is coming. The captain headed for Coatzacoalcas, which is a port city south of Vera Cruz. It is located at the mouth of a large river.

The rain is so thick you can't see five feet even with a strong search light. The wind is blowing the rain horizontally and buffeting the ship, which is about 110 feet long and 40 feet wide. The ship is making nine knots and the hurricane is making 11 knots. This is not good. We barely made it to the relatively calm waters of the port but a sea-going tug several miles behind us was not so lucky. It went down with no survivors.

We tied up at the dock in port, the third boat out. That is, there was a boat moored to the dock and another boat was tied to it. We were tied to that boat. Everything was okay for the moment. Pretty soon it's Monday and Melissa had no idea where I was. This was before cell phones, the Internet, etc. Our time on the marine radio-telephone was rationed.

Eventually, another ship tied up outboard of us. I got to witness Mexican police arresting a Honduran national on that boat who did not have his papers. A fellow illegal alien. Seeing the way he was treated, I was not too eager to be outed.

This port city had its own El Commandante. He decided that the crew members of the boat must have work visas. In reality, that's a no-no. Crews of ocean-going vessels are exempt from such things. But as I said, El Commandante has more authority than a South Texas sheriff. It's a revenue thing. There is a fee for a work visa. The boat captain complained but he finally gave in and took the crew to the immigration office to get work visas all around. All but me, that is. The work visas would be cheaper than having the ship sit idle in dock for several days or weeks while they argued legalities.

But, what about me? My passport is back in del Carmen. It dawned on me that I was an undocumented alien! The captain said to stay out of sight on the boat and it would all work out. We would be leaving port soon and they would never know I was there. Silly me, I believed him. One of the crew members ratted me out and I was ordered to immigration. But, luck was with me for a change.

When an ocean going vessel is in port, they don't buy their groceries and other supplies directly. They don't go to Kroger or 7-11 for what they need. There are chandlers or shipping agents who perform that function for them. For a fee, of course. Fortunately for me, the shipping agent the captain selected was very well connected. He was Mexican but he had gone to high school in Chicago. Therefore, he spoke English like an American. He knew the ropes and he was into everything. He's probably a billionaire today. Through his efforts, the immigration office agreed to issue me an exit visa which would allow me to leave Mexico by the most direct route. In other words, get the hell out of Mexico you illegal gringo.

The shipping agent had another buddy who was a photographer who did a passport-type picture for the visa. He accompanied me to the immigration office where he had still another buddy, a lowly clerk, type up my exit visa after hours. The visa showed my job title as "ship's doctor." They had to account for my being on the boat. All of this had to cost money (can you say bribe?) but I never saw any money change hands. The plan was for me to take a bus ride to Ciudad del Carmen, get my passport and go home. I could not stay on the boat even though the boat was headed back in that direction.

The boat administrator, who was a company person located in Merida, Mexico, arrived via chartered Cessna with a brief case full of money to pay the bills the survey vessel had accumulated in port. The boat party manager prevailed upon him to let me fly back to Merida, which is what I did. However, my passport was still somewhere in del Carmen.

I took some of my helicopter charter money and bought a ticket to del Carmen on a little Mexican airline I had never heard of. I flew in an ancient DC-3 but I made it okay. Now the problem was to locate my passport.

The company navigation guy and I had to do another search for the immigration manager who had my passport. Where did we look? You guessed it. Back to the bars. We finally found him and he left us to go pick up my passport at somebody's office. When he came back, I did not get my passport immediately. He went into this long story about all the trouble he had to go through to get it, etc. I suspected that was to drive up the amount of the bribe, but as I said, I never saw any money exchanged.

My flight to Mexico City was not until the next morning but I was at the airport bright and early so as not to miss it. When I checked in for my ticket changes at the Mexico City airport, the pilot of my American Airlines flight happened to be hanging around the ticket counter talking to the ticket agent and we got into a conversation. You know, two Americans in a foreign country. He was intrigued by my story, not that he believed me. Later, when I got to D/FW he saw me again standing around looking forlorn. I told him I couldn't get hold of my wife to tell her to pick me up. He offered to give me a ride so we got into his beat up old pickup truck and he took me home.

I guess that was the only good thing that happened during the whole trip. My three day hurry up trip had stretched into a week and a half disaster. Oh, and about that exit visa? I still have it. I never turned it in. I didn't need it after I got my passport back. I'll show it to you sometime. My secret fantasy is that all the trouble that Mexico has gone through since then is because they have been looking for "el doktor's" exit visa and can't find it.

And the water quality tests? They were negative. It seems that before I got to the ship, someone had advised the boat crew to dump a sizeable quantity of bleach into the tank to purify it. So actually my trip was wasted.

One final insult. My boss docked my accrued vacation time for the extra days I spent on the trip.

2009-04-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

JUNK SCIENCE IS BACK!

I thought for a while there that the environmental decisions to be made by our government were going to have more validity in the future but I should have known better. Recently, I read an editorial in a plant engineering journal that said that science and law would take precedence at the EPA under the new administration.

The new administrator, Lisa Jackson, promised to let good science dictate decisions, not the other way around. We have heard promises like that before, only to find politics deciding which science is "good."

We generally take the definition of good science to mean that a rigid set of rules and procedures produce specific outcomes given certain data. Expectations are that by adhering to science and law, our environmental problems can be solved; 2 + 2 will always equal 4, not 5. The problem comes in the interpretation of the science. As it turns out, when the details of scientific data are examined, the answers are not always clear; particularly when political perspective is allowed to cloud one's vision.

So, I have to admit that my first impression was wrong. It seems that the nuts are still going to be running the asylum. The decisions and appointments of President Obama confirm it. This means we will continue to be regulated by junk science.

His campaign statement that he is going to "skyrocket electricity prices" and clean up the environment by forcing coal-fired generating plants out of business was only his first gaffe. His proposed "cap and trade" program to supposedly lower carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is another. Thankfully, it appears that this is a dead piece of legislation in the current Congress. I'll have more to say about cap and trade in a later posting.

Perhaps the most telling appointment by Mr. Obama that shows he hasn't a clue as to what environmental science is all about (neither does Al Gore) is his appointment of Harvard professor John Holdren as Presidential Science Advisor.

You need look no further than Dr. Holdren's recent statement to the Associated Press to see how far out in left field he is. He proposed that artificial trees be used to suck 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year and store it somewhere. He doesn't say where, how or why it will be stored. There is nothing territorial about the atmosphere. We could be sucking and storing 90,000 tons of Chinese, Indian or Russian CO2. All the while they can be pumping more into the air with their out of date generating plants and industries.

Another nutty idea of his is to use balloons, jet engines and artillery to put millions of tons of sulfates in the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation to cool the troposphere. This, he says, would mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption. You easily can imagine the geopolitical consequences of doing something like this. Our friends and enemies alike will holler loudly about how we are poisoning the atmosphere. They already are yelling because we have not signed the Kyoto Accords.

With someone like this whispering in President Obama's ear, who knows what's going to happen? It doesn't look good.

I have more to say on this. Come back later.

2009-03-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

IF ONLY IT WERE TRUE!

It seems that President Obama doesn't always reply with a big smile when being interviewed by a generally favorable media. CNN reported this recent answer to a question as to why he appeared to be slow off the mark in responding to AIG bonus outrage among voters and Congress. He replied "Because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak, all right?" Sounds a little snippy to me.

Better be careful there, Mr. President. You make the press mad and they won't carry water for you any more. So far, the press and the talking heads on t.v. have overlooked the fact that you really, really don't know what you are talking about, smile or not. Tick them off and you might have to do a little 'splaining of what you mean. For someone whose only job outside politics is as a community organizer, that might be a little difficult.

2009-03-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

NOT A CLUE!

When are people going to catch on that this guy we have elected president is in way over his head and his ideas are bad for the country.

For instance, on November 2, 2008 then presidential candidate Barak Obama gave an interview to the San Francisco Chronicle during which he pledged to "skyrocket" electricity prices. This was his plan at that time and now, as President Obama, he intends to carry it out.

He told the Chronicle "I'm capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, natural gas, you name it-whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers under my plan of cap-and-trade system. Electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."

He also said "If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them," under his cap-and-trade restrictions. He has repeatedly emphasized his cap-and-trade plan will make coal power unfeasible, thus bankrupting new coal plants and making coal a poor energy investment.

His aggressive greenhouse gas reduction plan would render coal power plants unprofitable and essentially wipe out this sector of the economy. This would mean the elimination of about 83,000 mining-related jobs, 60,000 coal-energy power plant jobs, 31,000 coal transportation jobs, and the tens of thousands of indirect jobs that produce products used by the coal sector. We already have plenty of jobless people. Does he really want to add another 200,000 or so more to the unemployment lines?

President Obama seems to make a habit of talking off the top of his head without thinking about the ramifications of his wacky proposals. He thinks if he says it with a big smile everything will work out. Get real, man!

2009-03-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

KERMIT WAS RIGHT!

It's not easy being green. The latest example was in Parade Magazine, an insert in the Sunday edition of many newspapers.

Readers send in questions about celebrities which are answered by writer Walter Scott. Last Sunday, March 22nd, a reader asked "When will the investigator played by David Caruso on CSI:Miami ditch his gas-guzzling Hummer?"

Walter Scott answered "When General Motors finally unloads the brand or stops paying the show for product placement."

Ironically, CBS, sponsor of the show, is running public service announcements on television about how we should be going green to save the environment. Also, GM is running commercials about how green and energy efficient their new cars are. Seems a little hypocritical to me.

The conclusion we can draw is that going green is good as long as it applies to someone else or as long as it does not stand in the way of making a profit.

2009-03-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

THE SILENT MEDIA

The second week of this month there was an important conference on climate change in New York City. Did you read about it in the newspaper or hear about it on t.v.? Neither did I.

You see, the Heartland Institute says that the global warming crisis is crock. The Institute says that tens of thousands of scientists say the media and environmental advocacy groups have it all wrong, that global warming is not a crisis. That goes against the thinking of the Al Gore supporting liberal media.

The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change was sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a 25-year-old national nonpartisan think tank based in Chicago. Featured speakers were internationally known scientists and atmospheric physicists.

They point to a cooling trend in global temperatures since 2000, past warming and cooling cycles that were not man-made, and new evidence that carbon dioxide is not a very powerful greenhouse gas.

The expertise of Heartland Institute supporters is such that they were able to recognize an egregious error NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) committed when it announced earlier this year that October 2008 was the warmest October in history.

It turns out that October 2008 was nowhere near a record. Global temperature measurements of the Earth's lower atmosphere by NASA satellite instruments show it was fairly typical compared to temperatures over the past 30 years and significantly cooler than average temperatures over the past seven years.

After GISS generated substantial media attention with its claim October 2008 was the warmest October in history, a number of global warming "skeptics" smelled something fishy and examined the data themselves. They soon discovered NASA and its partners at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had copied the September 2008 temperature data from Russia into the October Russian temperature dataset.

A prominent skeptic, statistician Steve McIntyre, reported that after GISS was forced to lower its October 2008 temperature data regarding Russia, it mysteriously and retroactively raised the temperatures that reportedly occurred in October in other parts of the world. The GISS, a federal agency, was forced to admit its blunder but they are busily adjusting their data to try to make it fit their conclusions.

Many climate scientists have criticized GISS in recent years for routinely claiming significantly higher global temperatures than those reported by other scientists; for employing a staff that appears to see its role more as advocates than as scientists; for getting caught claiming recent years were warmer than the data indicated; and for failing to provide transparency in how they manipulate raw temperature data before presenting their adjusted "official" temperature reports.

2008-02-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

SOLID PROOF!
Back in January I had an MRI done on my head. Nothing wrong. It was part of a research program for which I volunteered. A local hospital had a research grant to study blood flow in senior citizen's brains. It took about two hours and, no, they weren't searching for my brain all that time. Among other things, they took multiple snapshots, about 25 slices in all, starting at my left ear and moving across my head to my right ear. Pictured below is proof positive that I do have a brain.

2008-01-15T11:04:00.000-08:00

MORE ELECTRICAL POWER ON THE WAY!

It probably escaped your notice because it was buried inside the business section in the local newspaper, but the a Japanese manufacturer of nuclear generating power plants has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to certify one of their standard plant designs for use in the USA.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. applied to the NRC for certification of its US-APWR nuclear plant. It is the type of plant that Energy Future is considering using to expand its Comanche Peak Steam Generating Plant near Glen Rose, Texas. They removed the work "nuclear" from the plant's name long ago because of the anti-nuke activists but we all know it's a nuclear power plant.

This is a positive step in assuring the future availability of an adequate supply of electrical energy. The NRC has encouraged manufacturers to apply for standard design certification to speed the process of building reactors.

If a power company presents a cookie-cutter design package to the NRC for approval, the NRC can short-cut the design review part of the approval process and concentrate on the location of the plant and its operations. This can cut years off the approval process.

In the early 1970's I attended a briefing at the UT-Arlington about the proposed new plant at Commanche Peak. It was a presentation by the Westinghouse Corp., I think, who was designing the plant. If I remember right, the projected cost for the plant at that time was $750 million. Before it went online, the cost escalated to several billion dollars.

Because it was a "custom" designed plant, there were many changes made in the design as construction proceeded. If you have experience in building or remodeling a house, you know that design changes after construction begins are quite costly and slows the project.

At Commanche Peak there were siting changes as well as structural changes. For instance, one building had to be reoriented for safety reasons that escape me now. Also, the reactor building had to be beefed up to withstand the possible impact of a fully-loaded 747 aircraft crashing into it. I'm not kidding! It's a matter of record.

Of course, having a standardized design will only shortcut the design review process. The actual building of the plant and putting it into operation will be impeded by anti-nuke protests and related lawsuits. Hopefully, those can be minimized because most such protests were overcome in the consideration of the original plant. However, a new generation of protesters has been born and who knows what they will do.

Energy Future hopes to have two new 1,700-megawatt reactors online around the year 2020. That is 12 years away. It doesn't mean we will not have brownouts or rolling blackouts in the meantime. It will not hurt to keep a flashlight handy.

Standard design nuclear power generation is the way to go. This is the system used in France and Japan. It is reliable and safe. To those who question the safety of nuclear power electrical generation, I ask how many people were killed last year mining the coal we use in coal-fired generating plants and how many died in nuclear plants? Similarly, if you don't bring up the potential for suffering radiation health effects, I won't point out the very real effects of miners with black lung and other respiratory diseases.

2008-01-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

THE REAL TRUTH

Recently. I received an appeal from a past president of the National Academy of Sciences, asking my support for a project of the group. It was a mass mailing. I don't pretend to try to make you believe that he knows me. He included a copy of a paper that had been printed in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons last year that had to do with current hand wringing by global warming alarming activists. The paper is by two scientists at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. This is the organization that is responsible for obtaining over 22,000 signatures of scientists who are opposed to the Kyoto Accord of 1997.

An abstract of the paper says:

"A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequence of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide lead to the conclusion that increases during the 20th and 21st centuries have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth's weather and climate. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in hydrocarbon use and minor greenhouse gases like CO₂ do not conform to current experimental knowledge. The environmental effects of rapid expansion of the nuclear and hydrocarbon energy industries are discussed."

In the opinion of the 22,000 scientists who signed the petition, the treaty is based upon flawed ideas. The proposed treaty would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over 4 billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries.

Here are the conclusions of the JAPS paper:

"There are no experimental data to support the hypotheses that increases in human hydrocarbon use or in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing or can be expected to cause unfavorable changes changes in global temperatures, weather, or landscape. There is no reason to limit human reduction of CO₂, CH₄, and other minor greenhouse gases as has been proposed.

"We also need not worry about environmental calamities even if the current natural warming trend continues. The Earth has been much warmer during the past 3,000 years without catastrophic effects. Warmer weather extends growing seasons and generally improves the habitability of colder regions.

"As coal, oil, and natural gas are used to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe, more CO₂ will be released into the atmosphere. This will help to maintain and improve the health, longevity, prosperity, and productivity of all people.

"The United States and other countries need to produce more energy, not less. The most practical, economical, and environmentally sound methods available are hydrocarbon and nuclear technologies.

"Human use of coal, oil, and natural gas has not harmfully warmed the Earth, and the extrapolation of current trends shows that it will not do so in the foreseeable future. The CO₂ produced does, however, accelerate the growth rates of plants and also permits plants to grow in drier regions. Animal life, which depends upon plants, also flourishes, and the diversity of plant and animal life is increased.

"Human activities are producing part of the rise in CO₂ in the atmosphere. Mankind is moving the carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas from below ground to the atmosphere, where it is available for conversion into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of this CO₂ increase. Our children will therefore enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed."

Reprints of the JAPS paper, the petition against the Kyoto Accords and other information on the global warming issue can be obtained from:

Access To Energy
P.O. Box 1250
Cave Junction, Oregon 97523
(541)592-4142

Learn what the promoters of the inconvenient truth nonsense don't want you to know.

2008-01-01T15:33:00.000-08:00

ENTERTAIN ME!

I'll tell you straight up. This essay is about the societal effects of advanced technology. It's long. You might want to refill your coffee cup before you begin reading.

Toward the end of his book Timeline, author Michael Crichton had one of his characters delivering a presentation on a piece of high tech entertainment equipment his company had developed. It is all fiction, of course, but it has an element of truth as respects the lack of focus of purpose and the short attention span of the current crop of youngish people. It is unsettling because these are America's future leaders.

The book's character is the chief executive of a gigantic unscrupulous corporation (in fiction aren't they all?) about a time travel machine the company has developed. He thinks it will be bigger than Disney World on steroids. He is making a sales pitch to potential investors. He says:

"Ask yourself, what is the dominant mode of experience at the end of the twentieth century? How do people see things, and how do they expect to see things? The answer is simple. In every field, from business to politics to marketing to education, the dominant mode has become entertainment.

"Today, everybody expects to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren't bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse us as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused-everyone must be amused, or they will switch: brand names, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society at the end of the [twentieth] century.

"In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.

"But where will this mania for entertainment end? What will people do when they get tired of television? When they get tired of movies? We already know the answer-they go into participatory activities: sports, theme parks, amusement rides, roller coaster. Structured fun, planned thrills. And what will they do when they tire of theme parks and planned thrills? Sooner or later, the artifice becomes too noticeable. They begin to realize that an amusement park is really a kind of jail, in which you pay to be an inmate.

"This artifice will drive them to seek authenticity. Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century. And what is authentic? Anything that is not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that is not controlled by corporations. Anything that exists for its own sake, that assumes its own shape. But of course, nothing in the modern world is allowed to assume it own shape. The modern world is the corporate equivalent of a formal garden, where everything is planted and arranged for effect. Where nothing is untouched, where nothing is authentic.

"Where, then, will people turn for the rare and desirable experience of authenticity? They will turn to the past."

Then, the speaker launches into his pitch that the entertainment challenged public will be eager to use his time machine to return to medieval times for their "authentic" experiences. How does it all work out? You'll have to read the book to find out. When I read these words of fiction, I was struck by how a convergence of experiences and developments is taking place to make the speaker's words seem not only possible but practical as well. I'm not saying that I believe in time-travel or UFOs or crop circles or any other New Age stuff like that. I don't know. I put it all in the same category as the "grapefruit diet." Interesting, somewhat pleasant, but unproven. I know, I know. There are lots of testimonials as to its effectiveness. That's called anecdotal evidence and such evidence is unreliable at best. To my knowledge there has been no research that supports the efficacy of the grapefruit diet. Except, possibly by the grapefruit industry.

Those who know history are aware that change has always come slowly, whether it be social change or technological change. Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. The relatively few fast changes are called revolutions. It may be political revolution such as allowed the rise of Communism. Or, it could be technological such as the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Revolution is not always fast, such a the Bolshevik revolution of 1918 in Russia. The revolution in human rights that began with the signing of the Magna Carta took several hundred years to become totally effective. It's still going on.

The second half of the 20th century had a development that is accelerating change, both technological and social. It all started with invention of the transistor at Bell Labs in the 1950s. This was shortly followed by the almost simultaneous invention of the integrated circuit by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Bill Noyce at Intel Corp. They were working independently from separate viewpoints but the integrated circuit initiated a true technological revolution that even those two visionaries could not anticipate. Kilby's vision was to decrease the size and to increase the device density of electronic components. Noyce wanted to reduce the number of soldered connections, which were points of component failure. They both achieved their goals.

We have gone from the simple transistor to the integrated circuit to complex microprocessors to the computer on a chip. Product size has gone from vacuum tube computers of the 1950s, which were the size of a small residence, to hand-held devices with much greater computing power that were made available at the end of the century. Moore's Law explains this progress as "complexity will double every eighteen months." Although empirically derived, Moore's Law has proved to be fairly accurate.

Electronic product miniaturization and increased productivity brought about by the integrated circuit has brought us products that have drastically changed our lifestyles. The social behavior changes needed to integrate these new products seamless into our lives have been slower in developing.

Not only has the size of computers, both mainframe and personal units, decreased drastically, so has the computing power. Today's desktop or laptop computer has more computing power than the commercial mainframe that IBM introduced in the late 1950s. Computing speed also has increased exponentially. Computer speed is not particularly important for most activities that we desktop computer users engage in such as exchanging e-mail and doing word processing. However, graphics is another thing. A definite improvement is noted when you download pictures at DSL speed after having had to poke along at dial-up speed for so long.

Gaming is the area that has has benefited the most from higher speeds. Computer animation and imaging is very much improved. Computer games are very realistic and in many instances, one must take a second look to make sure it is computer simulation and not real live video.

An illustration of modern computer speed is an effort recently by a team of ten MIT students to set a Guinness Book record for human-powered computing (HPC). The ten cyclists pedaled their bikes, set on stands, with the wheels driving dynamos to generate direct current power which was converted into alternating current needed. The ten bikes were networked together to supply power for a supercomputer that was modeling a nuclear fusion reaction. They did this for ten minutes to set the Guinness record.

Now get this! The human-powered computer session of ten minutes produced more computations than took place in the first 3,000 years of civilization. More arithmetic calculations were computed than were done on the entire earth up to 1960. Awesome!

What does that have to do with anything, you ask? Just this. Computer games will get even more realistic. And, players will get more immersed in them, even to the extent that they will be in danger of losing touch with reality. Far fetched? Not at all. There already have been recorded instances of players of early primitive versions of Dungeon and Dragons losing touch with reality as well as cases of self destruction.

People get so immersed in use of personal electronic devices that they lose all sense of civility. Take the cell phone for instance. This is a marvelously convenient device for personal voice communication. Yet, many people would rather use it for text messaging, sometimes with persons in the same room where they are. Why not just talk? Also, most of us have experienced the annoyance of cell phone users load talk in inappropriate places, such as the next table in a restaurant where we had intended to have a quiet dinner. And, we have all felt the futility of trying to carry on a conversation with a teenager with white wires dangling from his ears.

The current craze is Second Life where players who are not satisfied with their own real life can develop a virtual life where they can be whatever or whomever they want to be. The rise in popularity of social networking web sites on the Internet is another good example. Participant's self-descriptions are seldom accurate. They picture themselves online as they wish they were instead of how they really are. Don't believe me? Check out out a friend or acquaintance who has a MySpace or Facebook page or a blog. Did he or she embellish their personal information? You might check my profile at the top of this blog and see if you recognize me. Is it accurate? I'll never tell.

Do people really do that? Of course they do. It seems like every week we read in the paper about some middle-aged creep that poses as a kid on a social networking web site to try to seduce a teenybopper little girl into a sexual liaison. The startling thing is how many naive, inexperienced girls actually fall for the ploy despite all the warnings and media coverage.

All of these events and developments, our need to be entertained, powerful tiny high-speed computers, advanced computer simulation, the rise of virtual reality, are converging. The logical next step would be the implantation of microprocessors in players to make interactive gaming more authentic. Don't scoff. It is already being done, not for gaming, but for medical purposes.

Years ago, I read another one of Crichton's first books entitled Terminal Man, The plot revolved around a man with a mental condition who had a microprocessor implanted in his body to control his impulses. The story involved problems created in his life when the electronic chip malfunctioned occasionally, either from a defect in the device or a programming bug.

About the time this book came out, I was considering a similar device that would cause a punch press operator to automatically withdraw his or her hands from the danger zone of an operating press. Most safety devices then consisted of either barriers or wrist shackles that were linked to the ram on the press. Neither was entirely satisfactory. My device would create an internal signal that would trigger a reflex motion when the operators hands were in danger. I abandoned the idea because of a number of issues involved at the time, including informed consent. But, that's another story.

Fast forward to the present. Pacemaker and defibrillator implants are common now. These devices help control heart problems. But, bio-medical engineering is moving into other areas such as the brain and nervous system. The granddaughter of a friend of mine is epileptic. Doctors have tried, without success, to reduce the child's seizures with traditional methods, drug therapy and diet. Their next effort will be to implant a device in the child's body that will detect the onset of a seizure and trigger an opposing electrical response that will eliminate or minimize the effects of the impending seizure.

So we're moving to a point ever closer to the time when a gamer can have a game chip implanted within his body to allow him to interact with other gamers with similar implantations. Or better still, a chip reader to enable the gamer to change games at will like changing memory cards on a digital camera. The circuitry will be such that gamers with implants can "sniff out" each other in a crowd of people and fight it out, so to speak, in virtual combat which they will monitor visually on screens concealed within their eye glass frames. Persons in the vicinity will not even notice (or care, probably) what is going on. The danger is that participants will live more and more in virtual reality to the detriment of their so-called "normal" lives. The danger will exist they may slip into their alternate state on a permanent basis and not be able to return to their real world.

All of these various facets of the new authentic entertainment experience exist now. The Terminal Man scenario does not seem so far fetched as it did way back there when I first read the book. A clever entrepreneur will figure out how to converge all these different aspects into a single package. A time machine as we have always imagined it will not be needed. That is, a booth-type device that one steps into for transportation to another dimension will not be necessary. Nor, will a "beam me up, Scotty" type molecular transporter be needed. All the pieces are in place and are just waiting for someone to configure them into a workable product.

The ultimate question to me is "As a society, are we capable of handling such 'authentic experiences?' " Sociologically speaking, we are far behind the technology we have developed. Technology has improved from one upgrade to the next. There even are incremental improvement versions within upgrades. Each generation of technology builds upon the one that produced it.

To the contrary, each generation of society has stood alone. For the most part, each succeeding generation "re-invents the wheel." Sociologically, we are stuck in Version 1.0. I am willing to admit that, over time, there have appeared outstanding individuals who impacted the human condition in a positive way. At the same time, there have been many less than outstanding individuals produced in greater numbers such that we haven't been able to advance to Version 2.0. In fact, we have barely advanced to Version 1.1.

In so many ways, we are still like our cave man ancestor. He drew on the walls of his cave with charcoal sticks. True, we don't draw on the walls of our MacMansions or starter castles. We prefer to use a hand operated pointing device to draw on our LCD monitors using Photoshop techniques. But, in many ways, we have retained our cave man mentality. When he wanted something another cave man had, he knocked him in the head and took it. We don't knock each other in the head (well, most of us don't) when we want to enrich ourselves at the expense of another. We perpetrate an Enron-like swindle. The adverse effect on the lives of those affected is not a consideration to the perpetrator. So you see, even in the most basic of issues, our sociological thinking is still pretty primitive. How in the world can we handle this new concept of "authentic entertainment?"

What's the answer? I haven't a clue. My engineering education and technical experience does not equip me to resolve questions like this. I am woefully short on philosophical reasoning technique. One thing I do know. The circumstances necessary to produce this entertain me phenomenon are in place. It will happen, whether or not we have to capacity to understand and control it. We cannot adopt a Luddite mentality and try to turn back the clock. To use familiar cliches, we cannot put the genie back in the bottle, nor can we close Pandora's box now that we have allowed it to be opened. Somehow, we have to learn to live with the boxes' released contents. Somehow, we have to cause our combined societal intellect to catch up with our technological achievements. I will be glad to hear your ideas on the subject. Right now, all I can say is "may God help us all."

2007-11-08T21:22:00.000-08:00

Celebrate Veterans Day!

November 11 is Veterans Day. It formerly was called Armistice Day and celebrated the end of World War I. In the intervening years, the emphasis on the day was to honor all military veterans. There used to be big military parades with high school R.O.T.C. units marching with military units. During the Viet Nam era, many cities stopped having such parades because of the strong anti-war sentiment in vogue at that time. In the last few years, the military parades have resumed to honor Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom veterans as well. If you attend a parade or any other such event that may occur this year, I hope that sometime during the festivities you will pause to honor those in the armed services who are protecting us now.

I repeat what I said about the July 4th celebrations, regardless of our personal opinions on the politics of the current armed conflicts, we should be united in our support of the brave young men and women who are serving over there no matter where "over there" may be. Monday will not be a day off for them. It will pretty much be like Sunday was and like Tuesday will be. Constant danger will be their companion. The "fireworks" they witness will be the real kind, terrifying and lethal.

Most of them are civilian soldiers. Their lives are on hold while they serve. Their loved ones back home worry and wait all the while praying for their safe return. Please, sometime Monday in the middle of your celebration, pause and remember these modern day heroes. They're not forgetting you.

2007-07-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Celebrate the Fourth!

Wedneday is Independence Day with all that entails. Cook-outs, fire works, fighter aircraft flyovers, patriotic band music, and speeches honoring our country's Founding Fathers and those who fought for our freedom. I hope that sometime during the festivities you will pause to honor those in the armed services who are protecting us now.

Regardless of our personal opinions on the politics of the current armed conflicts, we should be united in our support of the brave young men and women who are serving over there no matter where "over there" may be. Wednesday will not be a day off for them. It will pretty much be like Tuesday was and like Thursday will be. Constant danger will be their companion. The "fireworks" they witness will be the real kind, terrifying and lethal.

Most of them are civilian soldiers. Their lives are on hold while they serve. Their loved ones back home worry and wait all the while praying for their safe return. Please, sometime Wednesday in the middle of your celebration, pause and remember these modern day heroes. They're not forgetting you.

2007-06-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

NATIONAL ENERGY POLICY NEEDED
In April of last year I heard a Texas state representative being interviewed by a local talk show host about rolling blackouts that had occurred earlier that month in Texas.

The state rep's solution for preventing future rolling blackouts was to build more coal-fired power generating plants and more nuclear plants (gasp!). Don't get me wrong. I'm all for the nuclear option. But, it's not likely to happen because the anti-nuke nuts will go beserk over the idea of building more nuclear plants.

He pointed that we need to get away from natural gas-fired power generating plants. I fully agree with him on that. However, his recall of how we got so dependent on gas-fired plants was a little faulty or else he was trying to rewrite history. He stated that thirty years ago (this would be the mid-1970s), natural gas was cheap and clean burning. It was. All the power plants, he says, began converting to natural gas for economic reasons and to comply with increasingly expensive stack emission restrictions. That's not exactly he way it happened. There were other factors involved.

If you are old enough to remember the mid-seventies, you will remember that the U.S. was trying to come up with a national energy policy that included both a conservation of diminishing fossil fuel resources and a lessening of our dependence on foreign crude. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting States (OPEC) began to flex its muscles by restricting oil production to force higher prices. This was coupled with Iran's cutting off oil exports to the U.S. over our coddling of the ousted Shah and his replacement by an Ayatollah. Before long, we had gasoline shortages that caused long lines at the pumps.

We conserved electricy by turning off unnecessary lights at night. Companies did such things as removing every other lamp from fluoresecent ceiling fixtures and by installing sensors to turn off room lights when there was no one present. Cities removed every other light standard used for street median lighting. Few people put up outside Christmas lights that year. People who had gas yard lights were severly criticized by annonymous "politically correct" enforcers. Gas yard lights were considered a frivilous use of precious energy. There was a conscious effort by the citizenry to try to conserve non-renewable fossil fuels. We don't see that same thing happening today. In fact, Atmos Energy is advertising the availability of gas yard lights again.

People were serious about conserving all kinds of energy. Downtown buildings were dark at night. They had only the minimal lighting necessary for security purposes. When you looked out over the city from an elevated position, there was no light island like today.

The federal government threw serious research money at anyone who had an idea for alternative energy sources; oil shale, coal tar, solar, wind, biomass, you name it.

Actually, there was a lot of valid research done. Little of it was put into effect, however. I am sure the information is still in the archives of various research organizations just waiting to plucked out and dusted off should there again be research dollars available again

Ethanol is produced, not because it is such a great idea, but because powerful political persons gave us reasons why we should support increased corn production in the Plains States. The corn lobby is still active and effective. As a result, we now are experiencing higher prices for beef, milk, and tortillas because of higher corn prices due to increased demand for grain corn. Oil shale was eventually phased out because it was not economically feasible at the time and there was not enough political support for it. Coal tar never went anywhere.

Wind energy has slowly grown as the production costs of conventially produced electricity have increased. In the early days of alternative energy production, the startup costs of erecting a power generating windmill were offset somewhat by a tax credit that created investment interest. When the tax credit help expired, wind charger building decreased as investor interest went elsewhere. Today's high electricity costs have regenerated investor interest in wind power but it is still a minor percentage of total electricity production. Curiously, some environmental activists are protesting the effects the windmills are having on birds and other wildlife.

There was a serious effort to get something going in the solar field but it was not successful on a wide scale. We have solar cells being used for such minor things as energy sources for isolated equipment, traffic warning signals, remote telemetry equipment, deer hunter's feed spreaders to attract deer, etc. There were federal grants,
tax credits and subsidies given to motels and commercial laundries for solar generating of low grade heat for hot water for laundry operations. As soon as the federal money ran out, the systems fell into disrepair and were abandoned. Occasionally, you will still see the remnants of a solar heated water system on the roof of a motel.

The main drawback to solar generation is cost. Solar cells are expensive and not exactly energy efficient when you consider their total manufacturing costs. Production plants to produce them are energy hogs. A large part of solar cell production now is done offshore which just transfers the environmental problem. One U.S. company developed a viable program for manufacturing solar cells from technical grade silicon rather than semiconductor grade. There was considerable difference in cost. Further, the product could be incorporated into building materials such as roofing tiles and sheet metal which would make installation easier and less visually intrusive. With the easing of energy costs of the mid-seventies, the market for the low-grade silicon cells went away.

More than one U.S. president stated in the past that our national energy policy should be to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Jimmy Carter started it, I think, and Nixon was the last one to express it. I don't recall Johnson ever doing anything that would work against oil industry interests. Congress did pass a law back then against oil companies that supposedly would take away their "obscene" profits. We know how that worked out. Exxon-Mobil made record profits last year.

What happened to all this national resolve? The same thing that always happens with short attention span Americans. The Ayatollah ordered the valves opened and as the oil supplies loosened up and gas pump prices settled in the $1.00-$1.25 per gallon region, we considered the problem solved and turned our attention to other things then current. Think back; savings and loan scandals, real estate scandals, getting ready for the dot.com boom and bust. As the mid-seventies retreated further into the past, we forgot that we ever had an energy problem. Detroit started making gas guzzlers again to counter lower sales impacted by foreign car manufacturers. We began building Mac-mansions and mini-castles that needed more and more electricity for air conditioning of space that we really didn't need or use. In short, we reacted in the time honored way that Americans have always done. "If I can afford to pay for it, it's my right to waste it!" Why do we need to live in houses that provide 1,000 square feet per occupant. When I did some training in Singapore, my students lived in government built flats that provided 750 sq. ft. for a family of four.

With this trip down memory lane behind us, let me get to my contention that the state rep's recall was faulty as to why we went to using natural gas for power generation. Actually, the situation was just the opposite in the mid-70s. The conventional wisdom at that time was that we should conserve our domestic fossil fuels for use at a future time when world resources would be somewhat depleted. Our domestic fossil fuel reserves were known to be finite whereas our domestic coal reserves were considered to be infinite. Therefore, the federal government required all large-scale users of natural gas to change to fuel oil or coal. The company I was
working for at the time had to convert their boilers to fuel oil and construct a 100,000 gallon storage tank for fuel storage.

As we got further and further from the crisis of the mid-seventies, Boone Pickens and other large holders of natural gas leases began to look for alternative markets for natural gas. Pickens pushed for the use of natural gas in automobiles, since it burns clean. He was somewhat successful because some states began requiring that a certain percentage of large vehicle fleet operators autos or trucks run on natural gas, either compressed natural gas (CNG) or liquified natural gas (LGN). So far, there has not been a market demand from the general public to cause a supply chain to develop. Natural gas filling stations are few and far between.

Somehow, over time, the prohibition on using natural gas for power generation was relaxed to the extent that even small-time independent investors began building small gas-fired generating units to supply power to the power grid. They are much easier to shut down and start up in response to power demand than similarly sized coal fired units. There now is a network of small "mom & pop" electric generator stations in the U.S.

You can pretty well expect that as fuel prices, both automobile and commercial, subside there will be a similar relaxing of the sense of urgency by the American people to "get something done." Don't expect a backtracking of gasoline or natural gas prices to 20th century levels. It's not going to happen. Things are different this time
around. This time we are not likely to see fuel prices decrease greatly. The difference now is that the developing economies of China and India are the driving forces behind the increased demand for fossil fuels. As their huge populations become more and more prosperous, they will be driving autos instead of walking or riding bikes as they do now. And to make the situation even more critical, control of the world's oil supply is falling more and more under the control of unstable foreign government leaders. It's not exactly a rosy picture. The U.S. actually may have to change it's world role from promoting democracy to protecting the world's supply and distribution of oil for all countries.

In 1974 when I was well into middle age, I began to wonder what the heck is going on in all this gas shortage business. Texas had always been a major producer of crude oil and natural gas. I could remember back in the late fifties and early sixties when the Texas Railroad Commission would only let oil wells in Texas produce three days a month. That meant that if a well could produce 100 barrels per day, it could produce only 300 barrels that month. And, the price of crude was around $2.00 a barrel. Now, the wells are flowing wide open and we can't produce enough of it to sell at $70.00 per barrel. Of course, the environmental movement had something to do with it. That, and the higher labor costs involved.

By the way, do you know where OPEC learned to control production. Sometime in the 1940s, a member of the royal family in Saudi Arabia was enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin studying petroleum engineering. He paid special attention to the way the State of Texas set oil production quotas to control an oil glut that developed in the first part of the Twentieth Century in the East Texas oil fields. The price of crude at that time had dropped to less than 25 cents per barrel. That's right, twenty five cents per barrel. When the Suadi graduated, he went home and applied what he had learned in America. OPEC was formed and they began controlling oil production from their wells. The rest is history.

Is there a solution to this problem? Yes, but you won't like it. We have to conserve energy. We have to develop (and use) alternative energy sources, And, we have to limit our dependence on foreign crude. We have to get rid of this attitude of "Me first and screw you."

2007-06-13T15:46:00.001-07:00

IMMIGRATION REFORM
Local talk show host Mark Davis (WBAP-AM 820) made some good points on immigration reform during his interview with Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez recently.

Davis told the Secretary that immigration reform legislation now being considered in Congress must include:

1. Secure the borders, with a wall if necessary.
2. Deport the illegals we find, swiftly and without apology.
3. Punish businesses that knowingly hire them.
4. Formulate a tamper-proof ID to end the workplace kabuki dance that got us into this mess in the first place.

Is that so hard for members of Congress to understand? Apparently. When they went home on Memorial Day weekend break, they got an earfull from their constitutients about the immigration reform bill that they were trying to pass.

Maybe they will listen to the voters but I doubt it. They are too eager to pass a "Mickey Mouse" bill that includes amnesty under another name. The Democrats want cheap votes and the Republicans want cheap labor. Phooey!

2007-06-11T15:15:00.000-07:00

AN INCONVENIENT HALF TRUTH REDUX

I heard one of Al Gore's "warriors" last month give Gore's slide show presentation on global warming. The young man was sincere and well trained in how to do the Power Point slide show. But he didn't convince me.

He also had been well coached in how to answer any questions that might be asked. For instance, an audience member asked him about carbon offsets. The speaker immediately launched into an explanation of how carbon offsets are being used to "offset" the huge amount of electricity used at Gore's Tennessee mansion, which had been a news item a month or two before. He uses such carbon offsets as planting a certain number of trees, etc. to reduce the environmental impact. Of course, he is still using the same amount of electricity which must be generated somewhere.

Although the activists are claiming victory, the global warming controversy is far from being settled. It is true that the global temperature appears to be rising, although not at the rate claimed by Gore and the others. The global temperature is always changing, either going up or going down. What has not been proven is that mankind is solely responsible for the change.

The scientific community is not in unanimous agreement as to the cause or causes of climate change as some would have you believe. The climate change activists have the most to gain from keeping the controversy going. It's all about money.

Author Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park and others) has a late novel that tells the story pretty well. State of Fear came out in 2004. Crichton is not just a best-selling author, he is a trained scientist as well as a medical doctor. His undergraduate work was in a hard science so he knows the scientific method and is able to evaluate other scientist's works. His novels are always well researched and State of Fear is no exception. At the end of his book, Crichton includes a 32 page bibliography that supports graphs and statements he uses in the book. I checked out some of them on the Internet and found them to be accurate. He also devotes a number of pages to how he arrived at his conclusions on climate change. Then, there is an appendix on why politicized science is dangerous.

The premise of State of Fear is that a large non-profit, research organization needs to pull off a deliberate environmental disaster in order to scare the general population so as to secure additional funding from foundations set up by wealthy persons who get huge tax write-offs for such philanthropy. It's a gripping novel made all the more interesting when you can see the present day reality parallels in vocal activists organizations and Hollywood clueless types.

However, read Crichton's book and make up your own mind. Then let me know what you think. A later blog entry will point you to some of Crichton's testimony before scientific and political groups.

2007-06-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

SHADES OF TYPHOID MARY!

The hunt for Atlanta lawyer Andrew Speaker and his subsequent isolation in a Denver treatment center is reminiscent of the saga of Typhoid Mary. Attorney Speaker, you are aware has a particularly virulent, drug resistant strain of tuberculosis and he traveled internationally quite a bit before he was apprehended and placed in isolation. No one is sure how this will play out. Did he infect anyone else? Was the situation really worth all the media frenzy? We'll see.

Typhoid Mary was an actual person, Mary Mallon, who achieved notoriety in the early part of the Twentieth Century during an outbreak of typhoid fever in suburban New York City. A sanitary engineer traced the source to Mary Mallon.

He had concluded that the food and water supplies, the usual culprits in outbreaks in those days, were beyond suspicion. Instead of closing his investigation at that point, he continued his search for factors that might be common to typhoid-stricken households. He found that Mary had served as a cook in many of the afflicted homes and the disease always followed but never preceded her hiring. A bacteriological examination of her feces showed her to be a chronic typhoid carrier. Bingo! Mystery solved.

Mary must have had some inkling of her condition. When typhoid appeared in the family she served, she thought it best to leave at once, without giving a forwarding address.

Mary's case very clearly illustrated the importance of the chronic carrier in causing the spread of typhoid fever. Thus, she was largely responsible for the important public health procedure of making a thorough search for a carrier among those who have been in intimate contact with, or who have prepared food for, the typhoid patient. This is a procedure followed today in hepititus outbreaks among customers of restaurants and fast food places. The food preparers are the first suspects.

Strangely enough, Mary never suffered from any illness recognized as typhoid fever. This is not unusual and demonstrated the fact that potential carriers might be overlooked if a search for carriers is confined only to persons having a prior history of typhoid fever.

Mary was incarcerated by health officials from 1907 to 1910. She sought release by legal means. The New York Supreme Court upheld the community's right to keep her in isolation. This is no longer done for typhoid fever patients. Modern control methods are based on frequent supervision of the carrier in his or her home. However, the established right of the community to require isolation has been applied to other chronic contagious diseases, notably in cases of careless or dangerous tuberculosis patients.

Mary was a sympathetic figure to the general public and she was released from confinement in 1910. She promply dropped out of sight. In the next couple of years typhoid fever occurred in a New Jersey and a New York hospital. More than 200 people were affected. Typhoid Mary had returned to her old occupation of a cook and had worked at both hospitals under an assumed name. Did public health officials learn anything from this episode? Apparently not.

2007-04-28T18:00:00.000-07:00

CAN SOCCER UNITE US?
Officer Suzette Elwonger of the University Park Police Dept. in Dallas says it can. Officer Elwonger is helping spearhead an effort by the North Texas Women's Soccer Assn. and North Dallas Chamber Soccer to to send soccer balls to military personnel in Iraq and Afgahnistan. The soldiers will distribute the balls to kids over there.

A soccer player herself, Officer Elwonger also coaches her daughter's first grade level soccer team.

Officer Elwonger is collecting new or used soccer balls to forward to our American heroes over there. Deflated balls would be great for shippng purposes, but not necessary. In lieu of a soccer ball, a $15 donation will cover a brand new soccer ball and the shipping charge. Donations also are accepted for shoes, jerseys and shirts. For more info, contact Officer Elwonger at soccerunitesus@sbcglobal.net or go to her web site http://soccerunitesus.org .

2007-04-25T19:40:00.000-07:00

SAVING THE PLANET ONE SHEET AT A TIME!

When I put up my blog yesterday, I had not heard the latest idiocy from the bio-diesel bus babes. If I had I would have waited for the laughter to die down before I put something up. Now, Sheryl Crow is trying to make it sound like she was kidding. Laugh on, America.

2007-04-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

AN INCONVENIENT HALF TRUTH
I've been wondering about something. When Chicken Little was running around telliing everyone that the sky was falling, did anyone stop to ask if there was a personal agenda involved? With his misinterpretation of the available data (something hit him on the head), did this lead him to decide to form a 501(c) type organization to have the barnyard government equip everyone with anti-falling-sky protection?

Chicken Little holds the distisnction of probably being the first individual in history to demand public action based on imperfect information. So it goes today, the latest being the person who first claimed to being the inventor of the Internet. Al Gore wasn't the first person to discover or to predict dire future effects of global warming. He simply latched on to it to extend his already overextended 15 minutes of fame.

What is his personal agenda, you ask? To sell his book, of course, and later his documentary movie. Recently, the producer of his documentary, Laurie David, and singer Sheryl Crow rolled through Dallas in their bio-diesel bus for a scheduled appearance at S.M.U. I didn't take in their appearance but I have to wonder if it was more about the merchandizing of movie tickets and CDs than the effects of global warming.

Recently, the Dallas Morning News carried three articles related to people speaking out about global warming. One article was a letter-to-the-editor by an eight year-old schoolboy asking people to be careful what they buy and throw into the dump because the pollution that is causing global warming is hurting him. From his limited childhood perspective he is speaking sincerely, most likely repeating what he has heard grownups say. As he expands his experiences and his education, he will figure it out for himself and, perhaps, become an even more ardent supporter of the global warming movement. Or, he may learn that the adults he had listened to were full of it. He also will learn that there are more real events in life that will threaten his well-being. Things like vehicular accidents, man-made and natural disasters, criminal acts such as university campus massacres and the list goes on. As far as he personally is concerned, the effects of global warming are far down the list of threats to his well being. The young man has a personal agenda but that's okay. It is within scope of his life. I applaud him for having the courage to speak out.

Another article in the paper had to do with a Michigan mother's frustration in explaining to her 4 year-old son that there just wasn't enough snow for sledding. So she called on her friends and purchased space on five billboards around the Detroit area that pleaded "Take Back the Weather." She says her campaign is her small attempt to make a dent in global-warming awareness. Her personal agenda? Her sister sells billboard advertising. They both neglected to mention this year's record snowfalls in the north and northeast.

The third article had to do with the previously mentioned David and Crow who showed up at the White House Correspondents Association dinner Saturday night and sought out the all-purpose political target, Karl Rove, for a debate on global warming that was not on the agenda for the dinner. Their brave action was duly noted in the friendly media. We already know what their agenda is. It was not reported whether they traveled from Dallas to Washington, D.C. on their bio-diesel bus or went in first-class comfort on an airliner that spewed umpteen pounds of noxious gases into the atmosphere while they toasted each other for their noble activities.

I have an author whom I want to share with you in my next blog entry. He covers this idea of global warming activists and their personal agendas in a manner much better than I can. So, check back in a few days and read about his work.

2006-11-30T10:15:00.000-08:00

ALERT THE KIDDIES!

NORAD SANTA TRACKING: The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has launched its annual tracking of Saint Nick on his journey around the globe. On 19 NOV Norad’s web site www.noradsanta.org/index.php dedicated to the annual event was activated. The site features interactive games as well as information describing how NORAD tracks the world’s premier gift giver, officials say. On Christmas Eve beginning at 0200 MST (i.e. 0400 EST & 0900 Greenwich Mean Time) the site will feature a minute-by-minute update on Santa’s travels. All information will be available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. This is the 51st year NORAD has tracked Santa Claus.

The program began in 1955 after a child in Colorado Springs, Colo., accidentally dialed NORAD’s predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command, and asked about Santa’s whereabouts. The commander who answered the phone was happy to oblige.

Last year, the Web site received more than 900 million hits from 204 countries and territories worldwide. The “NTS” operations center, staffed by some 550 volunteers, answered nearly 55,000 phone calls and nearly 98,000 e-mails, according to reports. Island Web Studios, America Online, Akami, Analytical Graphics, Globelink Language and Cultural Services, Qwest Communications, Verizon, and Microsoft Virtual Earth help to make the program possible, NORAD officials said. [Source: NavyTimes
Staff report 16 Nov 06 ++]

2006-09-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

9/11 Plus Five.

Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001. Everyone remembers exactly where they were when they heard that two airliners had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City. Initially, we had no idea that the crashes were intentional.

I remember where I was for sure. I was getting ready to go to the hospital to have cataract surgery on my left eye. The surgeon's office called and said the surgery was still scheduled. Later, while waiting in the surgical suite waiting room I learned some of the circumstances of the crashes and watched the buildings collapse on TV.

It is still inconceivable to me that human beings can do such things to one another because of religious hatred. But, there's the evidence and it is still happening.

The events on 9/11 contiinue to impact our lives five years later. Is there a connection between the events of 9/11 and what is happening in Iraq? I don't know. All I know is that that's just the way the world is now.

Last month, we went to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma to welcome our grandson back from his second tour of duty in Iraq. Thank God he returned safely along with those in his Field Artillery Battery.

As you can imagine, the welcoming ceremony was very emotional. At precisely the appointed time, the doors to the gym building where the families had been waiting swung open and the returning soldiers, male and female, marched in. They had a confident swagger in their step that said "I've been there. I faced the danger. I'm back and will go again, if asked." There were cheers and tears aplenty.

None of those I talked to questioned their mission. They said they did not lack for anything; equipment, support, supplies, weaponry. Troop morale is high over there. This is in direct contrast to what is seen and heard on much of the media. They were as appalled as the rest of us at how the Iraqi religious factions are turning on each other. The death toll of Iraqi civilians far exceeds that of the military personnel serving there.

Remember those who died on 9/11 and remember their families who are still suffering the loss. God bless and comfort them. And, God bless our brave young men and women who serve in our military wherever they may be. They pay the price that we can watch the 9/11 TV specials tonight in the comfort and safety of our homes.

2006-07-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

A July 4th Memory
The Fourth of July 2001 found me in Malaysia on a training project at a new semiconductor manufacturing plant. I was in Kuching, the capital city of the Malaysian state of Sarawak. Sarawak is not situated on the Malaysian mainland but is one of two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo. Kuching is located just a few miles down the coast from where the first season of "Survivor" had just finished filming that year.

The vision of the Malaysian government is for the country to emerge from third-world status by the year 2020. The microchip plant where I was working is a part of that vision. My training partner and I were teaching emergency response techniques to the workers. You know, what to do if the plant blows up, catches fire, or if there is a big chemical spill or release. I have to explain that these trainees were mostly Muslim (Islam is the national religion of Malaysia) and the rest were ethnic Chinese. Most of them had never been off the island. They were all well educated, however.

At the end of the day on July 3rd, some of the students asked what we would be covering the next day. My co-instructor piped up and said that we would not be there because the Fourth is a holiday. He was just kidding, of course, but his statement caused blank looks all around. You could almost read their minds, "What are these two crazy Americans talking about?"

It dawned on us that very few of them had any idea of how important Independence Day is to Americans. It certainly is not a holiday celebrated in their culture. We decided that this was a special "teachable moment."

After dinner that night, we scouted the shopping plazas looking for U.S. flags or other suitable decorations. We didn't find any, probably because we weren't looking in the right places, I guess. But we did find some ladies scarves with red, white and blue stars and stripes so we bought several of those and decorated the classroom with them the next day.

At the beginning of the class that day, we explained to them the significance of July 4, 1776 to Americans. I have to say that they were properly impressed. When we came back from lunch that day, someone had written in big letters on the blackboard HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!. Now, I may be a grizzled old geezer, but my eyes still tear up every time I tell this story.

God Bless America.

2006-07-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Wright's Still Wrong!
Dual meaning there. First, despite the so-called agreement between "all parties" involved, there is a good chance the agreement will be rejected on Capitol Hill when it comes time for Congress to consider the Wright Amendment. The validity of the compromise is tainted by the fact that the participants who worked out the deal were limited to a carefully chosen few; the mayors of Dallas and Fort Worth, the heads of American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, and a representative from DFW Airport. Negotiations were held in secrecy in a closed environment. The citizenry had no input even through their elected City Council persons. Potential airline competitors at Love Field were left out. The traveling public had no say-so in the matter even though the results of the agreement would affect them directly.

Basically, here is what the agreement says:
- The Wright amendment will be phased out over seven years.
- Airlines flying out of Love Field will be able to fly to any destination in the U.S. provided they make an intermendiate stop in a state adjoining Texas. Actually, that's what is happening now.
- The number of gates at Love Field will be limited to 20. Southwest Airlines now has 16 and American and Continental have a total of four. None will be available for any other airline that would want to provide Love Field service in the future. Any gates in excess of 20 that exist now will be demolished.
- Through-ticketing for passengers will be allowed. The Wright amendment prohibited this. A passenger wishing to go beyond the service area allowed by Wright had to purchase two tickets. I once flew from Love to Las Vegas. I had a ticket from Love to Albuquerque, New Mexico and one from Albuquerque to Las Vegas via Phoenix. I had to deplane at Albuquerque, retrieve my luggage and board another plane for Phoenix and onto Las Vegas. Why did I do it? There was a significant difference in ticket prices compared to flying non-stop DFW to Las Vegas.

The agreement is so Mickey Mouse it could have been crafted by Walt Disney himself. It is a face saving piece of paper for the mayors of Dallas and Fort Worth. They and American Airlines evidently recognized the reality of the situation that the Wright Amendment was going to become history. For American Airlines, it also will serve as a way for them to gracefully back out of serving Love Field, a losing proposition for them. Expect them to hold onto their gates though.

Southwest Airlines is the big winner here. If the agreement holds and Congress accepts it as-is, Southwest will continue to hold a virtual monopoly on airline service at Love. For a vindictive piece of federal legislation that was passed 25 years ago to punish Southwest Airlines, it has instead helped Southwest become what is is today by limiting competion at Love Field.

The agreement is likely to have a rough ride in Congress. Other air carriers already are attacking it for what it is, a back room deal done with limited imput from the public. For one thing, congressmen and senators from far off states that want economical non-stop service to Dallas are not going to like having to make an intermediate stop in another state to get it. Plus, they will not be willing to wait seven years until the Wright Amendment runs out to get true non-stop service to Love Field.

Now, as to the other meaning of the headline above. Former House Speaker Jim Wright, for whom the Wright Amendment is named, is attempting to rewrite history as it pertains to him. He was quoted recently as saying that he resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives in an attempt to curb the devisiveness that existed in Washington, D.C. He said he was trying to bring harmony and civility to the lawmaking process.

Hogwash! He was hounded out of office by Newt Gingrich and his cohorts. Ironically, Gingrich himself was later forced from office for participating in a book selling deal similar to that for which he critized Wright. Instead of admitting that he was run out of town, Jim Wright is trying to make it sound like he was leading a parade in his honor.

2006-06-10T15:15:00.000-07:00

The Clueless Chicks.
The Dixie Chicks should change their name, for more than one reason. They should begin calling themselves the "Clueless Chicks." They just don't get it. They whine about how C & W radio stations won't play their music because their lead singer critized our President before a London audience. They claim they have a right to express their opinion. True enough. They do have that right. The music buying public also has a right to show their collective disagreement by not buying their music.

Then the lead singer goes on Sixty Minutes and with a big goofy grin says she can't understand what all the fuss is about. And then, with an in-your-face move, the Chicks record a song about their not being ready to make nice. They continue to complain because stations don't play their music.

Apparently, their latest album Taking the Long Way is selling well. The Dallas Morning News reported that in the first two weeks after release, the album sold nearly 800,000 copies. This despite the lack of playing time on C & W stations. It would seem that the Chicks have crossed over to the popular music genre.

Their CD may be selling but the Chicks upcoming Accidents & Accusations concert tour is another thing. Fans are staying away in droves. One tour date already has been cancelled and others are in limbo. Initial ticket sales for the more than 20 arena shows have been averaging 5,ooo to 6,000 per show in major markets and less in smaller markets. Venue capacities on the tour generally top 15,000. They are booked into the American Airlines Center in Dallas which has a capacity during concerts of 18,000. Neither AAC nor the Chicks Nashville publicist would comment on the AAC sales to date.

Billboard Magazine reports that the 42-city tour, which begins in Detroit on July 21st, is in trouble. Public sales for shows in Oklahoma City, Memphis and Houston were stopped due to slow sales. Memphis was pulled off the tour and the OKC and Houston stops remain questionable. The whole tour may be rerouted. However, some concert markets are doing well with the Philadelphis and Toronto dates sold out.

During their 2003 tour, the Chicks moved over 875,000 tickets the first weekend of sales. They had the top-grossing country tour of 2003 at $62 million. I want you to hold that thought for a minute and I'll come back to it.

The Chicks are learning a hard lesson. You don't offend your fan base with impunity. Country Western music fans are predominantly conservative, patriotic and loyal. When you go against your fan's beliefs, you are asking for trouble. Your fans are likely to stop buying your music, which is what happened. They will complain to C & W radio stations that continue to play your music and the stations will pull your records. After all, radio stations depend on their listener base to sell advertising. If their listener audience goes down, the stations' revenue goes down also.

If you are thinking that I've never listened to the Dixie Chicks, you are wrong. I heard them way back when they were still just a regional act and before the current big-mouth lead singer joined the group. They were doing a concert at a Dallas church and I was given a couple of tickets. I left at intermission because they were not what I was expecting. I was expecting a C & W act and they were more rock and roll. Their musicianship was great. No doubt about it. They played with all the confidence in the world as though they knew they would eventually hit the big time, which they did.

However, they have made the mistake that many entertainers and actors make. They began to believe that just because their adoring fans loved their music on stage, the fans would embrace their non-stage thinking. It has happened before. Ed Asner, the actor, had a couple of hit TV series. His mistake was speaking out against another actor who just happened to be the President of the United States at the time. Asner critized President Reagan loudly and in print about the U. S. involvment in El Salvador. Of course, as it turned out, Asner was not completely wrong. But, Ronald Reagan was a very popular president and the general public did not appreciate a Hollywood liberal dissing him. Asner's TV show was cancelled and he now shows up as an occasional guest celebrity on Jay Leno's late-night show. Not to hear his opinion on current events but to participate in some rinky-dink gimmick activity.

The Dixie Chicks are experiencing similar fallout from their ill-advised political comments. President Bush's approval rating was high at the time relative to what it is now and Red State population fans took exception to the Chicks' view, especially since it was expressed before a foreign audience. Although their conservative fan base has deserted them, they are still making a lot of money as crossover artists. Probably, more money than they can ever spend. They sure don't have to worry about whether their 401(k) is doing good. But, their ill-advised outspoken view is costing them big bucks also.

It is for this reason that I expect the act to break up eventually. Maybe not this year or the next, but eventually. The two sisters in the act, one of these days, are going to stop and think about how much money the big-mouthed lead singer has cost them and is continuing to cost them. They have expressed support for her but she's costing them real money. They will remember that they were looking for a lead singer when they found her, so they know they can find another. If this year's tour goes badly, you can expect a big cat fight.

Now, back to the another need for a name change for the act. The cutsey name "Dixie Chicks" is going to begin wearing a little thin. When they were considered a primarily regional C & W act, the name fit and it helped them to get to show off their musical and singing skills. However, now that their fan base has shifted away from the predominantly conservative C & W fans, the term "Dixie" is not appreciated by the Blue State people in their current fan base. It smacks of the rural South. Their new non-conservative (read that as liberal) fans do not want to appear to be associated with a bunch of red-necks. The word "Chicks" also is offensive to a lot of left over bra-burners from the Sixties, who consider the term demeaning to American womanhood.

So, what do I know about music and show business? Not much. What I do know is that hubris has been the downfall of many people in many different fields. Just so you know, hubris means "exaggerated pride or self-confidence often resulting in retribution." It's the kind of thing that happened to Ken Lay at Enron and Tom DeLay in Congress. Just because you are good at one thing doesn't mean you'll be good at everything you try. Also, as many other members of Congress have found out, just because you have gotten by with questionable behavior in the past doesn't mean you will get away with it in the future. Hubristic people begin to think they are bullet proof. They're not.

2006-06-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

Wright Is Wrong.

It's not original, but the phrase is accurate as it pertains to the DFW Airport/Love Field controversy. Here is why.

The Wright Amendment, when it was enacted, was never about protecting the then-new DFW Airport from a peanut of a startup airline. It was a piece of vindictive legislation pushed through by Fort Worth officials as punitive action against Dallas' Love Field in general and Southwest Airlines in particular. Southwest had exploited a loophole in the DFW agreement all major airlines were required to sign whereby they would transfer all flights to DFW when it was completed. Southwest Airlines was not a signatory to the agreement for whatever reason and therefore did not have to abide by it.

If you go back and review the history of the controversy you will find that Fort Worth was livid over the oversight in drafting the original airline agreement. They and DFW Airport filed lawsuit after lawsuit against Southwest to force SWA to cease operations at Love. They termed Southwest a "termite undermining the new airport." The City of Dallas reluctantly was forced to go along with Fort Worth on the legislation since Dallas was a signatory to the DFW agreement.

The legal action went on for several years with the courts consistently ruling in favor of Southwest and against Fort Worth, et al. There was one Fort Worth district court that sided with Fort Worth and DFW Airport but what would you expect? The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where the ruling was in favor of Southwest. Among other things, the Supremes could not understand how a tiny airline (I think Southwest had only three or four airplanes at the time and flew a limited number of routes within Texas) could undermine a multi-billion dollar operation like DFW Airport. That pretty well settled the situation. Or did it?

Fort Worth dusted off the legacy of Amon G. Carter and decided they were going to show Dallas a thing or two. Dallas had always been kind of half-hearted in the fight to close Love Field to commercial flights. Love Field and Southwest Airlines are good economic engines. The die was cast. Fort Worth's attitude was "Shut down commercial airline traffic at Love Field or else." Of course, all this was going on while Fort Worth was working behind the scenes to inaugurate commercial airline service out of Meacham Field. They tried several times and failed, which added to Fort Worth's frustration. Their ego was somewhat salved by the construction of Alliance Airport north of Fort Worth.

Seemingly working from the Amon Carter playbook, Fort Worth rolled out its big guns, their political muscle and American Airlines. Despite continually hemmoraging red ink, AA seems to have plenty of money available to keep up the Love Field fight. Unable to win in the courts, Fort Worth, DFW Airport and American Airlines decided to go for a politcal solution. They turned to their U.S. Representative who just happened to be Speaker of the House of Representatives. As Speaker, he could ramrod through just about any kind of legislation he wanted to. Seemingly, this was a local issue but Speaker Jim Wright pushed through the legislation that bears his name. It seemingly would put a stop to Southwest's growth by limiting it's operations. That turned out to be just wishful thinking on Fort Worth's part.

Although it was not related to the Love Field controversy, Jim Wright's fund-raising activities would later cause him to relinquish the House Speakership and he soon left Congress.

Fast forward to the present. Southwest Airlines, who was quiet and apparently neutral on the Wright Amendment, has begun agitating for its repeal. Fort Worth, American Airlines and DFW Airport are hollering "Foul." They want SWA to be made to move flight operations from Love to DFW. In weak retaliation, American Airlines reopened a few gates at Love Field and initiated a few flights in a token effort to show they are not afraid to compete head-to-head with Southwest. In doing so, American cancelled flights to several smaller cities and reassigned the aircraft to the new Love Field flights. The implication to other smaller cities was "Get your congressmen to support American Airlines in its effort to prevent repeal of the Wright amendment or you may lose what little air travel accommodations you have now."

The truth is, American Airlines is scared to go head-to-head with Southwest on a level playing field such as at Love. The "flying termite" is not so small any more. Other airlines would love to emulate SWA's business model. No other airline has been able to duplicate the work ethic and company loyalty of Southwest's employees. From its beginning, Southwest has stressed short turn around times at airports in order to maximize in-air time for its aircraft. Spend as little time on the ground as possible and keep those planes flying. Aircraft only make money while they are flying, not while sitting on the ground. A Southwest aircraft will spend as little as 20 minutes on the ground between flights. SWA is the only airline where you will see the pilot and co-pilot come out of the cockpit and help the flight attendants prepare the cabin for the next load of passengers.

American Airlines would love to make Southwest have to move their flights to DFW Airport. American could play havoc with Southwest's short turn around time by clogging the runways with American's take-offs. American has done it before in order to drive competition from DFW. Ask Delta Airlines. You can be sure they'll do it again.

Fort Worth wants Congress to establish a regional airport authority to control commercial flights and airport use in North Texas. This is just another political ploy pushed by Fort Worth's congressional delegation and some Dallas politicos who have business interests at DFW Airport.

The Wright Amendment should be repealed now. Otherwise, it will be dismantled state-by-state, as recently happened in Missouri. Nebraska's congressional members are prepared to introduce a bill to get flights from Dallas Love to their state. They saw how air fares dropped between Dallas and Kansas City and St. Louis when Southwest started flying those routes. Nebraskans want lower fares, too. Wyoming and Pennsylvania are readying legislation to do the same thing.

Two Dallas area U.S. representatives have Wright repeal legislation ready and say that they have nearly fifty co-sponsors from several states signed on for support. They had observed a self-imposed waiting period while the Dallas and Fort Worth mayors were trying to work out a compromise. There is no such compromise possible. It is an "either/or" thing. Fort Worth's Mayor Moncrief says "Shut down Love Field." Dallas' Mayor Miller says "No way." There is no wiggle room between those two extremes.

You know, the ironic thing is that the Wright amendment made Southwest Airlines what it is today - a very large airline serving the entire U.S. and an airline that has an unbroken series of quarterly profits. The Wright amendment has given SWA a virtual monolopy at Love Field. They have been able to crush any competitors with the efficiency of their operations. There have been several who tried, and failed, to compete at Love against Southwest - Muse Air, Air Florida and others.

The truth is, Southwest could have been flying non-stop from Love Field to cities all over the U.S. within the Wright Amendment any time they wanted to. Some of their competitors tried by flying planes with more seats as allowed within the Wright Amendment. The Southwest Airlines business model called for them to stay with one model of aircraft with its limited seating, the Boeing 737 and its various subsequent configurations. This greatly simplifies their maintenance work by limiting parts, training and procedures to one model of aircraft. Even within one aircraft model there are a significant number of variations, but nothing to compare with what airlines flying multiple makes and models of aircraft have to contend with.

So bottom line is, Fort Worth and DFW Airport are whipping a dead horse in continuing to support a piece of legislation that bears a disgraced poltician's name. It was conceived as punitive legislation against a particular company. Congress had no business sticking their nose into what was basically a local issue. It would never have happened except for the fact that Fort Worth was located in the House Speaker's district. That situation no longer exists. It's still a local issue except that people from other states are witnessing how air fares from their cities to Dallas decrease once Southwest Airlines comes to town. Also, Americans (not American Airlines) like to support the underdog.

Am I trying to rewrite history? Not at all. All of the facts stated above are verifiable. Check back issues of the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star Telegram. You will find each newspaper's reporting perspective different as respects their location, but the truth is there for anyone to find. You know, there is a good book lurking within this controversy. Somebody's going to get rich when it's published. Thank you, Fort Worth.

2006-05-31T09:30:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day Leftovers.

Freedom has a taste to those who fight for it and almost die that the protected will never know. author unknown

God bless and protect all those who serve.

2006-05-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

About This Illegal Immigration Thing.

I don't know about you, but I am ready for Congress to take some action to get illegal immigration under control. The House and Senate have passed separate versions of their own bill and are heading into a joint-conference to reach a compromise.

Due to those differences, I fear they will drag their feet through the summer. They love to take vacations and summer also is their traditional time for going off on various junkets supposedly to gather information on issues they are working on. By then, we will be well into the election season and there will not be much significant legislative work being done.

House members are all up for re-election. Senators not up for election this cycle will be out campaigning for and raising campaign money for those who are up for election in November. Both parties will be trying to establish control over the next Congress. Democrats are targeting certain House members they consider vulnerable and Republicans will be trying to protect their colleagues. Our needs will be lost in the campaign rhetoric.

There are a few things that the Senate and House bills agree on and I say enact those into law and take care of the other issues later. Both houses agree that we must secure our borders. Do whatever is necessary to turn back those persons who try to enter this country illegally. If they are caught, send them back. Period.

Take action to secure the borders now, not later. Right now, Congress is under pressure from their constituents to act. After the November elections, those who return to Congress, will feel that the pressure is off and they can ignore the people back home. They will pass whatever type of legislation the lobbyists tell them to pass. What lobbyists you ask? The ones representing the businesses and corporations that are hiring the vast majority of the illegals.

I like the House's bill. It will:
1. Make illegal presence in the U.S. a felony and will increase penalties for first time illegal entry.
2. Make it a felony to assist, encourage, direct, or induce a person to enter or remain in the U.S. illegally.
3. Require all employers to verify the legal status of all employees.
4. Increase maximum fines for employers of illegal workers from $40,000 per violation and establish prison sentences of up to 30 years for repeat offenders.
5. Require mandatory detention for all non-Mexican illegal immigrants arrested at ports of entry or at land and sea borders. No more "catch and release" for terrorist suspects.
6. Establish mandatory sentences for smuggling illegal immigrants and for those re-entering the U.S. illegally after deportation.
7. Make a drunken driving conviction a deportable offense.
8. Fence the border between Mexico and the U.S. The House says a two-layer fence and the Senate says a triple-layered fence. Surely they can agree on this small detail.

I'm not going to go into the Senate's version because it is more concerned with turning all 2 million illegals that are already here into legal citizens in the most painless way possible for them. And, they also want to provide for accepting another 200,000 immigrants per year. Ted Kennedy and his cohorts are presuming that these newly-minted U.S. citizens will all vote anti-Republican(if they vote at all).

The mechanics of the Senate plan are impractical. It would require illegal immigrants in the U.S, between two and five years to go to a border point and file an application to return. Can't you just see that happening? Or, another provision would require those in the country less than two years to leave. Yeah, right. Like they are going to take the bus home.

The Senate bill has no sanctions against employers of illegal workers. I'm not after the people who hire an illegal to mow their lawn or wash their car. They are certainly adding to the problem. But, I want something done about the egregious conduct of those employers who deliberately seek out illegal immigrants in order to exploit them with less than standard wages and bad working conditions. Stiff fines alone won't correct the problem. They need to send a few executives to jail. Managers can hide behind insurance policies that pay for their malfeasance but they can't buy their way out of a jail term as Ken Lay has found out.

So what's the poor tax payer to do? For one thing, make your Representative and Senators know how you feel on the issue. Write 'em. Call 'em. Email 'em. Find their addresses and phone numbers at FirstGov.com. Then act. Get involved! This is our country. There is nothing that says we have to let other people in under rules they specify. We are allowed to set the rules. Other countries do.

You have heard it said many time that, historically, we are an immigrant nation. Even those we refer to as Native Americans originally came from somewhere else. Our immigrant ancestors entered the country under specific rules. My first immigrant American ancestor was a bonded servant. He and his family worked off their boat passage in seven years but he was an American from the time he took his oath of allegience after debarking in the Virginia Colony. He followed the rules. We should expect no less from today's immigrants. We should not cut them any slack even though they may have been living in this country for years in violation of our laws.

We are a nation of immigrants but we also are a nation of laws and we make the laws.

2006-05-04T15:05:00.000-07:00

Take That, You Twit.

I highly recommend that you read the May 1st posting on the blog of my grandson who is serving in Iraq. It is entitled "On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs." It is a reply that Lt. Gen. (ret) Brett Dula made to a student leader at the University of Washington. The girl had objected to the university's plans to honor World War II hero and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient "Pappy" Boyington, a UW graduate. Her feelings are that it is inappropriate to honor someone who killed people. Besides that, she says, he was a Marine and it is common knowledge that Marines are trained to kill. Well, duh!

You can read Gen. Dula's response to the little twit. He was nicer to her than I would have been. The general includes a long article by LTC(RET) Dave Grossman on the need to have "sheepdogs" to protect "sheep" like you and me from the "wolves." Very thought provoking. It also makes me have more appreciation for my daughter and her husband, who are both law enforcement officers.

I doubt that the UW student will get it.

2006-05-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

Phoney Heroes.

In today's world in which there are plenty of genuine military heroes who are not being properly honored for their service, there are a lot of phoney heroes around who are claiming recognition they do not deserve. As the grandfather of a field artillery captain who is serving his second tour of duty in Iraq, this thoroughly disgusts me.

A recent newspaper article pointed out that there is such a proliferation of phoney heroes that real Congressional Medal of Honor recipients are outnumbered by the phonies. Some fakers merely brag about receiving the award. That's not illegal under present law. But some imposters wear military uniforms and bogus medals. The FBI, who tracks such things, has about 25 pending investigations of such people. Anyone convicted of fraudently wearing the Medal of Honor faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

There is no such penalty for other medals. U.S. Rep. John T. Salazar, of Colorado, is sponsoring the Stolen Valor Act which would make it illegal to make a false public claim to be the recipient of any military valor award, such as the Medal of Honor, a Silver Star or a Purple Heart.

MOH phonies are not the only false heroes. They are only the tip of the iceberg. Authors B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley wrote a book called Stolen Valor documenting a long list of phoney heroes. You will be surprised at who is on the list. Many of the miscreants, such as former CBS news anchorman Dan Rather, have only embellished their military record. Many others have come up with complete fabrications. If you Google the name "Stolen Valor," you will get about 72,600 hits.

One of the most famous pictures of the Viet Nam Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. shows an "alleged" Viet Nam veteran leaning against the wall crying over the names of his fallen "buddies." He is shown in army fatigues that are covered with military patches. He's a complete fake. He just sought attention he did not earn nor deserve.

For the life of me, I can't see how these people think they can get away with such deception. With the easy access to information that exists today, there are few secrets anymore. You can go to my archives and read a posting from August 2005 that shows that the same thing happens in other phases of public life. That instance had to do with a city official "earning" a college degree from an online diploma mill. No classes, no exams. Just send the fee and receive the fake sheepskin.

I'm no psychologist but I'm guessing that these things actually start with a wee small lie that the teller gets away with. Then, he or she embellishes it over time until becomes something absurd. Then, they actually begin believing their own lies. However, some of the fibbers mentioned in Burkett's and Whitley's book start out with a big lie to begin with. Even actors and politicians have told whoppers to enhance their resumes. Read Stolen Valor. You will be surprised at some of the names you find.

I actually knew one of these phoney heroes although he is not mentioned in the book. He was a top-level manager at a company where I formerly worked. When I first met him, I was told that the guy was a former U-2 spyplane pilot for the CIA during the Cold War. He very modestly deflected any of my questions about his activities citing secrecy provisions of his former employment.

In retrospect, this seems very curious to me. His job required access to very sensitive defense department information and therefore required that he have a high level security clearance. Such clearances require vigorous background checks by the FBI. I would think that his deception would have been discovered at that time. Last year, after the guy's deception was revealed, I happened to have coffee with the former security director of the company where I worked and I asked him how the imposter got away with his deception for so many years. He professed not to know what I was talking about. Another deception, maybe?

What brought the fake U-2 pilot down was a talk he gave at a service club luncheon in Richarson, Texas a couple of years ago. During his talk he told of his exploits as a U-2 pilot. Apparently, his service activities had been declassified by the CIA. He even told of how he had to bail out one day over the Sea of Japan and was rescued by a U.S. Navy ship. He really piled it on.

His big mistake was that there was someone in the audience that was familiar with an organization of former U-2 pilots. Now, ex-U-2 pilots are a very tight group and they, like the MOH recipients, very jealously guard the honor of their group. They don't want fakes sponging off their service records. They all know each other and an imposter is immediately spotted. His "bail out" story was a complete fabrication, they said.

Veterans' organizations are vigilant to ferret out the phonies also. My VFW magazine periodically updates their list to expose the latest frauds. We should give them our help and support. Also, we should contact Rep. Salazar and let him know we are behind him and his legislation. You can find his address by going to FirstGov. While you are there, get the address of your own congressman and your senators. Let them know you want this kind of deception stopped.

2006-05-02T22:30:00.000-07:00

Prepare To Be Amazed.

Boeing Aircraft was honored by the National Aeronautics Association recently for a record-setting distance flight of the Boeing 777-200LR Worldliner as one of the most memorable aviation records of 2005. The record flight was named among eight achievements in aviation out of more than 100 records set in the United States last year. I had no idea aviation records were still being set in such large numbers.

In November 2005, the Boeing 777-200LR (Longer Range) set a new world record for distance traveled nonstop by a commercial jetliner, flying 11,664 nautical miles eastbound from Hong Kong to London.

On its record flight, the 777-200LR took off from Hong Kong the evening of Nov. 9 flying over the North Pacific Ocean, across North America, and then over the mid-North Atlantic Ocean. The airplane landed at London Heathrow Airport the afternoon of Nov. 10 after logging 22 hours and 42 minutes for the flight. That is a long time in the air.

I think the longest flight I've ever made was 17 hours from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Even though I was flying business class (which is very similar to first class) it was a miserable flight. After a few hours of sitting, your body begins to tell you how uncomfortable you are. And sleeping is very, very difficult.

Along about that same time, Melissa and I went to Hong Kong on a shopping trip. I guess the flight from L.A. to Hong Kong was about 12 or 14 hours. Only this time we were flying coach which was doubly miserable. Got some good buys in Hong Kong though. Just had to remember not to buy anything that might need to be returned.

There can be serious health effects from long flights that require extended periods of sitting. You can develop a condition called Deep Venous Thrombosis (DVT), which means blood clots in a deep vein. It can be brought on by the combination of sitting still for long periods and the pressure of the thighs against the seat cushion. This sedentary position can reduce blood circulation in the lower limbs lesding to the formation of blood clots. The potential is very real and DVT has been reported on extended flights.

The prevention is to get up and walk around frequently on long flights. It may seem awkward on smaller aircraft but on wide body jets such as used for longer flights, it is possible to walk a reasonable distance. Also, when sitting, do not cross your legs as doing so also restricts blood flow.

If you Google the phrase "Deep Venous Thrombosis" (or just the initials DVT) you will get about 4,410,000 hits. So, you can see that there is a lot of interest in the condition. The best article is at National Library of Medicine.

2006-05-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

Left Side, Right Side.

Someone jumped the gun and did not wait for me to ask the question "How do you tell which is the left side and which is the right side of a rail car?" He had it right because he had railroad experience in his past.

Most of you probably don't care. Or, you assume that as you face the line of a train from the caboose looking toward the engine, the right side of the cars would be on your right hand side. 'Taint necessarily so. Cars sometimes get turned around during transit in switching yards, etc. In such cases, if the shipping papers say "Unload right side first" and you don't know which is the right side, there could be problems.

If you were to draw a line from coupler to coupler (the coupler is the thing that hooks the cars together) the length of a railcar, one side will be the left side and the other the right. Knowing which is the right side is all a matter of knowing your A's and B's. Cars have an A and a B end. The B stands for "brake" and is the location of the hand brake. That's the steering wheel looking thingy that the crew turns to set the brakes on the car. The A doesn't stand for anything except to tell you "that's not the B end, fella."

If you are standing at the B end of a car and facing the A end, the left side of the car is on your left and the right side is on your right. Simple, huh, when you know how it's done. Some railroads stenciled a small L or R near the doors of their boxcars. That's another thing you can look for while you are sitting at a railroad crossing waiting for a train to pass.

Actually, I had a reason for presenting this bit of trivia to you. It is to show the importance of knowing and following established standard operating procedures when performing a particular task. Being a cowboy and doing things your own way can be bothersome sometimes, as well as dangerous. This is a point I emphasize during my courses on emergency response training.

2006-04-18T16:07:00.000-07:00

I didn't know this.

My brother told me this several years ago but I did not really believe him. I should have known better because, at the time, he was still a big shot journalist at the Dallas Morning News (it was still a good paper then) and journalists know everything.

Jon told me that the railroads are required to put the letter "F" on the front end of their diesel locomotives so the employees will know which is the front. This seemed preposterous because, it seemed to me, any idiot should know the front of a train from the rear. Well, the joke's on me. Jon is right!

While reading the February 2006 issue of a model railroad magazine, I found this same subject discussed. It seems that the Federal Railroad Locomotive Safety Standards say "The letter "F" shall be legibly shown on each side of every locomotive near the end which for identification purposes will be known as the front end." It's at 49CFR229.11 if you want to look it up in the Code of Federal Regulations.

In the steam era, all locomotives looked pretty much the same. A cow-catcher was on the front end of the engine. The cab where the engineer and fireman sat was on the back end, but not always. There were a few cab forward locomotives but still the cow-catcher was underneath them.

When the more efficient diesel engines replaced the old smoke belching steam locomotives, the crew cab was put at the front end, but not always. At the customer's request, some manufacturers put the cab at the back or near the middle. Maybe you thought all diesel engines were alike, but look closer next time you see a train. You might even be able to pick out the "F" although you already will have figured out which end is the front.

Many diesels run equally well in either direction. Therefore, it is essential that switchmen and other crew members working on the ground know how an engineer will respond to their go forward or back up signals. Likewise, an engineer needs to know which way an unfamiliar locomotive will move when he or she sets the reverser lever on the control stand forward or reverse (yes, there are female engineers just as there are female airline pilots).

In an industry as dangerous as railroading you never want to guess!

Now for another bit of railroad trivia. How do you tell the right side of a box car from the left side? It makes a difference sometimes. It is not uncommon for instructions for rail shipments to include a note to "Unload from the right side first." I'll leave the answer to that for another time. Right now, I need another nap.

2006-01-13T18:00:00.000-08:00

Who You Callin' Fat, Girl?

The Skinny on the Fat
Rebecca L. Newsome, MS, RD

Just when you thought you had a handle on the war against fats, a new fat has rolled in to town. Trans fatty acids, also called trans fats, have become the new dietary enemy, second only to saturated fat.

Trans fat is formed through a chemical process called hydrogenation, which adds hydrogen to liquid vegetable oils to make them more solid. Trans fats are cheap, prolong shelf life, and give food a desirable taste, shape, and texture, all important attributes to manufacturers who must please ever-hungry consumers. While a very small amount of trans fat is found naturally in various meat and dairy products, the majority are found in shortenings, stick (or hard) margarines, commercially baked and fried foods, including doughnuts, French fries, pastries, cookies, crackers, and the “You Can’t Just Eat One” potato chips. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimates that the average daily intake of trans fat in the U.S. population is about 5.8 grams, or 2.6% of calories, per day for individuals 20 years of age and older.

So why are trans fats so harmful? Evidence suggests that trans fats behave much like saturated fats and tend to raise total cholesterol levels and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol levels, and lower HDL (“good”) cholesterol levels. This in turn may lead to clogged arteries, thus increasing the risk of developing heart disease and stroke.

Is there an upside, you may ask? Or is this another, “there goes everything I like to eat” kind of things? Effective January 1st, 2006, the FDA requires that trans fat content be listed separately on the Nutrition Facts panel of all packaged foods. Food companies were given ample time to reformulate products into somewhat “healthier” versions. Keep an eye out for packages stating “No Trans Fat” or “Trans Fat Free.” In addition, start reading labels!! You will see Nutrition Facts panels listing any measurable amount of trans fat in a separate line in the total fat section under saturated fat.

Did you catch that word, “measurable?” Be aware that food companies are allowed to list the amount of trans fat as 0 grams on the Nutrition Facts panel and/or claim “Zero or No Trans Fat” if the amount of trans fat per serving is less than 0.5 gram. If you see both “0 grams trans fat” and “partially hydrogenated oil” listed on the package, the food product contains less than 0.5 gram of trans fat per serving. In addition, this labeling requirement applies only to packaged products, not foods served at restaurants or fast food chains.

It is also important to note that some companies have sought petitions for
extending the trans fat deadline, so if you come across a product that does not have trans fat listed on the Nutrition Facts panel, do not assume that it is trans free. You may perhaps come across a product with no Nutrition Facts panel at all, such as the nut mix your granddaughter gave you for Christmas. If you encounter a situation like this, take a look at the ingredient list (hopefully there is one) and be on the lookout for the following terms: hydrogenated oils, partially hydrogenated oils, margarine, and vegetable shortening. If any of these are close to the top of the list, remember that what you may munch on is a source of trans fat.

At this time, there is not enough scientific evidence to make recommendations on a specific amount of trans fat to consume daily. Therefore, a % Daily Value can not be calculated and so will not be present under the %DV column on food labels.

Eliminating trans fat from the diet completely is impractical for many individuals. As far as fats are concerned, stick to previous guidelines given for fats, as well as the new guidelines provided for trans fats. In other words, when choosing processed foods, select those with no trans fat. Follow the guidelines given above and get used to reading labels. Choose soft (liquid or tub) margarines with no more than 2 grams of saturated fat per tablespoon. Limit your intake of saturated fat found in fatty beef, veal, lamb, pork, lard, poultry fat and skin, butter, cream, whole milk, ice cream, cheese, and other dairy products made from whole milk. These foods also contain dietary cholesterol, as do eggs, shrimp, shellfish, and organ meats, such as liver.

A final word from the American Heart Association: “The American Heart Association supports the new nutrition labeling requirement and urges consumers to read food nutrition labels before making purchases. The intake of trans fat as well as saturated fat and cholesterol should be as low as possible while consuming a nutritionally adequate diet.” Try not to think of it as one more restriction, one more thing that you can’t eat. Chances are, it was probably already something you should have been avoiding in the first place.

About the author. Rebecca Newsome is a registered dietitian at the Veterans Hospital in Dallas. She works with diabetic and spinal cord injury patients and their special dietary needs. If you liked her article, why don't you drop her a line at: rebecca.newsome2@med.va.gov

2006-01-03T20:45:00.000-08:00

Who We Are

A couple of current issues on the national scene could redefine the image of who we are as Americans. These happen to be issues about which I, personally, feel very passionately. I refer to the ongoing debate over torture of prisoners of war and domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens without a legal warrant. I'll state it unequivocally. We should not be torturing people nor should we be supportive of such conduct among our allies. Nor should we be eavesdropping on our law abiding fellow American citizens. Torturing and gossip mongering is not who we are as Americans.

We Do Not Torture

We have always tried to project an image of a nation of people who are guided by law and righteous thinking. It has been such since our beginnings. Sometimes we have tended to stray but in the end, our form of government has brought us back to the proper path. As a people, we have never condoned torture. We should not start now. Nor, should we support other countries that do so. It will not make our hands any cleaner if we transfer our POWs to those countries for interrogation.

Don't fall for the emotional rhetoric that says torture is okay if it can save an American life. Whether it's called "sleep deprivation," "hosing down with water," "psychological manipulation," "attitude adjustment" or whatever clever name is used, it is wrong. We haven't done it in past wars, even when we knew it was being done to our military people. Besides that, the overall results of torture interrogation are not as effective as its proponents say. The cages at Guantanamo are still full after all this time and what do we have to show for it? We still don't have a clue as to where Osama Bin Laden is hiding.

To use a favorite phrase of many activists, once we start down the "slippery slope" of allowing a little "gentle" torture, we become hooked. It escalates over time as more "gentle torture" ideas are created. It works exactly like the problems with college fraternity and high school athletic team hazing of new members. At first, a few little mental exercises seem tame enough, but it escalates until eventually you have such things as new members being forced to eat disgusting things and engage in hazardous activities such as drinking lethal quantities of alcohol. Or, even drinking lethal quantities of water. It happens every year. You can check it out for yourself. Just Google the phrase "college binge drinking."

The basic problem in such cases is the sophomoric mind set of the individuals involved. And, it's not just a case of "boys will be boys." The girls are getting into the act also.

What does college hazing have to do with POW torture? Same mind set. If you look at the activities of the American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison, you see the same sort of scenario creep. It started on a small scale and then the guards began to get innovative for their own amusement. These were military police, for gosh sakes! They are supposed to protect as well as guard those placed in their charge, not abuse them.

Of course, a few of the guards were punished. But, they were mostly lower ranking enlisted personnel. Oh, there was a company grade officer charged, I think. But, the field grade and command grade officers, who ultimately are responsible for those under their command, were quietly transferred or allowed to retire with their pensions, privileges and perks intact.

And what of the shadowy civilian interrogators who told the military types that it was okay to engage in the "light" torture activities to make the prisoners talk? What happened to them? We don't even know who they were or under whose orders they were working. So, hold that thought while we discuss this domestic spying thing.

We Do Not Engage In Domestic Eavesdropping Without Just Cause

Our country's founders wrote into our Declaration Of Independence, a document we revere, that among our self-evident truths is the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When they wrote our Constitution, another revered document, they incorporated rights that we did not have under British Colonial rule. Established were such rights as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Our founding fathers did not envision an Imperial Presidency.

This idea of federal security agents recording or listening in on our international telephone calls is just plain wrong. It is another one of those "slippery slopes" we do not want to get started on. Scenario creep in this instance can move from listening in on conversations with potential terrorists to eavesdropping on survivalists or local militia groups to clandestine listening in to locate state legislative members hiding out to avoid voting on a piece of legislation they oppose but cannot stop. Farfetched? Don't be too sure. Remember how Tom DeLay used the FAA to try to find Texas Democratic legislators who fled the state to avoid voting on a piece of re-districting legislation DeLay was pushing?

I support President Bush and I support his leadership in the Iraqi war. While I trust him, I am not so sure I trust all those around him. This may come as a surprise to you, but people in high places do not always tell the truth. In their mind they may rationalize it as being the truth. Two outstanding examples come to mind. Remember seeing our President NO. 42 leaning on the lectern on national television, pointing his finger at the camera and saying "I did not have sex with that woman. . ." Or, how about the famous baseball player who pointed his finger at the congressional committee investigating steroids in sports and saying "I have never used steroids - period!" There have been others, but you get the idea.

This warrentless domestic spying thing was put to former Attorney General John Ashcroft two years ago when he was in the hospital recovering from surgery. How bizarre is that? To his credit, he turned it down. But, if John Ashcroft did not like it, it must be a really bad idea.

The nature of security work is such that; number one, you must have trustworthy people involved; and two, it must be done in an atmosphere of secrecy. Too many times in this sort of situation, the people involved begin to feel that they are on a holy mission and the ends justify the means. A good watchdog is a must and then someone must watch the watchdog.

Even good people will do untrustworthy things at times depending on the pressure and
motivation. After all, they are only human and subject to ordinary human nature frailties that are part of it. Actually, right thinking super-patriots who are never wrong only exist in Tom Clancy novels.

We can't depend on our elected representatives and senators in Congress. They become seduced by the ego inflation that accompanies being privy to sensitive material with the highest security clearances. They like knowing secrets denied to ordinary people and will go along with questionable practices to keep their place in the good old boys secret club.

I am not too sure high volume electronic eavesdropping is all that effective. For one thing, electronic filters usually key on particular words or phrases that are said to be used by suspected terrorists. Even with such filters in place, a lot of information will be collected. Nearly all of this information requires translation from another language and we do not have that many accomplished translators of
Middle Eastern languages. So processing the intercepted information is slow. So slow, in fact, that it may be useless by the time it is available to be analyzed by an "intelligent" human.

As we become more and more dependent on technology for surveillance, we become more and more fixated with a sense of security that may not exist. Such things as facial feature recognition computeer programs using surveillance cameras scanning crowd scenes has not worked despite what you see on "Law and Order" on t.v. Psychological profiling of persons at airports has not produced one viable terrorist suspect. But, it did pick out Senator Ted Kennedy once. There is no substitute for human intelligence provided it is provided by intelligent humans. That's something we can watch.

Our founding fathers envisioned a government composed of three equal branches; executive, legislative and judicial. I am convinced that the closest our republic has come to failing occurred during the Watergate period. We had a president who, by use of executive privilege, sought to defy Congress in order to conceal information that would be incriminating to him and his administration. The Supreme Court sided with Congress and ruled that the info was not covered by executive privilege.

Would the President use his powers as Commander-in-chief of the armed forces to enforce his self-serving personal ruling as is done in banana republics? Or, would he bow to the rule of law and abide by the Supreme Court's decision? Fortunately for us all, he chose the latter. But only after he ordered his Attorney General to fire Justice Department persons who opposed his views. To his credit, the Attorney General refused and resigned his office in protest. As the sorry episode played out, the President finally recognized his untenable position and resigned the Presidency.

As I said starting out, we do not torture, and we do not eavesdrop on each other without using proper legal procedures. Our strength as a nation before the world is that we are a nation of laws that protects the rights of every citizen. We should do nothing to change that.

2005-12-28T11:40:00.000-08:00

More Blog Power

Here is another blog page from a soldier serving in Iraq. I couldn't send it with the others because I had misstyped the address and it kept bouncing. I emailed 1st Lt. Currie for the correct address and he immediately sent me the correct one.

He has some strong comments about his time in country. Also, you might want to email him your congratulations. 2nd Lt. Rusten D. Currie became 1st Lt. Currie early this month.

1st Lt. Currie

email: rdcblog@gmail.com

2005-12-26T16:33:00.000-08:00

Blog Power.

I received nice comments from several of you about my first Christmas overseas in 1944. The tight security precautions taken then seem so quaint now. It's certainly different from what's in place now. When something happens in one of the war zones now, we find out about it almost immediately through personal blogs from military personnel in country. This info comes to us unfiltered by either the mass media or the governmental spin doctors.

Such is the power of the blog. It was bloggers that exposed Dan Rather's "scoop" about George W.'s National Guard service "irregularities." Within minutes of the CBS news broadcast bloggers were online pointing out deficiences in the "exposure document." Instead of falling on his sword, Rather was allowed to retire gracefully to a lesser position in the CBS news organization. His producer did not fare as well. She was fired on the spot.

When reading or hearing the news of our military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo or any other place we have troops, you should remember that you are reading or hearing it after it has passed through filters put in place by the organizations supplying the news. Whether the source is liberal or conservative, governmental or civilian, they put their own spin on it - some more so than others.

I say we should take advantage of sources over there we know we can trust. We should pay attention to the voices of those who are there doing the work that is up close and personal to the situation. We should read what our individual military bloggers have to say. In addition to dodging the mortar shells and RPG rounds, they see the good things that are happening. In addition to protecting Iraqi civilians from local thugs who would try to intimidate them into submission of Iraqi hardliners, our brave men and women help rebuild schools and the other parts of the infrastructure that was destroyed.

If you don't know of a blogger in country, try these, starting with my grandson, Jason, who is on his second Iraqi tour. Just click on the name:

Jason
Col. Brown
Kris
Dorman
Buck Sergeant
Sgt. Scott
Major K.
Shawn
Co. Commander

When you finish reading a blog, click the "close page" button in the upper right-hand corner of your screen and you will be brought back here and can read another blog. After you read their blogs, take the time to leave a comment. Let them know you appreciate their service and their effort to keep you posted on the local news. It's the least we can do.

2005-12-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

A Christmas Memory.

Early in November 1944 I boarded a troop ship, a converted Matson Line luxury liner, in San Francisco headed to the war in the Pacific. There were 4,000 other U.S. troops, including 500 WACs and 500 ANZACS (Australian and New Zealand troops). The Aussies and New Zealanders were returning home on R & R from the tough fighting in the North African campaign.

The troop ship, the S.S. Monterey, followed the southern route far south of the Hawaiian Islands. Since we were unescorted, the ship zig-zaged all the way to Noumea, New Caldonia in order to dodge Japanese submarines. For this reason, the journey took about 30 days. I ate Thanksgiving dinner standing up and standing shoulder to shoulder with other guys in the cramped mess hall as the ship pitched back and forth.

The one pleasant thing about the trip was that there were about 15 USO entertainment units on board. They were headed to the Pacific war zone area to entertain the troops. Nearly every day one or another of the units would use the aft cargo hatch cover for a stage to rehearse their act. That was a great break in the boredom. Bill Collins, my best buddy from radio operator school, had played string bass in a dance band in Denver and he was pressed into service to play in the band accompanying the performers. Hanging with him, I was able to get a good seat upfront to see the shows.

This was the year that the movie "Holiday Inn" came out. It featured the song "White Christmas," which has since become a Christmas standard. The Army troop commander on the ship forbade any of the USO people to sing "White Christmas" as part of their act. He figured it would be bad for morale for troops heading into the unknown to hear a song that focused on holidays at home.

One afternoon along about the last day out at sea, the Army Special Services Officer in charge of the USO group took the microphone to say a few words to the troops. His name was Captain Lanny Ross. He identified himself as the same Lanny Ross who sang on the popular radio show of the time, "Showboat." It was a weekly show about life on a fictional Mississippi riverboat. There was a Captain Willie, and singers Lula Belle and Skyland Scottie, a couple of comedians called Molasses and January and some other regulars on the show. Maybe, some of you old timers remember it from the time before television.

Capt. Ross told us to just sit back and pretend that we were still kids back home sitting on the living room floor in front of the old Philco console radio set. You know, that big wooden piece of furniture that had a big glass tuning dial, and several wooden knobs and a big cloth-covered loudspeaker? He told us to remember how we would twist one of the knobs and we would hear "Moonlight and Roses," which was his personal theme song. He began singing it. Sure enough, it was just like being back home.

After he sang a couple of other songs for us, the band struck up "White Christmas." He sang it all the way through and then he led us while we all sang it with him. Colonel Humbug, the troop commander, didn't say a word. All too quickly it was over. Instead of being demoralized, as the colonel had feared, we more clearly understood that we were headed to an action that would help protect what we all had left back home. Although the future was uncertain for us, we knew what we had to do.

I finally arrived at my post in southern New Guinea just before Christmas Day. It was almost comical. The guys who were already there had fashioned a scrawny Christmas Tree out of a scrap of broken lumber with a bunch of bent coat hangers for branches. They had tied colored toilet paper and cloth scraps on it for decorations.

Of course, I didn't get any presents that year because my family had no idea where I was. Security was real tight. It was a pretty bleak Christmas but we all survived it. Most of us, that is. Some of my buddies did not survive events that happened later. Their sacrifice made it possible for me to have many, many "White Christmas" memories later. Every year at this time, I remember those guys and thank them in my heart for one more Christmas memory with my family.

And so, I wish you a most Merry Christmas or whatever particular day you celebrate. While we may celebrate for different reasons, those brave men, merely boys actually, gave their all for us so we can celebrate as we wish. God bless them all.

2005-12-09T21:37:00.000-08:00

Miss Rebecca said it so listen up.

BEATING THE HOLIDAY BULGE
Rebecca L. Newsome, MS, RD

“Tis the season to get fatter, Fa la la la la la…” For many of us, it is almost a given that the holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Year’s will add five to ten pounds to the scale. But not so, says a study conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Researchers discovered that Americans only gain about one pound in the six week holiday season. Whew! Only one pound? Pass the pumpkin pie!!!

Unfortunately, the study also found that weight gained over the winter holidays isn't lost during the rest of the year. That one pound doesn’t seem like much, but volunteers in the study also gained an average of 1.4 pounds over the rest of the year. Still doesn’t seem like much? Well, over five years, that may mean another dress or pants size. And it just keeps adding up, year after year, which can result in weight gain that ultimately leads to heart disease, diabetes, and other serious health problems. With over half of our population classified as overweight, holiday weight gain, or weight gain during any time of the year, is an obstacle to overcome.
There are many tips to keep the holiday heft at bay. Dallasites have one great advantage over the rest of the country – mostly great weather throughout fall and winter. Here are a few tips to help:

STAY ACTIVE

If you have an exercise routine, don’t use the holidays as an excuse to get off schedule. It is more important than ever to keep active during the holidays, because most likely you will be eating more fat and sugar. If you exercise regularly, your body will be better equipped to handle the extra calories. Try to get 30-40 minutes of activity daily. This can be broken into segments. Ten minutes walking to the store, 5 minutes taking the stairs, or 15 minutes dashing around doing last minute shopping.

EAT BEFORE YOU GO TO THAT PARTY

You might think about skipping meals during the day so you can really enjoy a big dinner at night, but this is not a healthy choice. Eat regular meals before parties. Right before you leave the house, drink a glass or two of water, or even skim milk, and have some yogurt or fruit. These snacks will help keep you from overindulging at the buffet, and the water will satisfy thirst which is often confused for hunger.

GET INVOLVED WITH PARTY PLANNING

Offer to bring a dish. Veggie or fruit trays are great choices, and that way, you’ll be sure there are healthy snacks at the party. Just don’t bring along a high fat dip to go along with those veggies. Those few carrot sticks don’t balance out the tablespoon of ranch you might dip it in.

THINK SMALL

It’s okay to partake in the holiday bounty, but choose smaller portions, or only one item. If the cake or pie is precut, ask to share it with someone. Take half a spoonful instead of a heaping one. Don’t try the three types of dressing, choose one. Also, use the smallest plate available for your meal. And if you’re the one throwing the party, serve dishes with smaller serving spoons rather than the largest you own, and don’t use your largest plates, in an effort to help others in the battle against the bulge.

USE YOUR NOG-GIN

If eggnog adds seasonal flavor to your holiday or hot buttered rum warms you up on cold December nights, then enjoy, but in moderation. You may be surprised at how many pounds can be packed on by beverages alone. Before a few sips become a few cups, consider this: True eggnog has 340 calories (from sweeteners and fat) per cup. From egg yolks and full-fat milk, much of its 20 fat grams per cup is saturated (and saturated fat intake should be kept less than 20 grams per day). Mix in a 1-½ ounce jigger of brandy or rum, and calories soar to 440 per cup! Drink water to quench your thirst more often than holiday beverages, or drinks such as apple cider or sodas that may be offered at parties. And remember, drinking alcohol can cause you to eat more. If you must indulge, consider replacing desert with a holiday beverage instead of enjoying both.

BE A PICKY EATER

Don’t eat foods just because they are there. Don’t sit down in front of the munchies table. It is too hard to resist! Pay attention to what you are eating and remember to balance your food groups. Try to keep a mental tab in your head about the food groups you’ve had that day. If you have mashed potatoes (starch), turkey (protein), and fruit salad (fruit) at lunch, try to have more vegetables and a dairy food at dinner.

Common sense and “everything in moderation” can get you through a lot of the holiday nutritional pitfalls. Maybe these tips, along with what you already know about proper nutrition, will help you through the season without having to waste your New Year’s resolution on “Lose Weight!”

###

About the author. Rebecca Newsome is a registered dietitian at the Veterans Hospital in Dallas. She works with diabetic and spinal cord injury patients. She says her experience with her granddaddy has helped her learn how to get along with grumpy old men. If you liked her article, why don't you drop her a line at:

rebecca.newsome2@med.va.gov

It might encourage her to write something else for us. The girl knows her stuff.

2005-11-10T10:30:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, November 11, is Veterans Day. It is a day set aside to honor those who have served in the military. There will be many instances of recognition of veterans in print, on television and on the Web. That is as it should be.

When I was a kid, there used to be a big military parade in downtown Dallas. Then, it was called Armistice Day to commemorate the end World War I in Europe. We had no idea at that time WW2 was right around the corner.

The ROTC units from all the high schools were in the parade. There were six Dallas high schools then, plus Highland Park. It was a point of pride to be a part of that parade that went up Main Street past the reviewing stand at the old City Hall building at Main and Harwood. We marched all that way carrying 1903 Springfield rifles that were nearly as big as we were. The platoon that was judged as having the staightest ranks going past the reviewing stand was given a prize, a simple ribbon to hang on their "colors." It doesn't sound like much in these days of huge prizes for accomplishing nothing but it those days the winners strutted for the following year.

During the Viet Nam war years, the anti-war sentiment that was prevalent caused the powers-that-be to cancel the parade as it was judged as "too militaristic." In recent years it has become politically correct to be patriotic again, so the parade has been reinstated.

When I voted Tuesday, my polling place was at an elementary school in my neighborhood. As I was leaving the school after voting, two young twentyish female teachers were setting up a display in the front hall about Veterans Day. I stopped to look at some of the memorabilia. One of the teachers asked "Did you serve?" and I told her yes. She asked where and I told her in the Southwest Pacific in New Guinea. Now, she did not genuflect or fall down on the floor in a kowtowing position or anything like that. She just smiled and turned back to her work. And, to be truthful, I did not expect anything more than a simple recognition as to my slight contribution to the war effort. A fellow Sunset graduate, Paul Mansfield, put it best when he described his service in Korea as "Without distinction but with great pride." I've used Paul's words many times.

I have attended many Veterans Day and Memorial Day events, not to receive any kind of honor (because I have none coming) but to honor my friends and buddies who made the supreme sacrifice in defense of our way of life. Here's why. When I was going to Sunset, we were recovering from the miserable years of the Great Depression. Many of my classmates had joined the National Guard for weekend duty to earn a little money to help out at home. When it became clear that the U.S. was going to be drawn into WW2, the National Guard units were among the first military units called to active duty. Many, many of my friends were in class on Friday and on active duty on the following Monday.

Those unfortunate guys were in the first fighting in the Pacific campaign after Pearl Harbor. Combat was extremely brutal because we were not fully prepared for war. My classmates were in the 36th Cavalry. This was a horse cavalry outfit. Seems quaint now. Of course, horses were not of much use in the jungle fighting in the Pacific. Even more amazing is the fact that when they were called up, one of their weapons with which they were equipped was a wooden lance.

I had many childhood friends and classmates killed and wounded, not only in WW2 but in Korea also. Viet Nam was a little more remote to me personally. By then, it was sons of my friends that were serving and sacrificing. It seems that there is no end to it. I've lost count of the number of wars we have been involved in since I served. The guy that said that only the dead have seen the end of war spoke the truth.

So, tomorrow, if you run into an old geezer wearing a VFW or American Legion cap, shake his hand and tell him thanks. That's all it takes. And, if he's a young geezer wearing a beret, which is the military fashion of the day, give him or her similar recognition. Like it or not, we are engaged in World War III. Those young people are standing between us and an enemy the likes of which the world has never seen before. May God bless them all.

2005-10-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

How ironic and at the same time how horrific!

This past Monday I attended breakfast meeting of a group of safety professionals. The speaker was a representative of a railroad company and his topic was railroad crossing safety. You might think that he was preaching to the "choir" and, in truth, you are right. His message was an appeal for us to help spread the word about crossing accidents and how to prevent them. He wanted us to help make drivers understand that in any contact between a train and a vehicle, the car is going to lose.

Now this was not new information. The railroad industry and various safety organizations have had railroad track crossing safety campaigns going on for years. "Operation Lifesaver" is at least 20 years old, I think. And yet, we continue to have a staggering number of train/vehicle collisions each year. They all pretty much happen where the vehicle crosses a railroad track. I have never heard of a train leaving the tracks and chasing down a car. Maybe it's happened but I haven't heard of it.

That same afternoon, barely hours after my meeting, a car in Grand Prairie was struck at a grade crossing. The driver had driven around the crossing arms in place to block vehicular traffic and stopped on the tracks. While waiting for a freight train to clear the crossing, her pickup truck was struck broadside by an Amtrak passenger train traveling about 60 mph. At the last instant she turned her head and saw the train bearing down upon her. The last thing she saw on this earth were the horror-filled faces of the crew in the locomotive cab of the train that was about to end her life.

The pickup truck was propelled about 50 yards and her husband was ejected. He later died from his injuries. Their baby daughter was strapped in a child safety seat in the center of the truck. She was CareFlighted to Children's Medical Center Dallas in serious condition and was still listed as such at last report.

As my Monday morning speaker said, this type of incident is repeated over and over and over every year. In fact, he had a video clip of a similar incident involving a 16-year old driver. The clip was taken by an amateur photographer who just happened to be photographing that grade crossing at the time. Fortunately, the young driver survived the crash. He had been driving on a street that paralled the tracks about 100 feet away. He made a left turn onto the crossing street and drove right in front of the train. He said he never saw it until it hit him despite that fact that there were flashing red light signals operating at the time.

Investigating police officers said that the lady in the Grand Prairie accident was on the tracks for about six seconds before the train hit her. The train was at least a tenth of a mile away when she drove around the crossing arms and onto the tracks. Why didn't she see it? Who knows? Maybe she thought it was farther away than it was. Maybe she had the truck windows up, the air conditioner on and the radio going and could not hear the train horn. Maybe the baby was crying and the driver was distracted.

At 60 mph the train was moving at a rate of 88 feet per second. That's moving about the width of an average city residential lot every second. At that speed it takes about a mile to bring a train to a complete stop. And, trains can't swerve to miss something on the tracks.

Picture an automobile running over a full can of soda pop. Because of the relative difference in the sizes and weights of the car and the soda pop, the car smashes the can and squishes the contents to smithereens. Now scale it up to consider the relative sizes of a car and a train. In a collision, the train is going to crush the vehicle to scrap. As to the car's contents, the question usually will be whether it will be a closed casket or an open casket funeral.

Operation Lifesaver frequently puts on training programs for law enforcement personnel. Such programs include an extended ride in the cab of an operating locomotive so the officers can see the many "near misses" that occur constantly when vehicle drivers try to beat a train at a crossing. This experience is designed to encourage the officers to write more tickets when they see drivers ignoring warning signs and devices at grade crossings.

I encourage you to check out Operation Lifesaver's Web site www.oli.org/oli . There is no reason for you to hit a train or be hit by a train. The only place that you will see a moving train is at railroad tracks. So, when you see railroad tracks (and that means light rail such as DART also), think MOVING TRAIN. Drive safely. The life you save may be your own.

And with that, I leave you with this childhood riddle:

Railroad crossing
Lookout for the cars.
Can you spell that
Without any r's?

2005-10-12T21:56:00.000-07:00

You gotta read this. I don't have my posting for this week done yet because of a few interruptions. In the meantime, go read my brother's latest posting on his blog. It is unbelievable, except that it actually happened. Go to: http://jonsays.blogspot.com .

2005-10-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

Now this is something that just crabs my apples. I'm talking about the increased use of the label "evangelical Christian" that is being flung about these days, usually by the media and usually in a political context. I consider the term redundant as well as misleading. If you're a Christian, you're evangelical. I started on this rant several months ago but got busy on something else and never got around to putting my ravings down on paper or whatever I'm writing this on now.

While on my way to church on a recent Sunday, I was listening on the radio to services at the University Park United Methodist Church. The pastor, Tom Robbins, happened to mention how the term "evangelical Christian" has such a negative tone these days that some churches are beginning to use the term "outreach" in place of it in reference to their mission activities.

An April issue of Business Week magazine (April - that shows how long I have been working on this) carried a cover feature article on "evangelical Christians" and how President Bush owed them big time for their support. For the most part, they talked about several mega-churches, such as Camelback in California and Prestonwood in Plano. However, the article focused more on their business model than on their theology. There was a separate article directed at "red state" evangelical Christians that made it look like they were all a bunch of cousin-marrying snake handlers.

I asked some of my friends what the term "evangelical Christian" meant to them. Invariably they described the work of Pentacostals, missionary groups, and fundamentalists. Basically, my friends were desribing "door knockers" and foreign missionary oriented groups. I decided my friends weren't any more knowledgable of the subject that I was.

Mostly the label "evangelical Christian" is used by the media in a political sense to make it look like every decision the President makes is done to please conservative Christians. Not so and we know it. This demonization of Christian conservatives by the media is a continuation of a tactic that was used back in the Fifties by media outlets of liberals who claimed that opposition to their social legislation agenda was by a "hateful coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats." Those were the exact words used by writers of the day. Of course, this was back when the "Solid South" meant solid Democratic, a leftover from the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. For many years Southern Democrats could be counted on to follow the line espoused by the national Democratic party.

At the other end of the spectrum there are the some mission-oriented Christians who have actually adopted the evangelical Christian label. It's an elitist thing. They are assuming a superior attitude because they have been on a mission trip which, they think, makes them holier than the rest of us. I read of this in an article in the religious section of the Dallas Morning News. The writer as much as blessed himself for his trip to Africa.

Hogwash, I say. Once, not too many years ago, I attended services at a Presbyterian church in Singapore. The head of Asian missions for the Presbyterian Church gave the sermon. He had spent 18 years in Thailand as an on-the-ground missionary. During that time, 20 of his fellow missionaries had been killed while serving the Lord. He said they tended to measure their service there, not by the number of souls saved or how many people marched down the aisle to answer the invitation, but by the number of their associates killed in mission service. Now that's committment - to see one of your fellow missionaries killed and then continue your work.

I was ranting to my pastor one Sunday after church and his advice was for me to step back, take a deep breath and consider who and what I was working up a sweat over. Many of the political writers using the evangelical Christian label are either agnostic or atheistic and as such don't know what the heck they are talking about. He said that with them it is simply a matter of semantics. They are wordsmiths who are looking for what they consider a catchy phrase or a clever tag line for a column. It seems sometimes that they think up the tag line and then write the column to match it. He as much as told me to get over it.

Now, my pastor is a very intelligent person despite being a teasipper. His t.u. connection is one of those little annoyances in other people that I have learned to cope with. He has a pocket full of degrees, one of which is from Princeton, the granddaddy of all U.S. theological seminaries. So, when he tells me something, I listen. He told me to check up on the basics, satisfy myself that I was thinking right and then move on and don't worry about the media because it's all political.

So I did. And it says it right there in Matthew 28:19, which is Jesus' Great Commission to his deciples. It makes it very clear. If your are Christian, you are evangelical. No qualifying descriptors are needed. Case closed.

Or I thought it was closed for me. Yesterday, I got an email from an old high school buddy about President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He was saying I should support the President's nominee because she is an "evangelical Christian." I'm thinking "What the heck does that have to do with it?" I emailed him back and asked him how evangelical Christians differed from other Christians. He didn't have much of an answer except that they are different because they are not Calvinists. Whew, I'm glad we got that cleared up.

As for Ms. Miers qualifications for the Supreme Court, I don't know anything about her and I'm not qualified to make a judgment anyway. As if it mattered. I do know that she served on the Dallas City Council and didn't get cut up. She pretty much blended into the woodwork, which is pretty hard to do on the Dallas City Council. That seems to be common throughout her career. She doesn't make waves. Of course, that may be why the President nominated her. He knows he's in for a fight with this second Court nomination. What better way to disarm your opponents than to put up a nominee with nothing for them to shoot at? Besides, it's already been shown that Supreme Court justices with prior judgeship experience don't necessarily make better justices than those without such prior experience.

But this was supposed to be about the "evangelical Christian" label. Here's my ruling and I'm sticking to it, as Judge Roy Bean used to say. I'm taking my preacher's advice and moving on. I need to focus on something I actually have a chance of causing to change. It's like a similar problem I encountered way back when I entered the safety engineering profession in the early 1950s. "Safety hazard" was a common term used then. Still is being used, as a matter of fact. Every time I would hear it I would get bent out of shape. "The two words are mutually exclusive" I would shout. You can't have a hazard that is safe and if a hazard is safe, it isn't a hazard.

Of course, I was mainly just showing off. I was fresh out of college and trying to show that I had a vocabulary. I was showing people that I knew what "mutually exclusive" meant. There was another term "mutually inclusive" I would try to weave into a conversation. I lost the battle then and I've got a feeling I'm not going to win this one either. I need a nap.

2005-09-26T11:12:00.000-07:00

My brother Jon has a couple of comments on the Katrina events on his blog posting for 9-23-05. Check it out at http://jonsays.blogspot.com .

2005-09-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

There is a new magazine out for geeks. It is called MAKE and it started publishing about six months ago. The third issue is on the newstand shelves now. At $14.95 it is a little pricey but you can subscribe for $34.95 per year. Whether it survives the first year or not depends on how many geeks want to spring with the bucks.

I don't claim to be a geek but I was attracted to the current issue by an article "CHEAP SHOT-Turn a $10 single-use camera into a $20 reusable digital camera." While I'm not a geek, I am cheap so I laid out three fives plus the tax for the governor and took along the magazine to read on a Southwest flight to San Antonio on my way to Yoakum, Texas. But, that's another story.

I thought all single-use, or disposable, cameras were film types. Turns out the Dakota Digital sold by Wolf Camera, Walgreen's, and CVS for $10.99 is a single-use camera that the buyer returns to the store and after they print out the digital prints, the store erases the memory chip and sells the camera to someone else. The Dakota is the equivalent of a $99 regular digital camera - 1.2 megapixels, fixed focus. There is a model with an LCD viewing window on the back for $18.99. Therefore, their business plan calls for the single-use camera to be used by multiple customers during the camera's lifetime.

There is one flaw in their business plan. They underestimated the determination of a dedicated hacker. There is a little blue sticker on the end of the camera that says "This camera does not connect to home computers." The first rule of business should be "Never issue that kind of a challenge to a hacker."

If you Google the phrase "dakota digital camera," you get over 500 hits telling how to hack it. The first thing that is done is to tear off that offending blue sticker to get at the interface connector underneath it. Several Web sites will give directions on how to make or modify a plug to connect the camera to a PC via the USB port. Other Web sites have the software to download the pictures from the camera to the PC.

In single-use service, the camera will only take 25 pictures. A Web site tells how to exceed this number to the full capacity of the memory chip - over 200 images.

These two sites will give you most of the info:

www.cexx.org/dakota/sucr.htm

www.maushammer.com/systems/dakotadigital/DakotaDigital.html

The second Web address is kind of long, but John Maushammer did much of the early work on hacking the Dakota.

Also, in the current issue you will find D-I-Y article on making biodiesel from used cooking oil in small batches in your kitchen sink. It really works and you can actually burn it in your diesel engine. The only problem is that your engine's exhaust has a strong odor of french fries.

Biodiesel is the fuel that Willie Nelson is touting. Despite the fact that old Willie is the only person ever arrested for "sleeping under the influence," as the late Waylon Jennings put it, Willie might be on to something to lessen our dependence on foreign oil.

If you decide to buy the magazine the full title is "MAKE:technology on your time." You may have trouble finding it on the shelves. The store clerks don't seem to know how to classify it. When I bought my copy at Border's, I found it with the computer magazines. Just for grins, I checked at another Border's store and found five copies of the magazine in the photography section. Go figure.

The magazine also has a Web site: http://makezine.com . It's amazing how many geek Web sites there are out there.

2005-09-12T08:26:00.000-07:00

About Katrina. Everyone else is having their say, why not me? However, I happen to have a little knowledge and experience in emergency planning so you might want to pay attention to what I say. My experience is not on the scale of a Katrina incident, but the basic procedure is the same. Have your emergency plan in place and make sure it is operational before the emergency incident occurs. Once the incident begins unfolding, it's too late to call a meeting or appoint a committee.

Here is the most important thing to understand about planning for an emergency incident. THE INITIAL RESPONSE TO ANY DISASTER IS A LOCAL RESPONSE. This should be intuitively obvious but many people just don't get it. No matter what grandiose plans the federal and state governments have in place, there always is a time lag due to bureaucratic inertia before those plans are implemented. Whether the emergency incident is a tornado, local flooding, a wildfire, a Bhopal-type chemical plant release or a terroristic act, the initial action taken is by local people, whether victims or responders.

Keep that in mind as you hear the mayor of New Orleans criticizing our federal officials, including the President, for not acting fast enough when Katrina hit. The hurricane was not exactly a surprise. The National Weather Service had been tracking it for days and issued ample warning when they determined where it would hit landfall. Many experts and organizations had predicted more than once what happened with Katrina. As a matter of fact, the October 2004 of National Geographic had a scenario that almost exactly duplicated the Katrina incident. If you keep your back copies like most people, dig out the issue and read it. Or, you can read the complete artice on the National Geographic's Web site, www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5 . The article actually is about the subsidence of the marshes caused by diverting water away from them by the Mississippi levee system.

The New Orleans mayor waited until the day before Katrina hit to order an evacuation. He acted then only after strong urging by the head of the National Weather Service and President Bush. Apparently, he had no plan in place to get the affected people to shelter. They were on their own. And yet, Fox News showed a scene of about 100 school buses under water. These buses could have been put to use transporting the people to shelters.

The mayor and the Louisiana governor delayed mobilizing the National Guard to maintain law and order. When notified by the President that the National Guard would be mobilized, the Louisiana Governor asked for 24 hours delay before she gave her decision to concur. The New Orleans police were so overwhelmed that some officers abandoned their posts. Looting is always an aftermath of a disaster. The City of New Orleans emergency preparedness planners should have had plans in place to counter such activity. The New Orleans mayor failed his constituents in their time of need. His cluelessness borders on malfeasance. Picture in your mind the 30 or so residents of St. Rita Nursing Home who were abandoned by their caregivers as the floodwaters rose to within a foot of the ceiling in their rooms.

Many talking heads have critized FEMA for not acting quicker. FEMA was already mobilizing their resources days before Katrina made landfall. This is the kind of event at which FEMA is very experienced. In fact, FEMA was already in action in Florida in connection with recent hurricanes. They were poised to move into the Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama Gulf Coast area. And they did promptly move into action into Mississippi and Alabama.

FEMA could not move into New Orleans quickly because of the flooding. That, the flooding, was what made their response in New Orleans different from previous disasters. The New Orleans area had been hit by hurricanes in previous years. In those instances most residents chose to ride out the storm. However, those were not Category 5 hurricanes. That is what made the difference with Katrina. In the previous hurricanes there was minor flooding but nothing the huge pumps could not handle. When the levee holding back Lake Pontchartrain failed, eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded. That was what was different about Katrina - the breeching of the levee and the subsequent failure of the pumps. That possibility had been discussed many times before but no action was taken. The general attitude taken by local leaders was that since it had never happened before, why worry?

In the several days that I have been working on this posting, the news media has changed their perspective somewhat. While recognizing that the White House made some errors of judgement (such as appointing an unqualified person to head FEMA), the media is beginning to talk about the mistakes that were made closer to the epicenter of the disaster. The Knight-Ridder newspapers posted an online day-by-day review of action taken by various responsible organizationss during the week of August 25 to September 2. In addition to action taken at the national level, time-lines are given for action by Louisiana and New Orleans officials, Mississippi officials, FEMA, the military and the White House. You can access the time-line series at www.grandforks.com/html/realcities/index_timeline.html.

Congressional demands already are being heard for an investigative commission similar to that for the 9-11 disaster. There undoubtedly will be an investigation because it gives the usual suspects inside the Washington Beltway an opportunity for lots of face time on national television. Of course, it will be conducted pretty much along political party lines. It should be interesting. While the Democrats will be trying to hang the blame on the Republican administration, they must be careful because the Louisiana governor and New Orleans local officials that messed up are Democrats.

Since the media is broadening its perspective on their finger pointing and showing that there is plenty of blame to go around, there is no use in me continuing to berate the subject here. I'll wrap it up by asking the question "Do you have a personal emergency plan?" If you don't, come back later and I'll help you formulate one.

2005-09-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

Well, the final curtain rang down on the little small town drama we talked about last week. The city clerk with the bogus degree resigned after a local resident called her a thief, among other names, in an open city council meeting. After the open meeting concluded, she submitted her resignation in a closed council session. The good hearted council members granted her four months' severance pay.

She said she couldn't stand being called a thief and wanted to end the "witch hunt." Her resignation might have been hurried along by the knowledge that her support by the council members was crumbling. One council member said that he found it hard to believe that she didn't know what she was doing when she went through a Web site to get a degree. Of course, he was about six months late with his observation. Turns out she paid the online university an extra $75 so she could pick her grade point average and honors. She modestly selected to honor herself as summa cum laude.

Actually, she wasn't a lowly clerk at all. She was the city secretary and reported directly to the city council. The council contends that they did not know about the online university when they gave her a raise although the Web site was common knowledge among city staffers. The council said that the staffers work for the city manager and there was a breakdown in communication. You think? The city secretary had waved her worthless degree at the council last year when she pointed out to them that it made her eligible for a substantial raise.

In a somewhat similar situation a recent piece about a retired DISD official mentioned that his resume lists a doctorate of education earned from Southeastern Nova University. Earlier this year, I found this same school listed among the credentials of an Arizona educational consultant doing some work for a local school district. I located their Web site and read that they claim to be the 10th largest independent university in the country and a pioneer of "non-traditional approaches to high-quality education."

I checked out their requirements for graduate degrees. It seemed to me that they were much, much less strenuous than traditional graduate schools. Having been through the process, I recalled what was required of me. After a strict application review, there were tough written entrance examinations, an oral presentation of my proposed research project, research investigation by me of an original nature, a written dissertation (which I had to pay to have typed and printed), and a rigorous oral defense of my dissertation before my faculty committee, two of whom had no idea what I was talking about. However, the chairman of my committee actually read my dissertation. He was an economics professor and he asked some of the most pointed questions during my oral defense. In a curious turn of events, one committee member that I had chosen boycotted the meeting. Not because of me. It was his way to protest against the university for an action they had taken and with which he did not agree.

It's hard to imagine how online instruction and research can match traditional "hands on" research and classroom experience. I think the concept needs more evaluation. I feel another paper coming on.

In an incident unrelated to the two mentioned above, a high administrative official with the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) was convicted of a mail order scam involving collectible writing pens. The scam has nothing to do with all this except that investigators discovered during a background check of the accused, he had a phoney graduate degree from Harvard which had helped him get the job with DCCCD. However, he got his fake degree the old fashioned way. He forged it.

Turns out he is a serial forger. To avoid significant jail time, he pleaded guilty and submitted a doctor's affidavit attesting to his having a serious medical condition such that prison would be most detrimental to his continued good health. Of course, he had forged the doctor's statement. When the prosecutor found out the truth, she petitioned the judge in the case to set the verdict and plea bargain aside and allow the forger to be retried. Things don't look too good for the forger. But don't be surprised if he forges himself a pardon.

2005-08-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

It's happened again. A minor official in a nearby city has been exposed as having a bogus college degree obtained over the Internet. It took her about a week's time and $399, which she paid with her city-issued credit card.

This is something that happens pretty regularly, bogus degrees that is, and it's nothing new. I know it has been going on for at least 30 years and probably long before that. Before the Internet, it was mail order diploma mills and phony correspondence schools.

Back in the Seventies, policy wonks in the Texas state education system decided that kids would learn better if teachers were better educated. A system of bonuses and pay raises was worked out to reward teachers who spent their summer vacations seeking higher degrees. Well, we know how that worked out. From what you read in the paper about current student's test scores, they seem to be regressing.

To avoid having to spend their summers sitting in classrooms, many teachers as well as athletic coaches sent away to colleges and universities located out-of-state that gave them credit for their "life experiences." A good number of these diploma mills seemed to be in Florida. The teachers would present their mail order diplomas to their district administrators and start enjoying their raises. That is until someone finally caught on and began checking out the bogus schools.

The city clerk that got into the news lately said that she really, really, really believed Belford University's pitch that her life experience counted toward a bachelor's in business administration. Her motivation was that a degree was key to earning her international certification as a municipal clerk. Such certification would get her a sizeable pay increase.

She professed ignorance but if she had been paying attention she would have known something was not right about the whole deal. According to their web site, Belford University offers degrees in seven days based on life experience "without attending classes, taking tests or submitting assignments." How many times lately have you heard someone say "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is?"

If she had been watching the news, she would have known that earlier this year a TV station in New York state enrolled a 13-year-old Lab at Belford and the remarkable dog earned a doctorate in educational administration in an extremely short time for a mere $549. On its application, the dog's qualifications were listed as "enthusiastic, energetic and loves children."

With her new bogus degree in hand, the city clerk applied to the International Institute of Municipal Clerks for certification, which qualified her (on paper) for a substantial raise. The Institute accepted her bogus degree without any hesitation (what were they thinking?), which makes you wonder how much their certification program is worth.

The really remarkable part about this whole episode is that when a couple of city finance department employees blew the whistle on the city clerk and the Institute pulled her certification, city council members severely critized the whistle blowers more sharply than they did the ciry clerk who caused the whole mess. Ain't small town government interesting?

I have a long-standing beef with credentialism anyway. During the past twenty years there has been an explosive growth in the certification business, especially in the medical community. On some people's business cards the lnitials after the person's name are as long, or longer, than the name itself.

The computer industry is just as bad. Microsoft started it off with their MSCE (Microsoft Certified Engineer) certification. This proved to be a cash cow for Microsoft as more and more people paid big money to take the online exam for certification. Other computer certification exams popped up to take advantage of the business opportunity. Now there are whole sections in bookstores that offer study aids for passing the exams.

In my own field, safety engineering, some 30 years ago the American Society of Safety Engineers took the lead in setting up a certification program to provide an indication of competence for safety practitioners. The certification program administered by the Board of Certified Safety Professionals soon attracted a plethora of competitors to serve those who could not qualify as CSPs with the BCSP. There even was a mom and pop operation that worked off the kitchen table of the husband and wife who started it. They are still offering certifications today, for a price. Basically, it is an unregulated activity.

The intent of most certification programs is to provide a set of bench marks by which practitioners can be evaluated. All it usually means is that the applicant had a good resume and was able to pass a rigorous written examination. Certification serves as a tool, or I should say a crutch, for human resources types. In these days of overqualified job applicants, human resourse persons can use it as a screening tool in determining which applicants to consider. Those applicants who indicate a certification of something or other get a second look. The others go directly to the waste basket. Many otherwise well-qualified people get overlooked this way.

Am I certified? Not any more. I got tired of paying sizeable annual dues for the priviledge of putting a set of initials after my name. Actually, that's all I ever got out of the whole program. Somehow, it did not seem to be enough to me. I finally realized that I was paying a sizeable registration fee each year to a staff of people in the Chicago area whose only function was to send me an annual bill for a registration fee. It finally dawned on me that I was getting the short end of the stick in that deal and I didn't need any kind of certification to figure it out.

2005-08-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong. I fully support our President and our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. In fact, one of my grandsons is returning to Iraq for his second tour of duty there at the end of this month. But, some recent happenings have made me consider the unanticipated ramifications of some of our international activities.

One such instance was discussed by Diana West in a recent article in Jewish World Review (http://jewishworldreview.com/0805/west081505.php3). She was commenting on how our stated intention to spread democracy throughout the world is instead making the world, or parts of it, safer for (gasp!) sharia, or strict Islamic law.

This is not a trivial issue. True, we threw out the Taliban government in Afghanistan. But we didn't capture Bin Laden. For help in the continuning hunt for him, we are playing footsie with a neighoring government that believes it is okay to gang-rape a female relative of a person who has committed a criminal act. And then consider it proper to murder the innocent rape victim to restore the honor of the family because she is a tainted women. It just boggles my mind.

The current wrangling by the Iraqi committee trying to draft a new constitution is hung up over whether the new government will be sharia, that is heavily influenced by the Mullahs, or whether it will be secular, that is, run acording to constitutional law whereby all citizens have equal protection before the law. Under sharia, Iraqi women will be worse off than they were under Saddam.

Israel, with U.S. prodding, is getting into the act. Consider Israel Prime Minister Sharon's unilateral action (that means he is doing something without any promise of concession on the part of the Palestinians) in removing Israeli settlers from the Gaza territory. This will have the effect of turning control over to the already sharia-vested Palestinian Authority, thus adding one more entity's strident voice to the community of nations at odds with the Free World.

What is the answer? I have no idea. How do you operate in an atmosphere where the vacating Israelis must take their dead with them to prevent their graves being desecrated by the remaining Palestinians? All I know to do is to pray for the safety of my grandson and the other military and civilian personnel we have put in harm's way. I hope you will join me.

2005-08-20T07:09:00.000-07:00

The virtual ink was hardly dry on my previous blog before I read another column about the pork-barrel issue. Chris Edwards, director of tax policy at the Cato Institute (cedwards@cato.org), published a column entitled "Going hog wild - with taxpayer money."

Edwards told how federal pork spending has exploded in recent years. Overall, pork projects have increased tenfold during the past decade. It's not a Republican/Democrat issue. It's not a red state/blue state issue. It's not a liberal/conservative issue. It is a shameless raiding of the federal treasury for local projects, many of which are unjustified on the national level and should be funded, if justified, with local money.

Edwards column names six specific slices of pork pie:

$350,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland;
$218,000 for a seafood plant in Oregon.
$250,000 for an Alaska statehood celebration.
$250,000 for sidewalk repairs in Boca Raton, Florida.
$1.4 million for upgrades to Ted Stevens Airport in Alaska.
$100,000 to Rochester, N.Y., for a film festival.

The federal highway bill passed just last month was bloated with 6,371 pork projects, or earmarks, inserted by membrs of Congress. "Earmarking" is a means whereby congressional members slip in project money for their districts. House majority leader Tom DeLay was quoted as saying that it is better for members to earmark money for their districts than to leave spending to the "bureaucrats." How arrogant.

Senator Robert Byrd (D) of West Virginia formerly was known as the "King of Pork." Republican senators Trent Lott, Thad Cochran and Ted Stevens have ursurped the title. By the way, guess who Ted Stevens Airport in Alaska is named for.

So what happens if you express your rightous indignation against pork-barrel politics to your representative in Congress? If you are successful and he or she refuses to dip into the pork pot, you will have no more flying bridges across the Trinity River. The money will go to other parts of the country like for a scheme for an indoor rain forest in Iowa.

Probably what we will do instead is to get a bigger bucket to use to dip into the pork-barrel and help perpetuate this culture of fiscal irresponsibility.

2005-08-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

I was in Houston last week on a training gig and I read a very interesting column by Rick Casey in the Houston Chronicle. The provocative headline "Tossing Pork At Terrorists" caught my eye. I thought "Here is a politically incorrect headline if I ever saw one."

Turns out Casey wasn't talking about pork in the Islamic halal context. He was talking about pork as in American pork-barrel politics. He was refering to some of the Homeland Security boondoggles that have been making the news recently.

For instance, Fort Bend County received a grant that puts $1,400 police radios in schools throughout the county. The 2,500 total students in rural Needville would not fill most urban high schools. This isn't exactly playing the odds. With few exceptions al-Qaida has favored large cities with its strikes, especially in Europe and the U.S.

Casey also mentions $7,750 in Homeland Security grant money that was sent to a volunteer fire department in False Pass, Alaska and money used to buy, among other things, 150 traffic cones in Fredericksburg, Texas. His column tells of additional questionable grant-funded projects. To read his full column, go to www.chron.com and click on "Columnists." Then, scroll down until you find his name and click on it. Click on his column for August 12, 2005.

If these were isolated instances, I would not have thought much about them. However, in September of last year, the Dallas Morning News had a long article headlined "Homeland spending not all on terror." Among other things, the article mentioned how Homeland Security grant money had allowed the City of Madisonville, Texas to purchase a $30,000 customized command trailer that will be used primarily during the annual mushroom festival in October of each year.

The News article by writer Dave Michaels told of a review of 15,000 homeland security purchases and found dozens of cases where federal grants were used for purposes that have very little to do with terrorism.

You can find the article in the News online archives at www.dallasnews.com but you'll probably have to pay for it. On the other hand, you can email the reporter at dmichaels@dallasnews.com and he may fix you up with a copy. Or not.

So what's my beef? In 2003 and 2003 more than $113 million was given out without adequate coordination by state and local officials. The result has left some potentially vulnerable areas relatively unprotected and other places flush with cash they did not seek. A little more intelligent oversight, please.

2005-06-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

Here are the posts from my old blog site. Enjoy.

April 10 About That Picture

People have asked me about that picture in the left column. One friend of my brother who saw it said "Your brother doesn't look much like you." My brother told her "That picture doesn't look much like my brother."

A free-lance professional photographer used to live next door to me. He was always trying out new photo equipment. One day he was testing a new closeup lens and asked me to pose for him. He wanted to see how close he could get before the picture was distorted. This was before digital cameras so he had to wait until he developed the film to see the results.

When he showed me the finished result, I thought it was pretty neat. In the first place, it doesn't look a whole lot like me except for the glasses. Second, the distortion makes my nose look huge. Third, the stuff in the background around my head makes it look like I'm wearing dreadlocks.

When Jon said I needed to put a picture on my blog page, I immediately dug out that old photo. My wife hates it and has demanded that I remove it.

March 21 Know-It-Alls

It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you do know and are sure of, only it's wrong. I didn't make that up. It was said by some great philosopher like Will Rogers or Mark Twain. Could even have been Kinky Friedman.

Anyway, recently I had contact with a walking, talking, mouth-breathing example. I went to the library near me to check out a book on cryptography. Why I'm reading about cryptography is another matter which I'll cover at another time. I had checked the Dallas Public Library card catalog from home (good old Internet) and I knew the call number. I went to the proper shelf and found my book among books about Quicken and Excel, but not in the computer section.

I wanted a book that was in another branch library and went to one of the staff librarians to get her to order it for me. While she was ordering my book, I mentioned to her that the cryptography book appeared to be improperly classified. She asked to see it and flipped to the copyright page to check the keywords that the publisher puts there to help librarians classify the book according to the Dewey Decimal System. One of the secondary entries was "data encryption." She said "data encryption, that means computer, so it's classified properly." I tried to tell her that computer data was different from cyphered encryption, but she wasn't buying it. She said "No, you're wrong. Data means computers. It's classified right."

Recognizing that I was dealing with a 20 something-year-old twit, I knew I was not going to get anywhere. I didn't bother to try to tell her that the whole bunch of computer books that were on that particular shelf were misfiled. They should have been in the computer section of the shelves.

Also, I recognized that she felt she was dealing with an old geezer who had no business telling a trained librarian her business. Fortunately, for library patrons the card catalog will steer you straight. Even if the person doing the book classification makes a mistake and assigns the wrong call number, you will still be able to find your book on the shelf, even though it is shelved wrong. But, the Dewey Decimal System is only as accurate as the librarians allow it to be. You will still be able to find a misclassified book. However, the misclassified book will be an orphan on the shelves. If you expect to find books on the same subject shelved with an orphan book, you're out of luck, unless all the classification and filing has been done by the same twit.

It just happened that my library branch had a couple of other cryptography books and they were shelved elsewhere under a different call number, properly classified I might add.

What's my point? None, I guess. Well, maybe it's to caution you to be sure of the accuracy of your information before you open your mouth. Otherwise, you may make a fool of yourself. And don't bother trying to open a closed mind. It's like trying to teach a pig to sing. In the first place, it can't be done. And it annoys the pig.

February 08Baylor Blathering

Far be it for me to try to get involved in Baylor University politics. And that's all it is, politics, this ranting against Dr. Robert Sloan, the president. Now that he has stepped down as university president, his critics should be dancing in the streets. Except that Baptists don't dance. I have to admit that I'm prejudiced in the matter. I think that Dr. Sloan is an inherently good man. He is a great preacher. He has been an able administrator. And, he has been a courageous visionary.

Now, I don't know him personally. But, when he was little, he used to play with my kids when I lived in Abilene, Texas. A couple of times when my church here in Dallas was without a pastor, Robert Sloan would fill in as interim preacher. And, he was a good one. He would drive up from Waco each Sunday, preach at two morning services and one evening service and drive back to Waco that evening. On Monday morning he would be up bright and early and on the job running the seminary down there. That was before he was elevated to president.

Last year, my wife and I moved our membership to another church. The pastor at our new church was none other than Robert Sloan's cousin. And he's a great preacher. It must run in the family. Several times my pastor and I have had conversations about the criticism Dr. Sloan has received from his critics on the Baylor Board of Regents and the Baylor faculty. We both agreed that he would leave his post as university president when he thought the time was right. After all, he had held the position for 10 years. That's about the average length of time that any CEO serves.

Dr. Sloan's vision for Baylor has been to take it to a higher level of excellence among the top tier of American universities. My question is "What is the vision of his critics - Baylor medocrity?"

Most people don't know it, but for the past two years, and this includes some of the bitterest criticism period, Robert Sloan's brother has had severe heart problems. So severe, in fact, that a heart transplant was required. Through it all, Dr. Sloan has displayed uncommon grace and dignity. I wish him well in his new challenges.

January 23 Welcome! Welcome to my blog! I'm just getting started, so there's not much here yet. I would be interested in how you got here. Please send me an e-mail or click on the comment link below to tell me how you found my blog. Bookmark this page and come back often. Once I get started there will be plenty to get upset about. It's okay to disagree with me. Just try to be nice about it

2005-06-15T20:55:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new blog. It probably will be about as interesting as my old blog. In fact one of the first things I will do is to transfer all of my old postings from the old blog to this one. There is a lot I can do as quickly as I can get around to learning it. I like the URL better. It's easier for people to remember. However, if you will bookmark it right now, or add it to your favorites list, you will not have to type in a URL.

Should I move my picture to here from my old blog? Let me know what you think, yes or no. Too late. I've already done it.