Georgia on our minds

There’s a saying that if you’re going to kick the tiger in the ass you’d better know where his teeth are. Georgia found that out over the past week.

I have to ask; what was Georgia thinking in taking on the imperial might of the Russian army? And why did a “U.S. Official” describe Russia’s response as ‘disproportionate’? Worse, why is our president, Vice President and presidential hopeful John McCain warning Russia about ‘consequences’?

Russia has more to show here than its wish to stop Georgia’s invasion – this is a demonstration for the world lest we forget what Russia is capable of. And the Russians are a tough bunch. They have been aching, according to recent news reports, to reclaim a place in the world as a superpower. Georgia’s aggression has obliged them well. And Russia has done nothing if not live up to its word that it would defend the breakaway provinces; it seems as though they have bulldozed much of the territories into the ground.

American’s response would better be left unsaid. There are no’ disproportionate response’s in war - war is an escalation of violence. Is the use of American military might – air force, bombs, artillery bombardment, cruise missiles, Apache helicopter strikes – a disproportionate response against an attack on a convoy by a militia armed with AK’s and RPGs? How about two nukes on civilian populations – events remembered by the Japanese recently. The fact is it doesn't matter whether you kill the fly with a swatter or a sledge-hammer; dead is dead. The notion of disproportionate response is, for the want of a better word, “silly;” there’s no such thing.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain would have been better off to have muttered ‘tut, tut, Russian problem…’ and gone back to whatever it is they do. Georgia is well beyond our sphere of influence and is frankly none of our business. This makes perfect sense when we remember that the U.S. has been quietly importing Russian oil for the past couple of years and Europe relies heavily on that Russian oil pipeline to stay toasty during the winter. ‘Consequences’ my (ample) ass.

What Georgia’s President, Mikheil Saakashvili, has done is a nothing less than a war crime. In attacking the breakaway province what did he expect as a response? Georgia has been playing brinksmanship with Russia for years and it finally came to a head with this confrontation. Russia warned Saakashvili that they would defend the breakaways. Saakashvili should be immediately charged with a war crime because of the innocent people killed by this futile and foolhardy attempt to do the impossible; for putting his people in harm’s way.

One of my kids asked recently why violence has died down in the Iraq – were the insurgents finally accepting us? “No,” I responded, “we killed them all.” And we did so with ‘disproportionate response’.'

That's how wars are won.

Our morbid fascination with our Bits and bo(o)bs

Some people in America have a morbid fascination with their boobs and bits. In the event that you don’t know what I’m talking about I’m referring to breasts and genitalia (yeah, the stuff ‘down there’). This morbidity needs to re-adjusted and quickly.

When traveling the beaches of Europe or South America, you’ll notice that the sun swept sands are littered, nay piled high, with the oily glistening taut bare breasts of women of all ages. Skimpy bathing suits are ‘de rigueur’ for both men and women alike, if worn at all. Public breast feeding is normal. It is accepted as part of life.

On the other hand, in the U.S. men wear boxers to the beach; my extra-small Speedo’s are giggled at. Boobs MUST be covered yet people who should never let the sun see a square inch of their bloated bodies insist - and get away - with wearing a thong. Now THAT’S disturbing.

A bare boob on TV is taboo – shocking. Looked upon with horror as if the sight will turn viewers into rabid sex-maniacs. TV Channels get fined for showing one, let alone two. Take for example Janet Jackson’s be-tasseled appendage that was the cause of outrage and the backlash to which cost her a new album. It went unnoticed in Europe, while in American it was if a nuke had gone off in Central Park. That Justin Timberlake forcibly exposed it went – and there’s the real shame - un-commented on.

The mere mention or public sight of genitalia – even when we are children innocently running on beach - is treated as though the devil himself had arrived and announced the end of days. Areas of our bodies, with which we are intimately familiar on a daily basis from birth to death, are treated with puritanical distain.

Breasts are treated as sex objects as opposed to feeding implements for babies. Granted, cleavage is designed by nature to attract men by mimicking the curvature of the female posterior. Hiding them causes male infatuation. Showing them will garner compliments. Truly it will. Really.

On TV boobs and bits on shows are blurred out even when there’s science, childbirth or surgery involved. Or indigenous people running around in their proud nakedness who haven’t seen a need to cover up their bodies since time began.

What gives? What makes the human body so shameful to some of us? Doesn't the shame felt reflect more on the person feeling it rather than on the beauty of the bodies we're given? It’s not like we don’t know what our bits and bobs look like; you’re either a boy or a girl so there are only three accessory options; they’re all the same for the most part.

Let’s start with boobs which while designed to feed babies. How people find the most natural of human actions distasteful is beyond my comprehension. Babies love it.

And of course there are our bits which are used for ridding the body of waste, sexual relief and mating. All 100% natural. It how life thrives and survives.

I’ve got news for you. The bits, while momentarily attractive due to catastrophic hormone releases during arousal, sex, teenage-hood and male life in general, are not all that interesting off hours.

Lighten up, it’s what we’re made of.

Pete Townshend banned from the U.S.?

On May 7th something quiet but quite remarkable happened. Pete Townshend (63), guitarist of the band the WHO, was scheduled to have his Sexual Offender status dropped from the British Violent and Sex Offender Register (ViSOR). A confirmation of the action is pending.

Mr. Townshend was arrested in January 2003 as part of Operation Ore, the largest investigation into child pornography in the UK. He admitted using his credit card to access child abuse images but claimed they were for "research" for a book in 1999. (Emphasis added by the Guardian Newspaper - see link below). Mr. Townshend was one of 1,600 people arrested in the UK from details given to an American child porn website.He avoided a charge but was cautioned by the British police and his name placed on the Sexual Offender Register for five years. No evidence of downloaded child pornography was found on his home computers. He did admit that he accessed the child porn site.

The British National Children’s Home (NCH) charity said it was not satisfied with Mr. Townshend's defense.

John Carr, its internet safety advisor, said: "We hope that anybody else out there who might be looking at using the internet to get child pornography for the purposes of research is now properly warned. It is not an acceptable defense and it only helps keep the child porn industry going."

And a spokesman for Phoenix survivors, a group that represents victims of child abuse, said it was appalled at the "leniency" of the punishment.

He said: "He (Mr. Townshend) still insists that curiosity is a fair excuse for the sexual exploitation of children."

When asked, a spokesman from Florida's Tampa Bay Police Department's Child Abuse Unit told this writer that “research” is one of the most commonly used excuses by perpetrators of child pornography site visitation.

You be the judge.

Why bring this up? Because despite all of this the U.S. allows Mr. Townshend entry into the United States against published INS regulations.

The US Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) specifies numerous grounds on which a consular officer can find an applicant ineligible for a visa and inadmissible to the United States. Applicants excludable on criminal and related grounds are the following: "Aliens convicted of, and those who admit having committed a crime involving moral turpitude (or an attempt or conspiracy to commit such a crime)." Many have fallen foul of these regulations.

Take, for example, Lilly Allen, the British singer, who was refused a visa after she assaulted a photographer some time ago in London. A Welch acquaintance of the writer was arrested in New York on a DUI in 2000. His next trip back to the US resulted on his being turned back at the Immigration desk in New York.

Pete Townshend on the other hand comes and goes from the U.S. with impunity. Why is he allowed to do this when his admitted offense - for which he was arrested and cautioned - resulted on his being placed on a Sex Offender list? In the U.S. we punish child sex crimes with draconian ferocity and rightly so.

Mr. Townshend is no exception. Why should being a celebrity give him a free pass?

The WHO, featuring Pete Townshend, are playing nationwide in October.

###

Evin Daly is a staff writer for ButlerReport and is also a child advocate in the 15th Judicial Circuit in Palm Beach, Florida, where as a Guardian ad Litem he represents abused, neglected and abandoned children’s interests in court.

Guardian Newspaper Article ('Pete Townshend put on sex offenders register' - May 08, 2003)

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Terminal decisions

I’ve got news for you. We all die. Of something. In 110 years from now every single person in the world today will be deceased. No longer in a state of physical being. Gone. Departed.

Life kills us. Smoking kills. Cancer also. Alcohol; yup. Drugs; uh-huh. Heart Disease; absolutely. Injury; eventually. Stroke; often. Pneumonia; frequently. Murder; 100%. Everything we do will eventually kill us. The act of living is the ballet of dying.

How we live is the only real control we may have on our final passing. Even then there’s no guarantee. A perfectly healthy soy-sucking vegetarian may be killed stepping off the sidewalk just as easily as the weight-challenged leaving McDonalds.

Is there a good way to die? Soldiers will tell you that buddies dying for each other is tops. So does the bible “no man hath greater love for another than he who lays his life down…” It’s been a while since I perused the good book so I may be paraphrasing – you get the point.

I am one of a number of death experts. Not because I am myself a killer, I have been a witness to death and dying. After the hideous death of my friend’s son from cancer, I became a front line care-center volunteer for a very busy hospice. 3,500 people a year were well taken care of in the facility. I, in my time there, was with 2,500 people who died or were dying during my watch. The number is guess only - I didn’t count, but I do still see many of their faces.

What did I learn from the experience? A number things. First no-one should die alone. By that I mean no-one should die without the company of another physically by them. Whether that’s a person dying in their bed of a disease or an accident victim at the side of the road. We arrive into the world into the arms of a loved one, that’s how we should we leave.

Second, there is no dignity in death. It is a process, sometimes quick, many times slow. It drags us to our most vulnerable state and leaves us completely at the mercy of others. On death we become – our remains at least - a dependent object. Jews show as much care and devotion to the corpse as they do the living out of respect for the person. When cleaning a body they pray and ask forgiveness for any indignity they have shown to the person during their tending. Unfortunately the rest of the world, most of it in fact, is not so kind.

Third. I am a believer in assisted suicide; in the hastening of the inevitable; in the alleviation of suffering even if it causes death. By doing we are not acting as G-d, we are using tools that G-d has given us. There no cure for cancer around the corner. No one is going to call to say that a dying person’s prognosis will change because of a just-discovered drug. It doesn’t happen and if it did, it would be used for someone in an early stages of a fatal decline. To think so is a cop-out and does nothing to help the dying. It merely abdicates responsibility, for moral or religious reasons, from those who can help, from those who should help, for the quality of the dying person’s passage. G-d, in whatever form you believe in, has helped us in every other aspect of life, why not death?

Without grossing the reader out I can tell you that I have seen many different types of deathly suffering. Some are downright “shoot me right now” horrible. Even with the best medical care available what I have seen would shock you. It could - should - have been avoided.

Dying is an area that continues to be taboo; we leave it in the “hands of G-d” to take care of the dying, unwilling - perhaps unable - to realize that hastening inevitable death for the right reason is in itself a G-d-given gift.

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When “tumbling” doesn’t mean Jack; to Joe

“Oil prices tumbled more than $3 a barrel Tuesday…” The choice of words the press uses when talking with oil prices are hilarious; “tumbling…plummets” are but two recent examples of single figure drops in price. You’d think from reading these announcements that oil had dropped by $120 a barrel back to where it should be. Alas that is not the case.

Who fooling who? Are these words the media pick up from the oil companies or are they words the media use to get us to read the article? You’re talking to someone who’s used to paying 0.98 cents a gallon and who thinks $1.38 is expensive. We were led up the garden path a few years ago when the water was tested with gas slowly moving into the mid-$2 mark before retreating. It was done gradually as if to condition us. Then it slid into the $3 range and now to $4+. It’s as if the suppliers were trying to find the point of diminishing returns, which I believe that have found.

The big “however” is that the gas revenue stream back to the producers is now taking in over 3 times revenue per gallon for the same gas quantity as five years ago. Even with reduced consumption, the increase in fortunes for the oil ‘folks’ is giddying. Instead of relying on market elasticity for revenue growth with bigger cars and additional consumption, the price itself has become elastic – in one direction only. And someone’s making a lot of money. At a cost to others.

Is there a snapping point? Granted most people have fixed incomes and cannot afford infinite price increases. That said, the essential driving that people do is to work, school and shopping. Longer trips are expensive; and optional. Aside from changing to public transport, walking or riding a bike, the essential consumption can’t and won’t be curtailed. And that is the consumption line below which we –as a nation - will not go.

Despite all of the hype many ‘folks’ are not hurting. Take the middle class soccer mom who brings the kids to school everyday, shops, plays tennis, and swings by Starbucks. She probably fills her gas tank every two weeks whether she’s driving a minivan or a Hummer. Her gas price has nearly trippled but a bi-weekly additional $60 doesn’t make much of a difference. Similarly for the executive driving to work. It’s the cost of a cheap dinner for two. Worst comes to worst they can do a takeout.

The people who are really hurting are the lower paid workers. And here in America, there are a lot of them. The same ones who get shafted when the price of cigarettes goes up, who got the sub-prime mortgage deals with variable interest rates, who can’t make ends meet with the estimated 20% increase in the price of food. The same people whose sons and daughters are fighting our wars and whose families at home are surviving on food stamps; the average Joe.

I don’t think he, or she, would disagree with my laughing at the words “plummet” to describe what really is a bad joke. The very obvious reality is that the poor are getting slammed yet again.

Just a thought.

Al Gore, the climate expert?

I felt sorry for Al when he walked away from the 2000 election, having come so close to being the next U.S. president. To have come so close, to have touched the mantle…to live with what could have been. The disappointment must have been numbing.

After a period of isolation, Al decided on a personal mission of promoting awareness of climate change. Why is anybody’s guess.

Perhaps his therapist suggested it as a way of countering the crushing self loathing he felt every time he turned on the TV and saw the man who snatched away his chance at immortality. Perhaps his bruised ego demanded another chance to achieve global recognition. Climate change was a mission that would allow Al to speak on a world stage. Doing so – like a president but not quite - not as the guy who could have been the president of the most powerful nation in the world but as someone that should be held in similar esteem because of the critical importance of his world saving assignment. Al was to be the Jesus of climate change.

Al made a movie, a documentary that was greeted enthusiastically by public and tree huggers alike. He made speeches all over the place. Al even won a Nobel Prize for his efforts. But there was a feeling of something wrong, something missing.

It goes back to the “why?” question. It can’t have been that Al was really worried about the changing world’s climate. He made no effort to live the life he promoted – no bike rides from home to office, no electric powered limo for Al, no solar-powered headquarters.

Al flies to his speeches and venues in a gas-guzzling, carbon pluming, private corporate jet. It is reported that his home uses as much power as a small Mid-Western city. While the therapy may have worked for Mr. Gore’s self preservation, he’s taken us for fools. Having Al promote climate change awareness with the accoutrements of living that he has, is akin to our being lectured on the evils of alcohol abuse by the head of a liquor company.

He would have been better off building houses with JimmyC.

The U.S. Economy: Chicken Little was Right

Here in the U.S. we’re days – maybe weeks - away from a true financial meltdown.
The president knows it – hence his speech today; Congress knows it. Wall Street knows it. And consumers - who control the destiny of the economy - are slowly beginning to realize it.

Gas is selling at $4.50 + a gallon. Winter heating cost is a monster lurking on the horizon. Home prices are tumbling and with it valuable equity. There is a list of dangerously close-to-failure banks published today. Foreclosures are running at an unprecedented rate as are personal bankruptcies. Our largest mortgage financial institutions, Freddie Mac and Fannie May, are described by Goldman Sachs as “insolvent.” We’ve got a war costing us $3 trillion. Another war, this time with Iran, hanging over our head by a frayed thread.

The holders of our currency in the Middle East, who use the dollar as the oil trading currency, are showing impatience at their losses, holding their earnings in US dollars that lose value daily. They may step away – as Iran has already done and Venezuela is calling for - and spread their earnings in a basket of alternative currencies. The dollar is worth less and less and its southern trend shows no sign of slowing - $1.60 for a Euro today. A $1.60. A run on the bank at IndyMac despite reassurances from the Fed. A full blown Bear market. A prediction that a number of airlines will fail. Consumer essentials price rises. Consumer debt at an all time high; default rates growing.

What’s holding the house of cards together? Consumer confidence. That’s it. That’s all that holds this ball of wax we call an economy together at the best of times.

American consumers, known for their balls-to-the-wall attitudes, are getting fidgety. Bush today looked nervous as he stumbled through his press conference trying to tell us that the economy is growing. Wall Street is scared; petrified that the US consumer will see through their repeated reassurances and realize that not only are they being lied to, but the smoke they’re seeing in the financial market is in fact their net worth, their life savings, their pensions, their future, burning.

If the consumer herd thinks for a second that any of the banks, that are reportedly on the precipice, are going to collapse – Citibank, Wamu, Wachovia – they will stampede to get cash out of the banks, heralding a depression and the end of the economic world as we know it today.

What’s the trigger? The collapse of a major financial institution. The disappearance of the once familiar into oblivion – an airline perhaps. A war in Iran that causes oil to double, triple. A banker or politician with the balls to tell the American public the truth; that we’re broke and our economy is in the toilet.

A solution? Why ask me? This fiasco’s been in the works for years. Politicians, the White House, business leaders watched and let it happen. And they’re expecting us, the average Joe to bail them out. We don’t have any more to give. Frankly I think that Chicken Little might be right after all; the sky is falling.