Hobbit'Sez

Mediterranean Village Home for Sale-Turkey

2011-02-20T17:41:00.000+02:00

Our Mediterranean village home is for sale. It is located located in the small, quiet Turkish village of Çukurbağ in the Mediterranean region of southern Turkey close to Kaş(kash), a seaside tourist destination.

You can see the home details and a map here: http://picasaweb.google.com/jhoguetr/HomeForSale#

Some information about Kaş:

http://www.facebook.com/bougainville.turizm

An article in the Guardian listed Kaş as no. 7 of its "Top 10 autumn sunshine holidays":

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/aug/17/autumn-sun-short-haul-breaks

Reasons Why You Would Like Our Home!

No taxes in Turkish villages

Very low utility costs especially electricity & water

One-of-a-kind blend of village and modern styles, unique

We would like to find or build a smaller place but on one floor instead of two. Only serious inquiries please...

The home is an old, two story, professionally restored, fully furnished, natural stone village home completely renovated with a spacious new stone terrace.

This two story village home overlooks a beautiful valley, has a view of the Mediterranean in the distance, and enjoys spectacular sunrises and sunsets. The building is a two story natural stone village home. On the front of the home we enjoy a beautiful cedar wood full balcony overlooking the valley.

Since we are outside of municipality borders we pay NO property taxes at this time. Village peo

ple are very friendly and make no exception to foreigners who are friendly

and courteous to them.

The home is located on 2,100 square meters (over 23,000 square feet) of almond, olive and çinar (a type of oak) trees, with a variety of natural vegetation, flowers and other plants.

The property is within an hour’s climb to ancient Phellos, a 2500 year old Lycian ruin, and yet is less than 15 minutes drive from the Mediterranean sea and Kaş, a tourist resort. There is an old village fountain immediately adjacent to the property which is on the famous Lycian Way Trail. Foreign and Turkish trekkers

can frequently be seen drinking and washing in this fountain.

This home would be ideal for a small bed and breakfast (B&B). Turkey is a tourist destination for many Europeans and especially adventurists. Hikers abound and they regularly travel the Lycian way which comes within a few meters of this property.

Kaş enjoys a classical Mediterranean climate, warm or cool and rainy in winter and hot in the summer. The weather is delightful year round with an average of over 300 sunny days each year.

Çukurbağ village climate is similar but because of its 600 meter elevation above Kaş, Çukurbağ is usually cooler in the summer with gentle, delightful breezes. In the winter, Kaş, on the sea, can be quite windy and the rain can fall in almost horizontal sheets. Çukurbağ village receives equal amounts of winter rain but without the severity of the sea borne winds.

November 2009 had 28 sunny days with 22 C or 71 F average temp, December had 18 sunny days with 19 C or 66 F temp and January 2010 had 21 sunny days with 18 C or 64 F average temp.

Thick (65 cm or 25 inch) natural stone walls keep the home cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The plumbing, sewage, phone and electric system for the home are brand new and modern.

The balcony, door & window frames, ceiling rafters and other new wooden pieces are all built with high quality cedar wood, cut from a nearby forest. As much of the original cedar wood was kept as was determined to be appropriate and safe. Most of the windows and doors are new, a few were restored and all the glass is new.

Restoration of the home was headed by an architect under our supervision. Modern engineering techniques and materials were used to reinforce the building and a double steel belt around the entire house was installed for earthquake protection.

Ground floor:

Terrace: 20 m2. Our two story village home overlooks a beautiful valley, has a view of the Mediterranean in the distance, and enjoys spectacular sunrises and sunsets. The building is a two story natural stone village home completely renovated with a spacious new stone terrace. On the front of the home we enjoy a beautiful cedar wood full balcony overlooking the valley.

Fireplace room: 14 m2. A modern, energy efficient, central wooden stove system is the primary heat source and is located in the downstairs living room. The building is designed to be heated using this system which also heats the upstairs. Due to the mild climate this is more than sufficient during the rainy season. Firewood is in abundance and inexpensive. Air-conditioning is not necessary in Çukurbağ due to the wonderful summer breezes and stone masonry.

Sitting room: 20 m2. Downstairs there is a combined sitting, sun & occasional dining room as well as a small toilet and wash sink, and living/sleeping room. The home is approximately 130 square meters (1,400 sq ft) of inside floor space not including the balcony.

Kitchen: 13 m2. Has a natural stone floor and all cabinets are hand made cedar.

Upstairs:

Stairs and corridor: 9 m2. These lead to the upstairs bedroom and bathroom. All flooring is natural stone.

Bathroom: 8 m2. All new tub, toilet, sink and shower. Cabinets and window frames are all cedar wood.

Bedroom: 25 m2. Upstairs the house has one very large bedroom which we may eventually convert into two rooms.

Balcony: 22 m2. Made completely from cedar wood.

Grounds: 2100 m2. Several terraces made by ancient villagers, stone wall terracing the property from the road. Many almond trees which have been cared for and properly pruned.

Fred sez

2011-02-18T13:31:00.000+02:00

Fred is at it again and as always, if you have not read some of Fred's columns you in for a real treat.
Here is his home page:
http://fredoneverything.net/fred-columns.shtml

Some recent articles?
Intelligence Agencies:
http://fredoneverything.net/fred-columns.shtml

The war in Afghanistan (Remember that?):
http://fredoneverything.net/FOXghanistan2.shtml

And the latest comments about Egypt:
http://fredoneverything.net/Cairo.shtml

Islam and the Ghost of Patton

2010-08-29T17:39:00.006+03:00

I was recently assaulted by an unnamed American and former soldier who misused the words of Gen. George Patton to cast negative insults upon Muslims. It was one of those ridiculous rants which come from the gut, utterly without a thought squandered at trying to find out something about "the other" meaning Muslims. This is what I believe many, if not most, Americans believe in their narrow minded pursuit of intolerance and xenophobia. My response...

Gentlemen, rogues, pirates and other assorted scoundrels. Lend me your ears, I come to bury the "Ghost of Patton" not to praise him.

I do not want to start WW III with my comments, however, I have some things I need to say about Muslims and Islam. I hope you will stay with me to the end please, this is a long message.

First, how many of you know that Muslims have the same God as Christians and Jews? Allah, Elohim or Yahweh or simply God, all mean the same thing. Jews and Muslims have many different names for what they perceive as different characteristics of God. Muslims, Christians and Jews all share the same "famous guys" (prophets) down through the ages such as Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, Noah, Kings Solomon and David, Jesus and others? Do you know that Jesus and Mother Mary are revered among Muslims and that there is a shrine to her in Turkey? Do you know that Muslims believe on the Judgment Day that Jesus, not Muhammad, will rise again and be the person to pull it off?

I have been living in Turkey for almost 10 years and am married to a Turkish woman who takes her Sufi Muslim religion seriously, BUT, she does not wear a burqa, a headscarf or dress all in black, however she occasionally gets her grey hair tinted. She is university educated, is about as "western" as they get (especially in her shopping habits), she speaks three languages fluently (French, Turkish and English, NOT profanity and broken English as do I) and does not hate the USA. Ditto for those in her family and virtually ALL of her friends and many of the Turkish people I have had the good fortune to meet along the way.

I am the ultimate "infidel" (kafir in Turkish); I am an atheist and a cynic, an old SF guy AND an American. Until I retired from teaching at a university in Istanbul, some of my students thought I was a CIA agent but I told them that I would not work for such an incompetent organization. If the Muslims here are going to hate anyone they should hate me.

During my first visit to the States after 9/11 I saw a lot of material being written about Islam in bookstores. How many of you have seriously tried to find out more about Muslims? There is no such thing as an Islamic "pope." Islam is not a monolithic world wide conspiracy as some people would have us believe anymore than is all of Christianity beholden to the Pope.

"Islam" is as difficult to pin down as is Christianity. Which Islam is the writer speaking of? Sunni, Shiite, Ahmaddiya, the "whirling dervishes" of Sufism or the more sober Naqshabandi? Is he speaking of the Alevi from Anatolia or the Kurd residing in Turkey, Iran or Iraq? When you think of a Muslim do you think of an Iranian, a Turkish manager of an F16 fighter plane mfg. plant, an Indonesian, a Saudi, an Afghan mystic, a Pakistani of Indian parents, a Malaysian flight attendant, an Emirates tourism company executive. a Taliban, or perhaps some other?

Does the writer really believe that all Muslims are out to destroy the "rest of us"? I do not believe in coddling those who would rain terror down on innocent people's heads and that they should be stopped and/or brought to justice. I also believe I have an obligation to try to find out WHY such people would WANT to do such terrible things and WHY so many people hate and/or fear America. When I first came to Turkey my ignorance showed in every question I asked and in my lack of understanding of everything I saw or experienced. I became determined that I would try to understand the culture in which I currently swim.

I am a "liberal" in the same vein as Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin and that "good ole boy" Sam Adams and I believe in the American dream and that the US Constitution is the finest political document ever written. So if you are going to hate liberals, don't forget those "pointy headed" intellectual academics who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

I believe that the United States Constitution guaranteeing freedom, in writing, and the words written at the base of the Statue of Liberty are the reason so many people have chosen to make America their home. I do not believe that most immigrants are the enemy; immigrants are almost all of us! The only non-immigrants are the indigenous people, those who are called American Indians. All you "papist micks, limeys, wops, krauts, japs, chinks, slopes" and other assorted ingredients of the American stew, were at first immigrants, seeking a new life. AND, you were not welcome to those who came before you and certainly not welcome by many indigenous people.

After 9/11, even LeMonde in France wrote in bold headlines "We are all Americans." Here, in Turkey, there was an outpouring of personal grief to me by my neighbors and Turkish friends and in public demonstrations. And in the media there were many condolences written to the American people. Turkish people seemed to feel the pain that Americans were feeling. The subsequent overthrow of the Taliban (a bunch of seriously "bad guys"), was cheered and supported among what seemed to be most of the Turkish population and media; all Muslims.

The first Gulf War to liberate Kuwait was almost unanimously supported around the world, including Muslim countries AND in Turkey. Turkey took a huge financial hit by stopping trade with Saddam and for supporting that war but they hoped that the end of Saddam would make for a better neighbor. Sadly, the US let the Kurds and the Turks down and left.

Later and unfortunately, the invasion and take over of Iraq culminated in a big loss of respect for the US and fear and anger about what might happen next. It seems that almost no one outside of the US believed the reasons for the "regime change" in Iraq.

I believe that the US is and should be "the good guys." I believe that if we do send troops into harms way we should have good reasons for doing so. However, I do NOT believe the rest of the world are "the bad guys." Since the end of WW II and the start of the Cold War, the US has gotten itself in a lot of trouble with "regime changes", especially the Middle East and especially Iran. (Do a Google for Mossadeq 1953) Oil figured prominently in that "regime change" not the threat of Communism.

Looking back from a comfortable arm chair, it seems many mistakes were made while trying to contain Communism. Somewhere along the way, the rest of the world stopped seeing America as the "good guys." That is the unfortunate (for America) perception of HUGE numbers of Europeans, Asians and Middle Easterners. In much of the rest of the world, it seems the USA has a seriously negative image problem. After "shock and awe" even Canadian tourists started wearing t-shirts saying they were Canadians and not Americans. Maybe we should ask some of the "best and brightest" psy ops guys to be brought in to fix this image problem?

Turkey is NOT a "Muslim country" but a secular democracy, which struggles with its democratic and secular prospects. Turkey has a Muslim population teetering around 95% ±. The government has its roots in Islam much as the Christian Democrats have their seated in Christianity.

I taught in Turkish universities (hot beds of radicalism? no more so than US schools today) for 7 out of my 10 years here and although I received many questions about Bush and company and the second Iraqi war, I NEVER ran across anyone spouting Islamist slogans or hatred. In 10 years here I NEVER had anyone confront me violently because I am an American. The Turkish people are as "westernized" as any people you will see on the planet, Nikes, Reeboks, Levis, Abercrombie and Fitch and Gucci are seen everywhere.

Isn't it possible that most Muslims just want to have a decent income, a good education, raise their families in peace and live comfortably among their Muslim and non-Muslim neighbors? Jihad, to most Islamic scholars, writers, thinkers and religious leaders is not a fight with non-Muslims, rather it is a fight within one's self to be a better Muslim, a better person.

The United States was founded upon the separation of state and religion for good reason AND upon the freedom to practice or NOT practice whatever brand of religion one wishes. That is a right! No other country guarantees that right so boldly as the US Constitution.

Let us condemn those who would take away what makes us the "good guys" in the eyes of the rest of the world and be careful of making enemies where there are none, let us strive to continue to be "the good guys."

Stasiland in the USA

2010-08-15T08:57:00.015+03:00

"One of the creepier weapons in the arsenal of the national-security state is the 'national-security letter' or NSL."

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
— Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil" and this banality is enveloping the assumed bastion of freedom and democracy, the United States of America. Seeing Hannah Arendt's comments made me thing about an article I read recently.

I just finished a very short article titled " Tales from Stasiland: The letter that makes you disappear" By Scott Horton, in which the author briefly discusses "One of the creepier weapons in the arsenal of the national-security state is the “national-security letter” or NSL..."The idea is simple: the device is something like a subpoena, though it doesn’t require approval of a judge to issue. Instead, the FBI requires the recipient to help it in an investigation targeting a third party. It might be dropped on a librarian, with a demand that she tell the FBI every book that a certain subscriber checked out, every magazine he perused, and every time he accessed the Internet using a computer at the library. Or it might go to an Internet service provider, requiring information about every website viewed by a certain customer...But the NSL also imposes a gag order on its recipient: you may not tell anyone you got this letter."

Read this interesting piece and see what you think:
9/11, Deep Events, and the Curtailment of U.S. Freedoms
A talk delivered to the New England Antiwar Conference, MIT, January 30, 2010. by Peter Dale Scott

Walk Kelly, the creator of Pogo once did a poster and later a cartoon which said "
We have met the enemy and he is us. " That was in 1971, 40 years later and we STILL have not come to terms with this.

The Stasi as I am sure you know were the secret police of East Germany who carried on where the Nazis left off in the systematic suppression of its citizens through banal and seemingly benign means of coercion; of course the threat of prison and worse was always behind the "requests" for spying on one's friends or neighbors. This is what the USA has become, a nation of Stasi, you call them the FBI or the CIA or the NSA or some have no names at all.

The US Empire has reached its nadir and has already started into its decline. This Empire has bankrupted its citizens, fought two aggressive, unnecessary and worst of all, preemptive wars in the guise of bringing freedom and democracy to the very people its armies are torching. Vietnam was just the first post-WWII example, it taught the military and the ruling class some lessons they learned well the next time around.

Everyone may indeed be "fighting a great battle" yet, what does that mean? The battle for courage in the face of a machine so invisible and yet so totalitarian, was lost long ago, else such agencies as your Homeland Security or such despicable laws as the Patriot Act would never be allowed to happen in what was once the promise of a great country. That is now lost and will not be regained. Its greatness now lies in how many cars its citizens have in their driveways and how much oil can be consumed on an hourly basis. How banal...

I became aware at an early stage in my political awareness that the left has consistently been correct in it's analyses of US involvement in wars and coups and human rights violations and over the years everything I have read has reinforced that belief. After 9/11 the emotional firestorms, hysteria and panic was unbelievable, especially as viewed from here. The perspective of a hurricane while in the middle of it and that while flying over it in a satellite is decidedly different and lends itself to different ways of thinking about the situation. For example, in Europe and here in Turkey, it is believed, and I agree, that Bush, Rice and Cheney were the "Axis of Evil" and not Iran, Iraq and N Korea.

I was no fan of Saddam, and I certainly do not love the Ayatollahs who are a shameful embarrassment to most of the Muslims I personally know. N. Korea is run by a demonic dwarf with a mind the size of a peanut. But they all pale to insignificance compared to the "BCC" coalition. Cheney took the US into moral and financial bankruptcy and the world into depression spending billions (trillions? who knows?) on keeping oil running smoothly and the cash registers of arms merchants full. Who profits from the obscene costs of war? Why don't ordinary people ask that instead of limply complying with the bankruptcy of the US treasury, the bailout of large corporations and the forgiving of the sins of bankers who rip off retirement funds?

Mainstream (normal?) Americans have been in the "hurricane" ever since, rocked back and forth by the political winds of those who are in power. "Bin Laden is responsible for our problems, kill Bin Laden", missed him (shucks) in Afghanistan but while we are there we might as well go there in force. "Saddam has WMD, he could lob a nuke missile at us any day now..." kill Saddam, and the streets will be filled with grateful Iraqis just begging us to take their oil and their culture and their lives and, did I mention their oil? from them. "Terror is our enemy, the War on Terror must be fought around the globe. We must bring freedom and democracy to 'those people.'" Remember "those people" from civil rights days? Meaning black and brown folks of course...

I wrote a lot of letters to people I know and posted blog warnings against all of this shit before Bush sent troops to kill and to die in Afghanistan and again ditto for Iraq. People think I am crazy, a fanatic, or even a traitor. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent and countless lives wasted for what? Eventually the US troops must leave and when they do, what then? What about the "War on Terror"? Isn't it just a way of keeping the minds of Americans on that and not on the erosion of what was supposed to make the USA great?

What is a teacher?

2010-08-05T09:41:00.007+03:00

As teachers we tend to talk too much. We are obsessed with the sound of our own voices, we relish another day of "talking to" our students when in fact we bore their nerve endings and stifle their imagination. We teachers are not there to impress our students, we are supposed to be there to teach our students how to impress us!

Teachers extol the virtues of listening, discussion and debate all the while lecturing in the context that what we are saying is nothing short of coming from some prophet or another directly from the fount of wisdom. Nothing could be further from the reality.

Our students have an authentic voice, we have taken on the task of helping them find it, nothing more. If, by now, we teachers have not found our own authentic selves in these wrappings of academic gowns, then we are more lost than our students will ever be. Thinking about these things led me to this article in one of the best of a thinking person's arsenal of writing: The New York Review of Books.

Tony Judt - Meritocrats - New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/aug/19/meritocrats/
"My greatest debt, though I did not fully appreciate it at the time, was to [John] Dunn, then a very young college Research Fellow, now a distinguished professor emeritus. It was John who—in the course of one extended conversation on the political thought of John Locke—broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history. He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect.

That is teaching. It is also a certain sort of liberalism: the kind that engages in good faith with dissenting (or simply mistaken) opinions across a broad political spectrum. No doubt such tolerant intellectual breadth was not confined to King’s. But listening to friends and contemporaries describe their experiences elsewhere, I sometimes wonder. Lecturers in other establishments often sounded disengaged and busy, or else professionally self-absorbed in the manner of American academic departments at their least impressive."

Runaway General? or Runaway War?

2010-06-24T16:03:00.007+03:00

Michael Hastings wrote a series of articles on Afghanistan for Rolling Stone Magazine. One of them, called "The Runaway General" was the reason President Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal on June 23, 2010, and replaced him with Gen. David Petraeus. "This is a change in personnel," Obama declared, "but not a change in policy."

"Stanley McChrystal, Obama's top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House."

"When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny."

"Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply fucked up things are in Afghanistan. "If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says."

"Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there."

So as the old Country Joe And The Fish song from the Vietnam War says: "...And its 1,2,3 what are we fighting for? Don't ask me I don't give a damn, The next stop is..." Afghanistan??

So come on folks, as of this moment (16:55 GMT+2) the war in Afghanistan alone has cost the people of the United States 279 Billion, 522 Million + dollars (source:CostofWar.com)

The taxpayers of Kansas alone will have spent 2.4 Billion dollars for this war. Enough to hire 46,033 Elementary School Teachers for One Year!!

This is simple lunacy, when the soldiers on the ground have no idea why we are there, when NO invader since Genghis Khan has been "successful" in Afghanistan, when countless amounts of money are being put into the pockets of war profiteers such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton, please, you tell me, when does this senseless war end? How many US soldiers and Afghan citizens have to die before the US government decides to pack it up and go home?

Dark heart of the American dream

2010-06-20T10:30:00.003+03:00

Sunday June 16, 2002 - The Observer
"It's the most polluted state in the planet's most powerful country. Ed Vulliamy goes into George Bush's backyard to reveal how big oil got in bed with big politics and the price paid by the little people"

"The Houston Ship Channel...is an epicentre of power, oil capital of the Western world and the most industrialised corner of the United States....It is also the capital of a power machine perfected in Texas, elevated to rule the nation and now unchallenged across the planet."

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,738196,00.html

I found this article recently and although it is 8 years old it certainly talks to us today in light of the BT oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We have been warned for a long time that such a disaster was going to happen, but the pundits pooed it and said no way! Well, kiss my ass pundits, it happened, when are you all going to wake up?

As this Newsweek photo article tells us "Since the Deepwater Horizon rig sank into the Gulf of Mexico on April 22, more than 200,000 gallons of oil a day have been pouring into the sea from the well it was drilling...At a Capitol Hill hearing on May 25, members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee vowed to hold BP 'fully accountable' for the disaster.""

I will not hold my breath until the United States of America holds BP responsible for this spill. Why should we believe the people who brought us this disaster in the first place? But, more importantly, WE are to blame. Those of us who do not get off our asses and refuse to use oil based products anymore. Whoops! What's that you say? That includes almost anything inside of a typical American home, the clothes you wear, certainly your footwear and of course the SUV, sports car, muscle car or whatever gasoline powered machine you drive.

There are many alternatives out there to power our homes in a green and clean way; photo-voltaic cells, hot water heating from the sun, fuel cells, wind and geothermal energy production. Why don't we demand a crash program to get us off the tit of big oil? Because we are lazy, complacent, we are afraid, or just too tired after a hard day at the office and an hour or more of fighting traffic to get to our nice homes in the suburbs.

Sorry folks, but we have gotten the government we deserve: Of the people, by the politicians, for the oil companies and their Saudi buddies. Yup, all those pesky Arabs over there, former nomadic tribesmen, sitting on top of millions of barrels of black gold are your best friends, even though they are Muslim fanatics, financing, with American petro-dollars, terror networks around the world. I wish America well, I left it and do not plan to return.

Thanksgiving memory

2009-11-26T08:39:00.008+02:00

I lived in Kansas as a kid out on a farm about two miles from a small village of some 200 people. It was the day before Thanksgiving around 1951 (52?) and we heard on the radio that a blizzard was headed our way so my mother took my baby brother and went to town to stock up before it hit. In those days the electricity was the first to go and with the wind and snow everything became a white out, literally no visibility. It seems that winters then had more snow, were colder and lasted longer.

My mother got to town but the storm hit so fast and hard that she had to stay with some friends in town. That left my father and me to tend to the 100 plus cattle, pigs, chickens, horses and other assorted members of the farm menagerie. The wind raised hell, of course the electricity went out and we used kerosene lamps for light. Luckily we had a propane floor furnace without a blower so we stayed warm.

Getting to the barn, which was about a hundred meters from the house, was no fun. During blizzards, we tied a rope from the house to a small shed about half way to the barn and then another rope there on. We did this to guide us to the barn because from the house it could not be seen. Farmers in that region had been found frozen to death from wandering in circles in a blizzard white out.

In the barn we could take care of the animals, break the ice on the stock tank and attempt to start the oil heater in it which kept the stock tank from freezing solid (and which often blew out). It took a couple of hours to feed the animals and drop down straw for their bedding. Then another exhausting walk back to the house. The wind was so fierce you had to turn your head away to get your breath. Just opening the porch door was difficult because of the wind.

Since my mother had been unable to get back with our groceries, and since Grandpa Hogue was not a cook, we ate fried eggs mixed with sliced potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner that year (and every other meal for that matter). That storm raged on for a couple of days and when it finally lifted we waited another day for the snow plow to come. It could not because the drifts were so high and the going was slow. So we hitched a trailer to a tractor and rode the crest of the snow to town, literally over the tops of the fence posts and brought home my mother, my brother and our Thanksgiving dinner. Although late, THAT dinner was one I was REALLY thankful for.

Remembering what life was like on the farm made going through Army basic training, SF qualification or drowning in scuba pool training at Key West a lot easier... :-)

Wintertime cometh

2009-11-04T11:00:00.005+02:00

Winter is fast approaching and we are trying to make sure the house and garden are prepared for its onslaught. Take a peek at some of our efforts.

We are into November and the night temperatures are starting to drop below 10C (50 F), where the sunny days top out about 26C (78.8 F) and the rainy ones around 15C (59F). In September we had one overnight rain, the first of the fall season but the rest of the days and nights were gorgeous sunshine with cool nights. The average temperature for September was 29C (84 F) and for October was 20C (69 F); we had our first real rains in October.

Mediterranean winters are always a shock. We get over 300 days of sunshine a year, but December and January can be surprisingly cold, windy, very WET and fierce with high winds causing the pouring rain to come down nearly horizontal. Therefore, we are trying to make sure the roof does not leak. We have repaired or replaced the gutters, have gotten our firewood cut and stacked, we will put in a new, small wood heater upstairs as well as our fireplace down, and we have stripped the garden (almost 2000 sm) of old, dead grass which should never been allowed to grow as tall as it did. We may have to increase the height of our two fireplace chimneys (baca in Turkish) so they draw better, we hope to get a few more trees and some vines planted before the winter rains start so they will grow well, and so on.

Not much going on here in our Çukurbağ village house, every morning I get up early, sit on our terrace with my first cup of coffee and seriously soak up the "sounds of silence." It is so quiet here that we hear people talking in normal tones clear across the valley. I remember listening to folks talk or a dog bark in Barnes from the old Harry Hogue place on the highway, similar to that. The ringing in my ears is now a constant annoyance, living in the city it was just "white noise." A barking dog is an annoyance but the mule doing its "hee haw" ("aWww eee" in Turkish) or the rooster crowing seems to fit the ambiance.

I occasionally count the cars going by, that gets exciting sometimes, I have counted as many as five in one day, of course one was a small farm truck and the other a tractor but a noisy vehicle none the less. Some of the vehicles are motor scooters and one obnoxious four-wheel scooter contraption.

At night we sometimes hear the wild pigs immediately below our place digging up the turf and trying to find something to eat, occasionally we hear a fox bark and just after the sun sets below the hill above our house, a pair of owls (called bay kush or "Mr. Bird" in Turkish, what an interesting name huh?) come and start their vigilance for food. They talk to each other for quite a while and then silently push off from the perch in the tree on their deadly survival missions. Just before sundown the breeze or wind (it does not blow hard at our elevation of 600 meters) usually dies down and again, complete silence prevails.

In these ways, life is good...

Come see us, here's a map...

Çukurbağ Village, Kaş/Antalya, Turkey

Baseball or Football?

2009-11-02T12:58:00.001+02:00

Baseball and football are the two most popular spectator sports in this country. And as such, it seems they ought to be able to tell us something about ourselves and our values. George really explains it well in this monologue.

Baseball is different from any other sport, very different. For instance, in most sports you score points or goals; in baseball you score runs. In most sports the ball, or object, is put in play by the offensive team; in baseball the defensive team puts the ball in play, and only the defense is allowed to touch the ball. In fact, in baseball if an offensive player touches the ball intentionally, he's out; sometimes unintentionally, he's out.

Also: in football, basketball, soccer, volleyball, and all sports played with a ball, you score with the ball and in baseball the ball prevents you from scoring.

In most sports the team is run by a coach; in baseball the team is run by a manager. And only in baseball does the manager or coach wear the same clothing the players do. If you'd ever seen John Madden in his Oakland Raiders uniform, you'd know the reason for this custom.

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park!
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.

In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.

Football is concerned with downs; what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups; who's up?

In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.

In football the specialist comes in to kick.
In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.

Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness.
Baseball has the sacrifice.

Football is played in any kind of weather: rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog...
In baseball, if it rains, we don't go out to play.

Baseball has the seventh inning stretch.
Football has the two minute warning.

Baseball has no time limit: we don't know when it's gonna end, the game might have extra innings.
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we've got to go to sudden death.

In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness.
In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.

Selective Amnesia on Assassination

2009-10-15T07:43:00.007+03:00

When IS the United States of America going to start being the "good guys"?

The good guys are supposed to be like John Wayne, go out and get the bad guys, bring 'em to court, give 'em a fair trial and THEN hang 'em. The good guys" (yup even John Wayne) do NOT go out and murder the bad guys. The "good guys" are for freedom and independence and truth and justice and things like that.

So why does the US government want to act like the "bad guys"?

The Democrats’ Selective Amnesia on Assassination: Clinton Did It and Obama Does It Too

July 15, 2009 by Jeremy Scahill author of, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now! and The Nation magazine. He has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia.

"While the focus is on Dick Cheney’s role, the U.S. has long had a bi-partisan assassination program."

"The fact is that many of Bush’s worst policies (now being highlighted by leading Democrats) were based in some form or another in a Clinton-initiated policy or were supported by the Democrats in Congress with their votes. To name a few: the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, the attack against Afghanistan, the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the widespread use of mercenaries and other private contractors in US war zones and warrant-less wire-tapping."

"Members of Congress have expressed outrage over the “secret” CIA assassination program that former vice president Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. But this program—and the media descriptions of it—sounds a lot like the assassination policy implemented by President Bill Clinton, particularly during his second term in office."

Why can't we remember the past?

2009-10-09T10:04:00.009+03:00

The US military "is redeploying troops to towns and cities to better protect the Afghan population. The decision effectively leaves large stretches of territory to the Taliban, made up of a variety of groups united by an opposition to the international military presence."

What a mess, since the US (and other) troops are, correct or not, perceived as an invading army, many of the Afghan population support the insurgents that the army has been sent to protect. Who is the military protecting the population from? The Taliban? Al-Qaeda? AND, if the President admits that the Taliban cannot be defeated but "weakened" what are the goals of the military troops on the ground? What are their objectives?

How does the military win the "hearts and minds" of the population when they are up to their necks in insurgency, when experienced foreign policy advisors warn the President that the war is not winnable, when the US President contradicts himself and on the one hand he says the US military is in a ditch and should get out and on the other he says the US troops are there to fight al-Qaeda, when populations which are to be "protected" give popular (or forced) support to the insurgents, and a fanatical religious group makes deals with the allegedly corrupt Afghan President to make all Afghan women slaves? When is enough, enough?

If you REALLY support the troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, tell your elected representatives and the US President to bring them home now! These wars are unwinnable, fighting terrorism is a police, clandestine, and political activity combined, NOT a military war. As in Vietnam, who really is the enemy?

Look to our past...George Santayana (1863-1952) wrote in Reasons and Places I: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interests in the present." Obama should look over his shoulder.

October 8, 2009, 12:57 pm
In a Ditch or Off a Cliff in Afghanistan? By Robert Mackey

"During a television interview last month, Rory Stewart, a foreign policy expert who has argued strenuously that President Obama should cut rather than increase the size of the American force in Afghanistan, used an arresting metaphor to describe what it was like to advise the American government on Afghan policy...the analogy that one of my colleagues used recently is this: It's as though they come to you and they say, 'We're planning to drive our car off a cliff. Do we wear a seatbelt or not?' And we say, 'Don't drive your car off the cliff.' And they say, 'No, no, no. That decision's already made. The question is should we wear our seat belts?' And you say, 'Why by all means wear a seat belt.' And they say, 'O.K., we consulted with policy expert, Rory Stewart'..."

US President Obama "said at a campaign rally in August 2008. 'But listen, if you drive a bus into a ditch and then after five years and a trillion dollars and 4,000 lives lost, you are getting the bus halfway out of the ditch, it doesn't mean you made a good decision driving the bus off the road in the first place.'"

"Mr. Stewart's argument — which he laid out in detail in that interview with Ms. Sherr on PBS last month, and in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a few days before that — hinges on a simple idea: that, despite what you may have heard, failure in Afghanistan is indeed an option."

"What we actually should have done is capped our troop levels at quite a modest number — twenty, thirty-thousand — which is what we had in 2004, 2005, and tried to stay with the long, difficult game of protecting the United States and helping Afghans."

"[My] message is: focus on what we can do. We don't have a moral obligation to do what we can't. People can get very fixed by saying, 'But surely you're not saying we ought to do nothing? Surely you're not saying we ought to allow the Taliban to do this or that?" And I just keep saying "ought" implies "can" — you don't have a moral obligation to do what you can't do..."
---------------------------------------
October 6, 2009, 5:21 pm
Fighting Uphill in Afghanistan By Robert Mackey

"Video shot this summer in Afghanistan by a British television crew near an American military base that was attacked on Saturday — in a battle that left eight Americans and four Afghan security officers dead — illustrates quite dramatically how tough the fight there is for soldiers trying to secure villages nestled in high mountains."

At the end of this video is Obama speaking to the VFW, giving his justification for continuing the war in Afghanistan..."this is not a war of choice this is a war of necessity, those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again and if left unchecked the Taliban insurgency will mean an even greater safe haven for al-Qaeda who are plotting to kill Americans"

If you believe that this "war of necessity" will stop al-Qaeda, then I have a bridge to sell you which spans the Bosphorus in Istanbul.

August 17, 2009, 12:39 pm
Afghan Husbands Win Right to Starve Wives By Robert Mackey

"...a revised version of the Shiite Personal Status Law had been quietly put into effect at the end of July — meaning that Shiite men in Afghanistan now have the legal right to starve their wives if their sexual demands are not met and that Shiite women must obtain permission from their husbands to even leave their houses, 'except in extreme circumstances.'

The new law was signed by President Hamid Karzai, (the guy the United States is backing to bring democracy Aghanistan and undermined by widespread allegations of electoral fraud) who is depending on support from Sheik Muhammad Asif Mohseni, the country's most powerful Shiite cleric, in this week's presidential election."

Is this REALLY what the United States should be fighting for?

Terrorism? Solution? Where is it?

2009-09-30T08:28:00.003+03:00

"The question was so obvious, nobody thought to ask it: How does terrorism end? After the attacks in Mumbai one week ago, it bears answering right now."

In Esquire, dated December 3, 2008, John H. Richardson has written about:
The Number Cruncher Who Knows How to End Terrorism

Richardson writes that Seth Jones, "an analyst for the Rand Corporation, has found that 40 percent of terrorist groups are defeated by police and intelligence operations. Forty-three percent end because they give up violence and join the political process. Only 7 percent end as a result of military force...Military force is often just too blunt an instrument, Jones says. History proves that the clearest path to success is using local police and intelligence agencies that have deep local knowledge."

Let's take a look at some numbers. If you really like the Greek islands as a vacation spot, think again, what about the good ole' USA? Maybe not so safe. A lot of Amerikans do not want to come to Turkey because they think it is unsafe because of "terrorists" targeting tourists. Yet, these same Amerikans will travel to Spain which is statistically no safer than Turkey.

# 18 Greece: 13.941 per 1 million people

# 23 United States: 10.813 per 1 million people

# 33 Turkey: 7.413 per 1 million people

# 35 Spain: 7.104 per 1 million people

Perhaps it is the Turkish "Muslim thing" that scares these travelers? The only "terrorists" I have encountered in my almost 10 years in Turkey are the rug and restaurant guys, out on the sidewalks attempting to engage tourists in idle conversation in order to bring them into their business. So much for "commen sense." Many Amerikans just do not get it about Turkey while the Brits are laughing it up in the sun, almost year round at what they consider ridiculously low prices (The exchange rate is currently around 2.4 Turkish Lira for each British Pound). As Richard Nixon was so fond of saying "My fellow Americans" wake up, come to Turkey, it is well over 1000 miles to Baghdad from Istanbul or the western part of the Mediterranean coast. Turkish people are friendly, like to have fun and are willing to share their cultural experiences with you. Try it, you just might like it...

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

2009-09-29T09:13:00.006+03:00

Many times I have heard folks from the UK comment about this phrase, I first heard about it when Joe Cocker went on tour with his rock and roll (and blues) group, Mad Dogs and Englishmen which included many famous British rock 'n roll artists. I later found out it was originally written by the famous Englishman, Noel Coward.

Here is a review of the album Mad Dogs and Englishmen .

The "savage" Mad Dogs on video, Leon Russell wears the long hair and top hat... Joe Cocker singing of course - hard core rock 'n roll 60's style!

After looking at some more videos of Joe Cocker I did a Google search and found this:

The Tough Road Taking Jethro To Top In U.S scroll down and read a bit from Kansas down to when they arrive in Houston
AND
HOUSTON MUSIC HALL ROCK CONCERT POSTERS
Search for: THIS AUTOGRAPHED HANDBILL PROMOTES A CONCERT APTLY DESCRIBED AS "THE PRIDE OF ENGLAND." HOUSTONIANS WERE TREATED TO JETHRO TULL, JOE COCKER AND FLEETWOOD MAC--ALL AT THE SAME SHOW. I was at this (among many) concerts in Houston during the one short year I lived there...

Mad Dogs and Englishmen by Noel Coward
Sources:
The Song Mad Dogs and Englishmen written and performed by Noel Coward (origination)

AND the words:
In tropical climes there are certain times of day
When all the citizens retire,
to tear their clothes off and perspire.
It's one of those rules that the biggest fools obey,
Because the sun is much too sultry and one must avoid
its ultry-violet ray --
Papalaka-papalaka-papalaka-boo. (Repeat)
Digariga-digariga-digariga-doo. (Repeat)
The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts,
Because they're obviously, absolutely nuts --

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
The Japanese don't care to, the Chinese wouldn't dare to,
Hindus and Argentines sleep firmly from twelve to one,
But Englishmen detest a siesta,
In the Philippines there are lovely screens,
to protect you from the glare,
In the Malay states there are hats like plates,
which the Britishers won't wear,
At twelve noon the natives swoon, and
no further work is done -
But Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

It's such a surprise for the Eastern eyes to see,
That though the British are effete,
they're quite impervious to heat,
When the white man rides, every native hides in glee,
Because the simple creatures hope he will
impale his solar topee on a tree.
Bolyboly-bolyboly-bolyboly-baa. (Repeat)
Habaninny-habaninny-habaninny-haa. (Repeat)
It seems such a shame that when the English claim the earth
That they give rise to such hilarity and mirth -

Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
The toughest Burmese bandit can never understand it.
In Rangoon the heat of noon is just what the natives shun.
They put their scotch or rye down, and lie down.
In the jungle town where the sun beats down,
to the rage of man or beast,
The English garb of the English sahib merely gets a bit more creased.
In Bangkok, at twelve o'clock, they foam at the mouth and run,
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen, go out in the midday sun.
The smallest Malay rabbit deplores this stupid habit.
In Hong Kong, they strike a gong, and fire off a noonday gun.
To reprimand each inmate, who's in late.
In the mangrove swamps where the python romps
there is peace from twelve till two.
Even caribous lie down and snooze, for there's nothing else to do.
In Bengal, to move at all, is seldom if ever done,
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

Kaş and the WWF

2009-09-28T13:45:00.012+03:00

The World Wide Fund For Nature (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) has been working in Kaş and "has increased protection off the country’s south-west coast." (Also see Marine turtle conservation in Turkey)

More marine protection for Turkey's Lycian coast
Posted on 13 December 2006
Kaş, Turkey – In a milestone achievement for marine conservation in Turkey, the government has increased protection off the country’s south-west coast.

The popular diving area of Kaş has been added to the specially protected Kekova marine area to further conserve the area’s rich underwater biodiversity.

The new Kaş-Kekova Specially Protected Area, initially proposed by WWF-Turkey, now covers 29,000ha - including some 3,000ha of ocean off the Lycian Coast between the Patara dunes and Antalya.

“Kaş is the perfect case for a marine protected area,” said Dr Filiz Demirayak, Director of WWF-Turkey.

“It is both rich in marine biodiversity and staggeringly beautiful. More importantly, it offers a great potential for sustainable tourism as it is the diving center of Turkey.”

As part of the Lycian Coast Ecoregion Conservation and Sustainable Tourism Project, WWF-Turkey conducted a comprehensive survey of marine biodiversity, which includes coral reefs, posidonia meadows, grouper and numerous other fish species.

Over 600 dives were completed along the 200km Lycian coastline to finalize the marine survey, which includes GIS maps and coordinates of the new protected area.

“We will continue our work to develop sustainable tourism projects and better environmental management,” Demirayak added.

WWF began working on the Lycian coast in 1996 to conserve nature and to promote responsible tourism. The aim is to prevent the creation of environmentally harmful mass tourism centers in the region, and to push for the planning of tourism activities in harmony with natural and cultural values.

END NOTES:

• Currently some 220 million tourists visit the Mediterranean annually, and the number is expected to rise to 350 million by 2020. Turkey is one of the most popular destinations, with a massive expansion in tourism recorded since the 1980s. Over 14 million tourists visited the country in 2003.

• Mass tourism development is seriously threatening the natural wealth of the Mediterranean — destroying natural areas and habitats, resulting in an excessive use of resources (land, water, energy), and contributing to all forms of pollution (water, waste, and atmosphere). It also threatens the region’s cultural wealth, and often doesn’t contribute significantly to local income.

For further information:
Deniz Şilliler Tapan, Press and Publications Coordinator
WWF-Turkey
Email: dtapan@wwf.org.tr

Retirement?

2009-09-25T15:16:00.016+03:00

A friend of mine responded to an email I wrote him a while ago in which I told him I was retiring from teaching.

Dear Johnny,
Most of my friends are retired. And, I think I am the oldest of them all. Last night, Judy and I were over at a friends house and saw many people we had not seen for a year. Th
e question... "Mike when are you going to retire? Are you retired yet?" As if the act itself was something.. an event. perhaps like getting married. I find my self becoming almost argumentative. "Like why should I?" Is the questioner, a retired person, wanting not to be alone in their new status? Is it the first step in becoming an old person? Is it part of that inevitable path we all take? Up on the mountain or into the desert or maybe the ice flow? It could be as simple as not wanting to face the ever accumulating list of retirement activities that I have put off for that "time". hoping instead to flame out and leave my pile of junk and mementos for someone else to deal with. Take care, there are not that many thinkers around

I am finished with the university and have no desire to teach anywhere else. I just do not have the passion to make the commute, fight the crowds and found myself less and less inclined to read student papers, often over 100 in a weekend. Not sure what is next, right now our house needs a lot of maintenance getting ready for winter. The grounds got a bit shabby and a lot of junk has accumulated over these past years when we were absent or renting the place so it will take me some time to get it squared away.

I sometimes work on the garden and do some occasional "handy man" stuff, I spend a bit more time on the computer, I try to keep Ayşe's computer from freezing (an ongoing problem, no fault of hers), I read a lot more and usually take a nap in the early afternoon. Not very exciting but a rather satisfying life for the moment.

Later, in the winter when it rains and keeps us inside close to the fire, I plan to go through all my old photos. I have three boxes of them and it is time that I put them into proper time and place. Someone else might want to see them someday and will wonder who are all these old, dead people?

Dissent in the Ranks

2009-09-15T09:58:00.004+03:00

Dissent in the Ranks
The article in part states: "Examples of various forms of GI resistance are once again becoming commonplace...continuation of a thread of resistance that has been ongoing, and growing slowly but surely, since nearly the beginning of the occupation of Iraq...The Iraq War boils on at still-dangerous levels of violence, while the war in Afghanistan (and across the border in Pakistan) only grows, as does the U.S. commitment to both. It's already clear that even an all-volunteer military isn't immune to dissent."

"Dahr Jamail is author of the book Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. Jamai's work has been featured on National Public Radio, the Guardian, the Nation, and the Progressive. He has received many awards for his reportage, including the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

[His] reporting from Iraq has been published in newspapers and magazine worldwide. He has appeared on Democracy Now! as a regular guest, as well as BBC, Pacifia Radio, and numerous other networks.

As one of the first and few unembedded Western journalists to report the truth about how the United States has destroyed, not liberated, Iraqi society in his book Beyond the Green Zone, Jamail now investigates the under-reported but growing antiwar resistance of American GIs, embodied in new organizations like Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). Gathering the stories of these courageous men and women, Jamail shows us that far from "supporting our troops," politicians have betrayed them at every turn.

Finally, Jamail shows us that the true heroes of the criminal tragedy of the Iraq War are those brave enough to say no."

Bush Lost-the Power Elite Gained

2009-09-13T16:35:00.025+03:00

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

It's not a record many Republicans are likely to point to with pride...

In The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein wrote an article titled "Closing the Book on the Bush Legacy" in which he states:
"Thursday's annual Census Bureau report on income, poverty and access to health care-the Bureau's principal report card on the well-being of average Americans-closes the books on the economic record of George W. Bush."

Bush's eight years in office were a disaster. His administration started two wars, made the United States the largest debtor nation on earth, and created a wellspring of ill-feeling the world over. Outside of the United States it is difficult to find a citizen on the street who does NOT despise Bush and his administration or at the very least hold the American public in contempt or ridicule for electing such an idiot to the Presidency.

As much as I loathe and despise Bush and his administration, I fear that Obama is even more dangerous but in another way. His easy going manner, his obvious intelligence, his photogenic family and his bi-racial heritage make him a difficult person to criticize or debate, AND, as President he is only one of a coterie of the Power Elite, those who really call the shots. He is not exactly the puppet, but, he is not the puppeteer.

C. Wright Mills wrote about the Power Elite back in 1956. The book describes the relationship between a political, military, and economic elite (people at the pinnacles of these three institutions). "The United States draws its members from three areas: (1) the highest political leaders including the president and a handful of key cabinet members and close advisers; (2) major corporate owners and directors; and (3) high-ranking military officers...(its strength) comes from control of the highest positions in the political and business hierarchy and from shared values and beliefs."

These people share a common world view:

a military definition of reality; "In this military world, debate is no more at a premium than persuasion: one obeys and one commands, and matters, even unimportant matters, are not to be decided by voting. Life in the military world accordingly influences the military mind's outlook on other institutions as well as on its own. The warlord often sees economic institutions as means for military production and the huge corporation as a sort of ill-run military establishment."
recognize themselves as separate and superior to the rest of society;
move within and between the three institutional structures and hold interlocking directorates.

Socialization of prospective new members is done based on how well they adapt themselves socially after such elites. These elites have an alliance based upon their shared community of interests driven by the necessity of the military definition, which has transformed the economy into a permanent war economy. It makes no difference if the enemy is the Soviet Union or Al Qaeda, an enemy is needed to keep the alliance properly functioning and in power.

When he left the US Presidency in 1961, conservative, grandfatherly Dwight Eisenhower, a former warlord himself, warned the American public of the Power Elite or what he called the "Military-Industrial Complex." Eisenhower said in part:
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Finally, if you read what David Rothkopf wrote in an article in Newsweek magazine in 2008 called "What Power Looks Like - The SuperClass", you will get yet another view of the Power Elite.
"They ride on Gulfstreams, set the global agenda, and manage the credit crunch in their spare time. They have more in common with each other than their countrymen. Meet the Superclass...not only in business and finance, but also politics, the arts, the nonprofit world and other realms, are part of a new global elite that has emerged over the past several decades. I call it the "superclass." They have vastly more power than any other group on the planet. Each of the members is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercises this power, and often amplifies it through the development of relationships with other superclass members."

My fellow Americans and other world citizens, beware, the Power Elite are watching and controlling you...

Kayakoy and my daughter

2009-09-08T13:34:00.011+03:00

My daughter came to see us in Kas recently and we visited Kayakoy, an abandoned village located close to Fethiye on the south coast of Turkey. This village was populated with approximately 3,000 + residents before the population exchange of 1923 which was a sad chapter in the lives of many Ottoman and Greek citizens.

The Ottoman Empire entered WWI on the side of Germany and they lost the war. Britain, France, Italy and Greece all wanted to carve up the Ottoman Empire and leave only a tiny little area up close to the Black Sea. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created a new nationalist government called Turkey in Ankara, mobilized troops and supplies and successfully resisted the Allies. The other Allies did not fight the nationalists and the Turks eventually fought a large scale war with Greek troops who had invaded Anatolia (the Asian side of Turkey often called Asia Minor). Atrocities were committed on both sides and eventually the Turks pushed the Greeks off the mainland at Izmir.

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, signed by the governments of Greece and Turkey, established official recognition of the new nation of Turkey and also ordered an exchange which took place "between Turkish citizens of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek citizens of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory..."

The village of Kayakoy in my photos is a result of that exchange. The Greek Muslims who were sent there did not, for various reasons, want to stay and shortly drifted away to other areas. The village was, before WWI, a mix of Armenians, Greeks and Turks all living together and calling themselves Ottomans. As nationalism grew, distrust and hatred of "others" became stronger and eventually the Armenian and Greek citizens left, leaving today only a very small minority of both.

There is an excellent book of fiction influenced by Kayakoy and the population exchange called
"Birds Without Wings"
by
Louis de Bernieres
who also wrote "Captain Corelli's Mandolin", both very interesting books. Corelli was made into a film with Nicholas Cage, it is rumored that Wings will also be made into a film.

Visa, not the credit card kind

2009-09-04T18:56:00.015+03:00

On September 04, I renewed my visa and it was quite an interesting experience.

My resident visa expired on Aug 31 and on that same day we did an official change of address in Kaş. We tried to get the Kaş police to stamp my residence permit that I had changed address but they said we had to go to the immigration authorities which are located just outside of Antalya. So we called them and because I have 48 hours to notify the proper authorities of my address they said I had to come to Antalya so they could stamp my resident visa. So, we go to Antalya only to find out that I no longer have to post an official change of address to them. This is because, for the uncertain future, I will be going to Meis, a Greek island less than two kilometers from Turkey, four times a year and renew my tourist visa. I do not need a resident visa. We asked why they did not tell us this over the phone to save us a trip since my wife had informed them that I was going to do the 90 day thing. They said that they always tell people to come to the office!?!

So, we turn around and make a quick trip back to Kaş, go to the travel office, turn in my passport and make a reservation with a Kaş travel agent for the next day on the boat to Meis (Kastellorizo) Greece. Just to be sure, we called the local port police and the first one we spoke to said that since I was going from a resident visa to a tourist visa I had to go back to the States and apply from there!!! Whoops, wrong answer. So the travel agent called a different cop and he said no problem, and that was the case. Took a four hour trip to Meis and back and now all proper and legal as a "tourist."

My wife does not have visa for the EU, they are a pain in the ass for Turks to get and every time she leaves the country she has to pay 50 USD for the "privilege."

I took some photos while I was there and posted them on Picasa. You can find some interesting information about Kastellorizo (Meis) from Monika and Damien Mavrothalassitis who own can rent you a room, feed you a meal or give you some interesting background on Kastellorizo (Meis).

There are only a couple of hundred Meis residents and many of them go to Kas on Fridays to the bazaar because I was told that Rhodes and Athens send crappy vegetables and fruits to the island. There were a number of obvious residents hanging around the cafes, I should have taken more people shots, I just did not think of it! Duh!

We are moving...again?

2009-08-04T17:49:00.013+03:00

Well as the bride said to her new husband as they were walking down the aisle out of the church; "There are going to be some CHANGES made around here..."

Change seems to be the only stable element in the life of Ayşe and me, so, we moved from Fethiye back to Çukurbağ village on the 16th of August. (http://barrakam.com/)

There are a variety of reasons for us making this change, if you are interested, just ask. We both came to the conclusion that Çukurbağ stacked up much better against all the other so-called reasons we moved to Fethiye.

Kaş has a Wikipedia site which you may find of interest located at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaş

We hope that we will see some of you sometime in Kaş or our village home in Çukurbağ?

Hmmm, so just where IS this Çukurbağ village?
-----------------------------

View Larger Map of our Çukurbağ village location
-----------------------------

Creative smokin'! (Beware it can also kill)

2009-08-03T09:36:00.031+03:00

Turkish smokers are frequently clever and resourceful at avoiding the new nationwide smoking ban.

For example take a look at this article which states in part:
"Turks, including café owners, understand the reasoning behind it and support it, some have devised ways to follow the letter of the law but still indulge in their guilty pleasure...some have already found ways to circumvent the ban...an owner of a coffeehouse...drilled two holes in a window and passed a thin hoses through each. A lit cigarette is attached to the outside end of one hose, enabling the customer to smoke the cigarette from within the coffeehouse. To exhale, the smoker uses the second pipe...his customers are quite happy."

Unfortunately...Smoking really does kill in more ways than one.

A restaurant owner in southwest Turkey was shot dead after he tried to prevent his customers from smoking to comply with a new law on the use of tobacco indoors, Hurriyet daily said on Thursday. (Reuters)

Turkey started a comprehensive, country-wide smoking ban almost anywhere that a roof exists. The Turkish government has hired over four thousand officials to enforce this ban. First time offenders may get off with a warning, repeat offenders are fined and an establishment which allows smokers can be heavily fined or even closed down. The prime minister is a known anti-smoking "crusader" and is serious about enforcing this ban. It is estimated that over 100,000 deaths occur annually as a result of tobacco related problems.

To Find a Ring

2009-08-02T10:04:00.017+03:00

Barnes, Kansas, August, 2008

My niece Michelle got married last year, this month her wedding is featured in Wedding Style Magazine online.

My daughter Jacqui took some photos and Michelle also had an official photographer take a series.

Wow! Michelle and Jason are famous...

So uh, where exactly is Barnes, Kansas?

View Larger Map

Let's dispel the myths holding up health care reform

2009-07-27T08:24:00.012+03:00

Posted on Sun, Jul. 26, 2009 in the Kansas City Star
"No one said fixing health care in America would be easy."

The problem is enormous in scope and at the same time intensely personal. The nation's economy, the federal deficit, state budgets and employers' payrolls are all tied up in the health care system — not to mention Jane Doe's timetable for retirement and John Doe's latest blood pressure reading.

So wrangling on the part of Congress is to be expected.

Fortunately, reasonable people from different political camps agree on the pillars of reform: All Americans should have affordable access to care; costs must be controlled; and medicine must shift from a model that pays for procedures to one that rewards results.

As the debate wears on, however, a number of falsehoods stand in the way of achieving those goals. Here are a few:

America has the best health care in the world. Why change?

Actually, the U.S. has the most expensive health care system on the planet, and outcomes here are inferior to those of nearly all other modern nations.

The death rate among newborns here is among the highest of industrialized nations. Americans are more likely to suffer from chronic diseases such as diabetes. A study that rated 19 relatively prosperous nations on their effectiveness in curbing deaths from preventable diseases put the United States at the very bottom.

Americans have access to care now — even if they have to use the emergency room.

Emergency room access is not comprehensive health care. Staffs can't provide the follow-up care that will prevent a crisis from reoccurring. And the costs of treating the uninsured are passed along to everyone else.

And access to care is increasingly expensive for everyone. The average employee health insurance premium is rising nearly eight times faster than income. One in four of the Americans who participated in a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation earlier this year said they put off getting health care services because they couldn't afford them. One in six reported cutting pills in half or skipping doses to make their prescriptions last longer.

President Obama wants to deny Americans the right to choose the treatment that's best for them.

First of all, employers and insurers already separate patients from physicians and treatment options. Care already is "rationed."

Any viable reform plan must set up a way to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments and procedures. In many cases, lower-cost treatments and medications work better than more expensive brands.

Citizens have a right to opt for more expensive options if they choose. But it is unreasonable to expect the health care system to pay for a gold-plated procedure if a less expensive avenue is available.

We can't afford to reform health care.

We can't afford not to. Medical costs account for one-sixth of domestic spending and are headed upward. They are handcuffing families and workers, and strangling federal and state governments.

Plans being considered by Congress present daunting up-front costs. But reform, done the right way, will mean savings for families and businesses — money that can be pumped into the economy.

Unfortunately, some Republicans seem content to stymie any Democratic plan on health care without putting forth any measures of their own.

"Why start diverting attention from this really bad piece of work (the Democrats' plan)?" U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri asked last week, when suggesting GOP House members may not propose a health care bill.

Sorry, but Republicans don't get off that easily. The default plan is the status quo, which, as Obama noted last week, is "guaranteed to double your premiums, cause more Americans to lose their coverage and create larger budget deficits over the next 10 years."

Republican politicians must stop promoting the greatest myth of all: That somehow we will stumble into a system in which all Americans can have all the services they want, and no one will have to pay for it.

© 2009 Kansas City Star and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.kansascity.com

Vegetarianism - Nutrition

2009-07-26T07:40:00.018+03:00

Not only is a vegetarian diet "good for you" as your Mother might have said, it will help ease the massive ecological damage being done to our Mother Earth on a daily basis.

Let's start with some basic nutrition information.

First of all be careful, see what this site has to tell us:

Myth: "Going vegetarian" means you are sure to lose weight and be healthier".
http://www.win.niddk.nih.gov/publications/myths.htm#foodmyths as a caution before you start on a vegetarian diet.

The Vegetarian Resource Group:
http://www.vrg.org/nutrition/ is a good starting point.

An interesting little ditty about protein:
Suppose you're trapped in a junk food warehouse and have nothing to eat but fat free pretzel sticks
1 ounce = 100 calories, 2 grams of protein,
(http://www.fritolay.com/our-snacks/rold-gold-classic-sticks.html)

You're getting your entire caloric intake– 2,500 calories– from two bags of pretzel sticks a day, or two, 1 pound, bags.

And how much protein are you getting from this miserably inadequate diet?
32 ounces x 2 grams per ounce = 64 grams of protein a day.

Even on this incredibly lousy diet you're making MORE THAN the RDA protein requirement depending on your age!
(http://www.dietaryfiberfood.com/protein-requirement.php)

Two months in this warehouse and you will develop scurvy, biotin deficiency syndromes, vitamin D deficiency, and a deep, abiding hatred of pretzel sticks.

But, you will not be experiencing protein deficiency!

Now, let us get more serious for a moment...

Another site discussing Vegetarian Protein - Myth and Reality can be found at:
http://www.savvyvegetarian.com/articles/protein-veg-diet.php

If you wonder how this works take a look at:
How To Get Get Enough Protein In Your Veggie Diet
http://www.savvyvegetarian.com/articles/get-enough-protein-veg-diet.php
What about Calcium-How much is needed?
http://barrakam.com/dawiz/veggie/calcium_iron.html

There of course is the myth about lack of iron in a vegetarian diet. Let us see what Iron, Vegetarian, Vegans, Anemia, Nutrition:
http://www.savvyvegetarian.com/articles/iron-vegetarian-diet.php has to say about iron:

A well-balanced vegetarian diet provides enough iron...vegetarians have no more iron deficiency or anemia than non-vegetarians."

What started me on the road to vegetarianism was this book: Diet for a Small Planet of the

Small Planet Institute: http://www.smallplanet.org/books/diet-small-planet

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_Small_Planet

(Un)sustainable eating

2009-07-26T07:14:00.025+03:00

If you are a regular meat eater, you are causing ecological damage to our Mother Earth. The eating of massive quantities of meat is not only unhealthy in the "normal" quantities which most Americans and Europeans consume it, meat eating is not sustainable on a global scale and has become an ecological disaster.

Hobbit'Sez "Why I am a vegetarian"... and if YOU are already a vegetarian see "How to Win an Argument with a Meat Eater." If you are NOT a vegetarian read on.

Eating meat has a serious ecological impact upon our Mother Earth.

Raising animals for food wastes resources. Food gives up only part of its energy to the eater. When chickens eat grain, they get part of its energy. When humans eat cows or chickens, they get only a part of the energy that the animal got from the grain. By cutting out the "middle animal" and eating the grain directly, humans get more energy, and more people can get fed. Land produces much more food when used for farming rather than grazing.

The environmental impact of eating meat is one of those "secrets" that meat eaters seldom confront. However, they are barraged by advertorials on eating meat, poultry or fish. The restrictive confinement of millions of slaughter cattle, chickens, fish and other animals in large confinement areas contributes to water, air, and land pollution. When meat eaters go to the supermarket they see prettily packaged (artificially colored) red meat cuts laid out. If many meat eaters had to see where their meat comes from and how animals are confined and killed to bring those pretty containers to the supermarket, they would become vegetarians.

IF you think it is OK to slaughter cattle, poultry or fish, and have no concern for the ethical issues of slaughtering many millions of these creatures, take a look at what The Meatrix tells us. (A look at what is behind The Meatrix )

There are other problems caused by raising these creatures for food:

Methane gas, one of the causes of the greenhouse effect, is produced by confinement areas. According to The Straight Dope:
"It's believed 18 percent of the greenhouse effect is caused by methane, putting it second on the list of offending gases behind carbon dioxide."
Confinement of herds leads to a loss of topsoil.
Cows are fed growth hormones so that they produce more milk as are beef cattle so they will grow to market faster.
Most confined animals are fed antibiotics because of the filthy and confined conditions caused by excessive crowding. Some of this trickles onto your plate. Even though there are laws against using antibiotics during a regulated time before slaughter of the animal, many feeders ignore these laws and are seldom caught.
Chicken "factory" farming where chickens are packed so tightly into cages that they can barely move. Excrement falls through the stacked cages onto chickens below. Chicken (and other poultry) farms also cause environmental damage because they are so large.
Fishing and "Fish farms" , pollute our water and are potential sources of health and dietary problems for fish eaters. (Not to mention the damage to the fish themselves.)
As if fish farms are not enough of a problem read why "Farmed Fish Could Give Humans Mad Cow Disease."
What about horses, surely no one eats them do they? Wrong!

Do YOU really want to eat this stuff?

Please buy (or review) the book which started the idea that we cannot continue to eat excessive quantities of meat and sustain an ecological balance: Diet for a Small Planet at the Small Planet Institute started by Francis Moore Lappe who is my hero too...

Bullfrog Films did a documentary on Francis Moore Lappe in which they state:

"There is tremendous waste of edible protein involved in producing America's meat-centered diet, while much of the world goes hungry...Perhaps its major statement is made by showing that 18 million pounds of vegetable protein are wasted in the US yearly through conversion to meat...This deficit of 18 million pounds is approximately that required by the Third World."

Also take a look at "Diet for a Healthy Planet." for some additional reasons why you should eliminate or significantly reduce your eating of animals.

Want to know more about vegetarianism? Take a look at these other sites.

Vegetarian, and proud

2009-07-21T08:58:00.004+03:00

An interesting and thoughtful commentary on why vegetarians should speak out more and why others should stop eating our animal friends...

"Hadley Freeman is embarrassed by her fellow non-meat-eaters...But vegetarianism is about doing the right thing, full stop..."
See the full posting at: Vegetarian, and proud

George Carlin's "A place for my stuff"

2009-07-19T06:53:00.005+03:00

George Carlin was a genius. He had a finger on the pulse of Amerika and he never lost the rhythm of it up to the moment he left us at age 71 on June 22, 2008 for whatever next great adventure he plans to move on to. (He was also an animal lover.)

He wrote a short little monologue called "A place for my stuff"...

Actually this is just a place for my stuff, ya know? That's all, a little place for my stuff. That's all I want, that's all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table, everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there.

That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you're taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody's got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff.

And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn't want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They never bother with that crap you're saving. All they want is the shiny stuff. That's what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get...more stuff! Sometimes you gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff anymore.

Did you ever notice when you go to somebody else's house, you never quite feel a hundred percent at home? You know why? No room for your stuff. Somebody else's stuff is all over the goddamn place! And if you stay overnight, unexpectedly, they give you a little bedroom to sleep in. Bedroom they haven't used in about eleven years. Someone died in it, eleven years ago. And they haven't moved any of his stuff! Right next to the bed there's usually a dresser or a bureau of some kind, and there's NO ROOM for your stuff on it. Somebody else's s--- is on the dresser. Have you noticed that their stuff is s--- and your s--- is stuff? God! And you say, "Get that s--- offa there and let me put my stuff down!"

Sometimes you leave your house to go on vacation. And you gotta take some of your stuff with you. Gotta take about two big suitcases full of stuff, when you go on vacation. You gotta take a smaller version of your house. It's the second version of your stuff. And you're gonna fly all the way to Honolulu. Gonna go across the continent, across half an ocean to Honolulu. You get down to the hotel room in Honolulu and you open up your suitcase and you put away all your stuff. "Here's a place here, put a little bit of stuff there, put some stuff here, put some stuff--you put your stuff there, I'll put some stuff--here's another place for stuff, look at this, I'll put some stuff here..." And even though you're far away from home, you start to get used to it, you start to feel okay, because after all, you do have some of your stuff with you.

That's when your friend calls up from Maui, and says, "Hey, why don'tchya come over to Maui for the weekend and spend a couple of nights over here." Oh, no! Now what do I pack? Right, you've gotta pack an even SMALLER version of your stuff. The third version of your house. Just enough stuff to take to Maui for a coupla days. You get over to Maui--I mean you're really getting extended now, when you think about it. You got stuff ALL the way back on the mainland, you got stuff on another island, you got stuff on this island. I mean, supply lines are getting longer and harder to maintain.

You get over to your friend's house on Maui and he gives you a little place to sleep, a little bed right next to his windowsill or something. You put some of your stuff up there. You put your stuff up there. You got your Visine, you got your nail clippers, and you put everything up. It takes about an hour and a half, but after a while you finally feel okay, say, "All right, I got my nail clippers, I must be okay." That's when your friend says, "Aaaaay, I think tonight we'll go over the other side of the island, visit a pal of mine and maybe stay over." Aww, no. NOW what do you pack? Right--you gotta pack an even SMALLER version of your stuff. The fourth version of your house. Only the stuff you know you're gonna need. Money, keys, comb, wallet, lighter, hanky, pen, smokes, rubber and change. Well, only the stuff you HOPE you're gonna need.

© April 2000 George Carlin from "Brain Droppings"

Iraqi War (Remember that?)

2009-07-18T13:27:00.012+03:00

You all remember the war in Iraq, that thar country somewhere over where all them Arabs live? Well guess what, as of Sunday, November 26, 2006 it had THEN lasted longer than WWII. That date marked the "Iraq war's 1,347th day the same amount of time American troops fought in World War II".

Guess what, this war is still going on, US soldiers and Iraqis are still being killed and the cost is bankrupting the United States. If you are a United States citizen, aren't you getting a little tired of supporting this debacle?

Iraq War Facts, Results & Statistics at June 24, 2009
By Deborah White, About.com
http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm
"4,318 US Soldiers Killed, 31,368 Seriously Wounded"
"Cost of deploying one U.S. soldier for one year in Iraq - $390,000"

"The Iraq War, also known as the Second Persian Gulf War, the Occupation of Iraq, or Operation Iraqi Freedom,is an ongoing military campaign which began...At 5:34 AM Baghdad time on March 20, 2003 (9:34 p.m., March 19 EST)..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War

A Little Perspective on $87 billion.
or "A billion here, a billion there... Pretty soon it starts to add up to some real money."
http://87billion.com/

Update : July 21, 2006
Three-hundred-fifteen billion dollars ...
"This is the amount of money the US has allocated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to be spent by September 30, 2006, the end of the fiscal year. This amount of money in dollar bills would be 125 feet wide, 200 feet deep, and 450 feet tall.

450 feet is the height of a 38-story building...If you were to stack the money in a single stack, your stack would be 19,887 miles tall, enough to wrap the Moon at its equator almost 3 times."

We moved to Fethiye

2009-07-17T18:26:00.005+03:00

Well we finally got moved to Fethiye, Turkey (or TTP Fethiye) from Istanbul. The move was relatively uneventful, we finished loading the truck about 16:00 on July 2nd and we took off with the cats about a half hour later.

We stopped that night at a hotel and came on into Fethiye the next day. We called the truck driver and he had just left the outskirts of Istanbul!! Surprise! He apologized and said he thought we were to arrive a day later. So we took the cats to the new place and unpacked the car. We got them as settled as we could, poor Frida, our oldest cat, was traumatized and would not even come out of her cat box; usually she bolts out of it like shot from a cannon.

Earlier in the day we had received a message from some friends who are starting an English language school in Fethiye and we called them in reply. When we returned the call and they found out we were looking for a hotel or pension they invited us to come stay in the school which is a former hotel. Some of the rooms will stay that way to house students. So we took them up on their offer and I took the three of them to dinner that evening. The next morning we had to check on the cats, and had a lot of other things to attend to so we left early.

We have more or less moved in, the last few days we have been slowly unpacking boxes (see the photos) and getting our phone and other admin stuff in order.

I have posted some photos of the view from our terrace/balcony on our Picasa web site:
http://picasaweb.google.com/johnny.hogue/FethiyeTurkeyKaragozlerArea#
stay tuned for more.

A "typical" day in Turkey?

2009-06-07T08:24:00.005+03:00

Here was how our day went down on Friday, June 5, 2009, a day to go down in our little history of infamy.

We were three days away from moving...

A textile exporter that Ayse does translations for was in a flurry of last minute negotiations with a French importer who wanted to place an unusually large order with her. The Frenchman speaks English but the Turkish exporter does not. Ayse was in the middle and had to deal with a rather large number of email and SMS messages as well as several phone calls. On a normal day, these transactions have a way of stressing her out if they get too weird and business type complicated, and; this was not turning out to be a normal day...

The day before, we learned that our rental house we had not yet moved into had suddenly acquired a new owner under weird and suspicious circumstances. The old owner emailed and called us to tell us that she sold the house but that the new owner ripped her off but would not tell us how or why and she was so distraught that Ayse had to spend half an hour on the phone calming her down. The old owner said she transferred our six months rent paid in advance to the new owner and that a village water pipe on the property which had broken a few days earlier, was going to be fixed by the new owner and that she did not think we would have a problem.

Ayse then called the new owner and in her first phone call he seemed very nice and reasonable and reassured Ayse that it would be "no problem" with us taking over the place but danced around the mention in that phone call about writing a new rental contract. He also asked Ayse how much money we paid the previous owner and for how long a rental period (the plot thickened at that point).

The next day the new owner called and told us the village repair people were there waiting to fix the water pipe which had broken and that he wanted us to pay 1000 TL for the pipe. He said it would be a "loan" which he will repay (vaguely) perhaps in extending our contract. He said he had to pay all of his money to the previous owner, that he then had no money and that he needed the money that day, immediately, or the village would not repair the water pipe. Ayse told him she would get back to him, spoke with me and a friend who is an attorney and we both said, no! The attorney said that it was of course up to the village muhtar (a mayor of sorts) and/or the owner of the land to repair the pipe, not the renters.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, Ayse got a call that her sister was in the hospital emergency room with a liver ailment. Ayse called her daughter to tell her to go to the hospital to be with her aunt and Ayse packed an overnight bag in case she had to stay depending upon what she found out upon arrival.

On her way to the hospital Ayse sent an SMS to the new owner that she was on her way to the hospital, that we were not going to pay the money, and that it was his responsibility to fix the pipe. A bit later he called Ayse back and said that if she did not send the money by 5:00 pm that day, he had other people who wanted to rent the house and he would rent it to them instead of us.

So I called the previous owner who, although sympathetic, said she could do nothing more. She said she only had a verbal agreement, nothing in writing about us, the rental money nor the broken pipe, and that the new owner had agreed to honor our rental and fix the pipe. She claimed she spoke all of this in front of a translator because she is English and the new owner is Turkish. So, at her suggestion, I called the translator, who claimed that there was nothing in the conversation that she translated for the two of them in which they spoke of us or the broken pipe. Ay yi yi...

Sometime in the middle of the phone call from Ayse's sister, I got an email from my department head telling me that Human Resources at the University informed him that I can turn in a resignation paper now taking effect on the 31st of August, BUT, that I have to come back to Istanbul to "final exit" on or around August 31. This means that they will then check that I haven't got any library books or walked off with anything else that I should not. This gives them the opportunity to deduct any money owing from my final salary check, payable on September 1st. Which means that I will have to travel back from the south coast of Turkey to Istanbul at an inconvenient and costly time.

We went to the phone company early the same morning, before all this hell broke loose to cancel our phone and ADSL here and transfer it to the new place. FORTUNATELY the guy said that they would have to cut our phone and ADSL immediately which would mean no phone and internet for several days in Istanbul. He said we could just as easily do it down there when we arrived so, luckily, that is what we said we would do!! Strange how things like that happen huh?

June 21, 2009
Ayse's sister is much better and now out of the hospital and everything seems to be under control.

We received an updated email from the previous owner who said that on, Monday, June 8, she was going to the prosecutor's office and see the muhtar about reversing this situation as she claims that she was cheated in the transaction in some manner and also plans to get the police and gendarme involved. Soooo, we shall see what we shall see.

Because of this debacle, we had to extend our stay (and rent) another month in Istanbul. We then made a trip to Fethiye on the 10th to see if we could clear up this mess. I called the previous owner but she firmly laid the blame on the "new" owner and again said she was going through the legal officials and all and that she does not have our deposit and advance rent and that it was the responsibility of the "new" owner to pay us or to honor the contract. I told her that she signed the contract with Ayse and that she was responsible.

After that phone call we consulted with an attorney and decided to send her a legal notice to refund our deposit or we will take her to court for additional costs and legal fees. We have to wait one week plus two days for her to respond before we move further. We gave her until the first of July to pay up. If she still refuses to pay after we contact her next week when we return, we will then seek a court settlement. As in the US, we can demand she pay attorney fees, legal costs, our extra month's rent because we had to stay in Istanbul and our costs for the extra trip to Fethiye to try to sort all this out.

It is interesting that after we sent the official registered letter through the notary (similar to a notice from the clerk of the court in the states) we got a call from the "new" owner, the night before we returned to Istanbul and he said that everything had been cleared up between him and the previous owner and that he was waiting for us to come move into the place. Ayse told him in her penultimate nice way that we were no longer interested and that we were seeking our refund. End of that part of the story!

In the meantime we started to look for a new place to stay as neither of us any longer wanted this place as it seemed that both parties involved were maniacs.

July 01, 2009
We sent the following message to the previous owner:

"We will return to Fethiye not later than Wednesday July 01. According to the phone call we received from the new owner, we learned that you had settled your differences. Our sincere congratulations. We now have hope that a refund of our deposit and rent is forthcoming."

"The postal service has delivered our letter to you. Accordingly we ask that you please send a full refund of the 4,350 Turkish Lira we gave you as six months advance rent to be deposited not later than July 01 in our bank."

This is what we received in return:

"Do not believe a word (the new owner) says.

"He has now forged a senet (a form of IOU) for 308,000 TL with my signature which was for 8,00 TL for a car which never arrived. Evidentially he is famous for stealing cars, the police know about it but he is still out on the streets cheating the people."

"I have to move from my rented home in Fethiye before the bailiffs come.
I have no possessions or money he has extracted all by deceit.
He has threated my life, tried to run me off the road, and made my life hell.
I am in a desperate state right now and have just found a lawyer from the British consulate to represent me we will approach the criminal court today.
I am sorry about your rental fees I am not in a position to deal with right now.
I am the victim of organized crime and have no idea how to get out of this hell."

{sigh} The saga continues... We sincerely hope some of this is not true. In any case, I will post more here as things progress.

July 08, 2009
On Wednesday, 08 Jul we sent the following new message to the person who owes us a refund on our six months rent deposit:

Your problems with (the new owner) are difficult to deal with I am sure. However, we are also victims in this situation.

You were quite insistent in the beginning for six months rent in advance, it was difficult for us to come up with that amount of money on such short notice but we did so because Ayse trusted you.

Regardless of the truth of your situation, your battle in that arena is not ours. We have been dragged into it and wish to bow out as painlessly and quickly as possible.

Note the letter (ihtarname) we sent you that you signed for from the notary. If we have to go to all the expense and aggravation of a court proceeding we are also going to ask for another thousand lira for the extra rent we had to pay in Istanbul, we will also ask for a thousand lira in unnecessary expenses incurred in a search for a different place to live in Fethiye and we will ask for attorney fees and court expenses. All of that plus the amount of time spent in courts and tying up whatever property or other resources you may have. We do NOT want to go
to that extreme, pay us the refund and our business with each other is finished.

Please email us or call so we can arrange a meeting to come to an agreeable and immediate solution.

AND this is the reply we received:

Yes sorry that you got caught up in the middle of all of this nightmare. I am just another statistic in the ongoing victimisation of single women in Turkey.

The situation is serious whether you believe or not in fact it appeared yestersday in Sabah newspaper half page feature appealing to the European Court for Human Rights.
(Not Sabah but this is the article she is referring to in Turkish. Essentially it confirms what she says)
http://www.yeniasir.com.tr/haber_detay.php?hid=28016

I am no longer in Turkey and have no assets there. I do not see an immediate solution to a refund of your funds.

July 16, 2009
I contacted the lawyer of the original owner of our not-to-be-rental and he confirmed that everything the original owner has told us is true. He claims she was ripped off and that the gendarme, the muhtar AND the local prosecutor would not do anything about the threats against her nor help her to settle her civil case against the guy who allegedly ripped her off.

He also said that if her case is favorably settled in the European Court of Human Rights, that he will help her with her civil case against the guy who allegedly ripped her off. He also said he was doing her case pro bono because she has no assets and that the guy who ripped her off has a seizure order against her property in Turkey. She, by the way, is a dual citizen, Turkish and UK.

The original owner has now been accepted for a hearing before the European Court of Human Rights in this case. She publicized her situation on a website (in Turkish) at (http://www.yeniasir.com.tr/haber_detay.php?hid=28016) which essentially says that she was the victim of a large scam and her house was taken from her in the deal by locals. It then says that when she sought assistance by the police and the local prosecutor she received no help and then was threatened with violence. She has now left Turkey until her ECHR hearing has been taken care of. We hope she wins in all regards and is able to get her property back, in which case, we may see our refund come back to us. A NOT typical day in our new "retired" life.

Postscript: We are now resigned to believing we will never see our refund. We have heard nothing further from the former owner...

Ubuntu and a librarian

2007-05-19T16:02:00.003+03:00

I was reading this web site :

http://www.librarian.net/stax/2042/do-you-ubuntu/

about my favorite operating system Ubuntu Linux and at the bottom I saw a short video made by...a librarian!!! Take a look, very cute I
think... Out out damned Windoze, in in free and open software.

In a world without fences or walls, who needs Gates or Windoze? Don't
want viruses or spyware? Use Linux...

A Scandal in Amerika (Fundamentalists again?)

2007-05-17T15:50:00.004+03:00

I recently wrote a letter to someone in Amerika. He commented about "Muslim Leaders" and fanatics, I believe that far too many Amerikans are horribly ill-informed about events outside the borders of their country.

Here reads my letter...

I agree that the issue is not religion, but individual interpretations of it. Fanatics forever have been killing one another over their specific "brand" of religion. This is especially true of the Bush fundamentalists who support the Zionists in Israel. However, I do believe, in spite of this rise in neo-conservative Christian Fundamentalism, that the real issue is the geopolitics of Amerikan hegemony and its muscle flexing in the areas of the Middle East where Muslim fanaticism can easily be encouraged to rear its ugly head.

You write: "You live in a country that the Muslim religion is the majority. Where are the leaders of the religion and why haven't they stepped up?"

Please know that virtually EVERY responsible Muslim leader or Muslim leaning politician in Turkey, condemned the murders of the Christian booksellers in the east. There were also outpourings of grief through demonstrations by Turkish Muslim people and more condemnation by journalists in the Turkish press. The prime minister and president both condemned the murders. It seems the sensationalist press of the US did not emphasize that point well or else you would not have asked the question.

Did the US press write about 100's of thousands of "Muslims" who turned out to mourn Hrant Dink, an Armenian Christian who was executed by a stupid kid brainwashed by nationalist (not Muslim) fanatics? And where is the US press when it comes to telling Christians that most Turkish people could care less what visitors believe as long as they come to have a good time and are reasonably polite? Of course, all we hear about is the sensationalist shit. When I was about to leave for Miami, people said it was dangerous because of the sensationalist events in the news. I never heard a shot fired in anger and I occasionally walked some mean streets there. The only violence I saw was the violence of poverty bordering on unspeakable wealth.

Where was the US press when a photographer published "sensationalist" photographs on a website of plane loads of US military coffins coming back from Iraq? The military vilified that person and the "mainstream press" (bought and paid for by advertisers) backed down from publishing these images, yet this same "mainstream press" will show the throats slit of Christians in Turkey as if that is the fate of all Christians who visit here. What about when the military blocks UTube to its members, where are the hallowed supporters of the US Constitution who have failed to notice the recently seldom used article called freedom of speech or expression?

After the planes destroyed the twin towers and flew into the pentagon, did the other countries of the world issue travel advisories against all non-essential travel to the US? Of course not. However, when the British Consulate, two synagogues and an HSBC bank were bombed, the US government immediately issued a warning against traveling here. By the way, most, if not all of the perpetrators of the Turkish bombing have been caught. When will the US catch Bin Laden?
The US press is no longer "free" if it ever has been, it is expensive and it is bought and paid for by some of the largest advertisers in the US.

Just one of many examples which tells us that US citizens are NOT getting the full story nor the truth is this article:
"The Real Newsweek Scandal"
http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4578
please read it carefully and then tell me if you think the US press is free and really gives you the news.

There is no such thing as a pope in Islam. No one speaks for all of Islam in the way the pope does to Catholics. Beyond that, Muslims are as diverse and fractured as are Christians. The Protestants broke into many factions, the same is true of Islam. I do not know who the "Muslims at ***" are nor do I know what is their "brand" of Islam. Are they Sunni, Shiite, Alevi, Yazidi (Yezidi) or what? There are others: Sufi, Baha'ism, USA Black Muslims, Kharijitis, Wahhabi, Ismailis, Ismaili Druze... Who are their "leaders" and if these "leaders" do not question the so-called martyrdom of young Muslims, brainwashed by terrorists, then the Muslims at *** should demand why not and question their so-called "leadership".

I paraphrase your comments back to you: "You live in a country that the Christian religion is the majority. Where are the leaders of the religion and why haven't they stepped up?" "Where are the strong Christian leaders that should be quoting the Christian teachings" and end the Amerikan terrorism, this illegal and totally immoral war in Iraq? The Bible says "Do not kill." Christ allegedly said, "turn the other cheek" and "love one another." If Christians believe that, how can they continue to be so vengeful and selfish?

I do not support violence of ANY kind, state sanctioned (military, CIA, FBI, etc), religious or personal. I believe that NON violence is the only way that humans will ever learn to live in
harmony, unfortunately I do not believe this will ever happen. Ghandi proved it could create a revolution and Martin Luther King tried to do the same in Amerika before violence took him out. Nowhere is violence the answer.

I believe in no religion, I only believe that non-violence is the answer, I do not believe that any kind of killing, defensive or otherwise, is a responsible way for any person or any government to act. The United States is one of the most violent countries in the world, both domestically and in its foreign policy, and the US press doesn't seem to be asking why. Murder is not against the law in any country, it is just that governments have the monopoly on murder through the military and capital punishment, so when the state sanctions murder, what do you expect from its citizens?

The US giant has been stepping on the toes of the world for a very long time and when one steps on the tail of a cat, they should not be surprised if it turns around and bites them. Did you read any of the relatively few books I have recommended over the last few years while I have been writing about my opposition to your country's terrorism in Iraq? Stephen Kinzer: "Crescent and Star" (about Turkey), "All the Shah's Men" (about the CIA coup in Iran leading directly to 9/11), or "Overthrow" (about ALL the "regime changes" affected by the US government).

If you read just these three books, you might also reach the inescapable fact that 9/11 targeted the US for political, emotional and religious reasons, but it seems that nobody in the US seems to be looking at these reasons.

The issue, as you say is not religion, except for the recent neo-conservative Fundamentalism driving the White House oval office. The real issue has always been the geopolitics of Amerikan hegemony and its muscle flexing in the areas of the Middle East where Muslim fanaticism can easily rear its ugly head. Neo-conservative Fundamentalists like Dubya or Wolfowit(less) believe that the only good Muslim is a dead one and they have initiated this unholy "jihad" against Iraq. Its symbolism cannot be lost on any thinking person. The United States, through its horrible foreign policies over the last 55 years in the region, has stepped on the tail of the cat and now does not understand why the cat has bitten.

Pessimism Rears its Head

2007-05-06T15:46:00.004+03:00

I am starting to believe like George Carlin who says he is only an onlooker to the parade of life.

He states: "Man's noble aspect is the aberration. Art, music and philosophy are merely poignant examples of what we might have been had not the priests and traders gotten hold of us. I think the human game was over a long time ago when they took over."

In a few hundred or years [maybe sooner] (a blink of an eye in the course of earth time) humans will kill themselves off or be killed off by the robots, then mother earth will take over again and pretend as if this terrible cancer called humans never existed. I believe it matters not a bit whether the terrorists (both State and individual) are Muslim, Jew or so-called Christian, they are all going to sink in the same boat. Such is the depth of my pessimism. I have stopped writing my missives to the US unless asked for an opinion, I believe it does absolutely no good.

Demonstrations in Turkey

2007-05-04T15:39:00.002+03:00

Last week there was a large demonstration in both Ankara the capital and in Istanbul a few days later. They estimate both crowds to have been over a million maybe two. They were against any religious influence in government and such a large outpouring seemed to have surprised the prime minister who lead the AK Party which is the majority party in parliament.

The AK party reminds me of the Democrats in Chicago during the decades of the 20's through the 60's when Daly was party boss. They have a large grassroots organization, they get vast numbers of volunteers (many who wear head scarves of the Islamic type) out into the streets and neighborhoods, they do a lot of social welfare stuff and so they have a large base of support among many poor, disaffected or uneducated people. They have also gotten the votes of those who, rightly, believed the previous political parties were corrupt and that it was time for a clean sweep. The AK Party, run by Tayip Erdogan the PM, has roots in Islam. In Europe and the US, they are compared by some to the Christian Democrats in Europe. In Turkey, the educated elite, the intelligentsia, and many mainstream but educated people on the street believe the AK Party wants to take the country into Islamic law much like Iran.

It was not the military who did not recognize the election. The parliament votes for the president, a largely ceremonial position since Ataturk died. The president does have veto power over the parliament and has the influence of the "bully pulpit." The AK Party has a majority in parliament and they voted for the current foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, a party member to be president. Because a party must have 10% of the total vote or more to stand in parliament, only two parties, the AK and the CHP are in parliament this term. The AK party in the last election, six years ago, got a solid majority, but only of those two parties. Of the total vote, the AK party got about 34% which many voters say does not represent the real will of Turkey.

The law says a certain number of members of parliament must be present and vote in order for an election to be valid, they fell short by six votes. This was due to the opposition CHP party boycotting the vote. The AK party said the election was valid anyway, which in the past, has been the case. However, the CHP then asked the Supreme Court to decide if the election was valid or not. The court decided the election was invalid. Now the choice of the prime minister is to either ask for a second vote of parliament for president or to call for early general elections. If there are early general elections, which seems to be what the PM called for, the AK party may come back with an even larger majority in parliament and they will get their president anyway.

The military has a website and said they would do whatever is necessary to maintain the secular (that is not religious) nature of the government. Many have interpreted this to mean they would depose an AK party government if the president was from the same party. As you may know, the military staged three open coups in 1960, 70, 80 and told a prime minister, Erbakan, to step down in 97. Erbaken was a nut and a religious fanatic who openly said he wanted Islamic law. Erdogan and Gul were members of his party at that time. Hence, the suspicions of the military and others.

May Day in ole Stamboul

2007-05-02T15:31:00.001+03:00

Well, yesterday was May Day in ole Stamboul and also the 30th anniversary of a demonstration in which over 30 people died as a result of a shooting and a stampede.

As you can see from this web page, not all went smoothly...
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20070501114358213

I left the house at 2:20 to catch my normal ferry to Besiktas but found out that Besiktas ferry station, one of the largest transportation hubs in the city, was CLOSED!! So I had to go on to Eminonu, the ferry stop closest to Sultanahmet, the old city next to the Golden Horn. (you can find some of this on Google Earth) On the way to Eminonu, I could see the blue and white chopper circling Taksim square, probably cheering the cops on and all. At Eminonu, cops were in evidence everywhere and this was a long way from Taksim. I tried to get several taxis to take me to the school and none of them would. So I started to walk, at the Golden Horn/Galata bridge, cops were checking bags and patting down everyone walking across the bridge. Tens of thousands of people walk across this bridge daily... Same on the other side.

I thought I would take the old Tunel funicular (subway) up to Beyoglu but it was also closed, so now, this old man, who has been sick for over three weeks and almost never left the house except for classes is walking up the Galata tower hill, a San Francisco type hill, very steep. Cops everywhere...

I got to the top and at the Tunel station the riot police (robocops) were in their neat little military formations. I guess they were the reserves in case the main force could not handle things OK in Taksim square which is more than a mile away. I decided to take the side streets--a good choice, the cops were keeping everyone off of the mail drag called Istiklal Caddesi, this is the busiest pedestrian thoroughfare in the city, usually crammed with thousands of shoppers and others.

So, 45 minutes later, yours truly arrived at work, a bit winded, my legs sore, and my cough still lingering. I had a lesson that night which went uneventful except that only two students showed up.

Ahhh, all in a day in Istanbul. By the way, the Turkish supreme court invalidated a parliamentary vote for President on the same day, the stock market has been going crazy and the lira bouncing all over the place. What a boring place your city must seem what with the shoppers and their cappuccinos...

Fundamentalists Are Running the United States

2007-01-26T16:14:00.003+02:00

The New York Review of Books recently gave some exposure to Bush and his "faith-based" initiatives in a New York Review of Books article by Garry Wills titled: "A Country Ruled by Faith"
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19590

The Fundamentalists have had over six years to make sure the bureaucracy heeded "the call" and it has attempted a Christian "revival" whose impact will be difficult for any successor to dismantle lest he (or she) be accused of being anti-religious (Christian that is...)

We are in Iraq and everything else which has gone wrong because of these people. So much for the separation of state and religion...

Edward R. Murrow told us in his direct and courageous manner:

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices. We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.

USA Social Security & Illegal Immigrants

2007-01-26T15:49:00.001+02:00

I was recently forwarded an article, written by Mr. Freddie McGoldrick (see far below), which was forwarded and forwarded and on and on and on... However, I did not see where anyone did anything but forward on the message. Since Social Security is becoming of some interest to me now, (I am almost 62 years old) I thought I might take the time to just Google some of these hot topics and see if there is some information there which I could reply to or comment upon. It seems I was right.

Mr McGoldrick complains that illegal immigrants are going to keep his mother from getting her social security, please read on...

First of all, immigrants are all US citizens, at one time or another. Every wave which came to the US for opportunity was crapped upon, first the dirty Irish, after they worshipped the devil, the Pope!! Then came the Italians, they were dark skinned AND worshipped the Pope!! The Chinese were literally brought over in the holds of ships, packed in like so many sardines to build the great transcontinental railroad and then when they had the audacity to ask to stay, many of them were booted out. Of course, we should not even mention the millions of African slaves who so willingly came here to give their labor the nation...

Take a look at one short humorous segment about "The Immıgration Debate" on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhEl6HdfqWM

The fact is that illegal immigrants are literally the backbone of the agriculture of California and many other states. Without them the prices of fresh fruits and vegetables in the USA would almost immediately skyrocket, IF that is, IF you could even GET "out of season" fruits or vegetables (in the frozen north and midwest US that is). So that is one HUGE cost savings, to you, the buying public. It seems illegal immigrants provide a huge bounty for your dinner tables. Edward R. Murrow, in 1960, documented the plight of migrant workers, many of whom are illegal immigrants, in his documentary "Harvest of Shame." It is as timely today as it was shocking then. Take a look at some information on it:

Discovery Times "Harvest Of Shame"
http://times.discovery.com/convergence/harvestofshame/harvestofshame.html

Next we should ask WHO hires all these illegal immigrants? Restaurants do to keep their kitchens and toilets clean AND their menu prices down. If they had to pay REAL Americans, none of you could afford to eat out!! Agriculture is a huge employer (see above). YOUR elected representatives hire illegals, these rich folks seem to need cheap nannies and house keepers, especially those who won't complain too much. This is to cite just a few examples, in other words the dirty work that good old honest, god fearin' REAL Americans will not do, the illegals will do. Without them, the shitwork is gonna have to be done by someone like Mr. McGoldrick (see far below) who is so worried about his mother. SOOOO, if the employers stop hiring then the illegals have no place to work. The situation is just like illegal drugs, without customers there is no drug trade.

Now on to the meat of Mr McGoldrick's purpose of his petition. The NY Tİmes article (below), written in March 2005, tells us some interesting things. It seems that most illegals contribute "more than most (legal) Americans to the solvency of the nation's public retirement system." Hmmmm, how do they do that? They have to pay into the system if they use forged documents so their employers will not look too closely at who they hire in return for getting a loyal workforce who really works! BUT, these same workers cannot draw benefits because they are illegal!! An interesting catch; so where does the money go that they pay into the system but that they cannot get back? This money goes into something called an "earning suspense file" which just keeps building up and according to the article "the estimated seven million or so illegal immigrant workers in the United States are now providing the system with a subsidy of as much as $7 billion a year." That is SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS!!!

But wait there is MORE:

"The file has been mushrooming ever since(the 80's): $189 billion worth of wages ended up recorded in the suspense file over the 1990's, two and a half times the amount of the 1980's.

In the current decade, the file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year, generating $6 billion to $7 billion in Social Security tax revenue and about $1.5 billion in Medicare taxes.

In 2002 alone, the last year with figures released by the Social Security Administration, nine million W-2's with incorrect Social Security numbers landed in the suspense file, accounting for $56 billion in earnings, or about 1.5 percent of total reported wages.

Social Security officials do not know what fraction of the suspense file corresponds to the earnings of illegal immigrants. But they suspect that the portion is significant.""

My take on all this is that illegal immigrants are helping keep SS afloat. It is YOUR elected reps up dere in pointy headed Washington who are wasting your SS dollars and helping make the system bankrupt. I am 61 and I will be frankly surprised if I can draw my benefits when I turn 67.
The real shirkers and criminals are Congressmen and Senators who use voodoo accounting methods to continuously borrow from the SS fund to pad the huge deficits they continue to run up for their pork barrel projects and to finance the war in Iraq and who knows what else. They are the ones who have allowed the United States to become the biggest debtor nation in the world and sold most of that debt to the Chinese, those godless commies.

Next time someone sends you a petition which sounds just a tad emotional, take it with a grain of salt, move your keyboard to google.com and check out these people and see if you can find out what is their agenda and do they have their facts straight. My teachers, including Mrs Gnagy, taught me that we should not plagiarize and write about the facts and although we did not have the internet in those days and the Barnes school library was a bit small, we did our best to look up stuff in the encyclopedia and tell it from some source which we were told, at the time, to have its facts straight.

You may forward this to whomever you wish including George "Dubya" Bush...

Sincerely, in peace,

Hobbit

=========================================================
Please take a look at just the first two stories I found when I did a Google search for "social security" "illegal aliens".

The first is titled "Illegals Granted Social Security" and tells about the bill to grant SS benefits to illegals of which Mr. Freddie McGoldrick took such offense:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060518-114132-2456r.htm

The second is a year older but explains the REAL story quite well:
"Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions"
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/05immigration.html?ex=1270353600&amp;en=78c87ac4641dc383&ei=5090&partner=kmarx
=============================================================================================
Below is the article and "petition" which Mr. Freddie McGoldrick sent out and was sent in the many "forwards" which eventually reached me and started this reply:
=============================================================================================

Social Security SSI Please read

My mom was a homemaker and dad worked all his life and paid into SS, dad has passed away and now my mom can barely make ends meet. While the possible illegal" alien in front of her at the grocery store buys the name brands, my mom goes for the generic brands, and day old breads.
She doesn't have out of state calling on her phone, because she can't afford it and shops at the thrift shops and dollar stores while the "illegal" aliens go to Macy's, Gap, J.C. Penny, Banana Republic, etc. She considers having a pizza delivered once a week "eating out". She grew up during the depression, watched her husband go overseas to fight in WW II a year after their marriage, and then they went on to raise, feed and cloth 5 children, scrounging to pay tuition for parochial schools.
I'm sorry, but I can't see how the Senate can justify this slap in the face to born and bred, or naturalized citizens. It is already impossible to live on Social Security alone. If they give benefits to "illegal" aliens who have never contributed, where does that leave us that have paid into Social Security all our working lives?

The Senate voted this week to allow "illegal" aliens access to Social Security benefits. Attached is an opportunity to sign a petition that requires citizenship for eligibility to receive Social services. If you do not wish to sign the petition yourself, please forward on to anyone you think might be interested.

PETITION FOR: President Bush

Mr. President:

The petition below is a protest against the recent vote of the senate
which was to allow illegal aliens access to our social security! We demand that you and all congressional representatives require citizenship for anyone to be eligible for social services in the United States...

A Letter from Iraq

2007-01-20T19:47:00.003+02:00

Today I was reading the New York Review of Books (NYR), a publication which demands that the reader actually read something well and then causes that reader to think about it, so unlike the "mass mur..(media)." Anyway, I digress; the NYR article I was reading is called "What About the Iraqis?" and starts with the following:

"Sometimes there is nothing more gripping than the mundane. Consider "Baghdad Burning," the on-line diary of a young Baghdad woman who goes by the pseudonym of Riverbend." http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

The article goes on to state "she has provided us with the most comprehensive Iraqi view of the war to date." It seems she was educated in the United States and her English puts most "native speakers" to shame as does her reporting from the street. Riverbend chronicles what it is like to live in Baghdad on a daily basis and gives all of us a point of view sorely missing from the stories coming out of the ultra-guarded (although not very safe) Green Zone of Baghdad. It seems that in bringing democracy, freedom and uh, oh yeh, peace to Iraq, it is not a good idea to venture out of the Green Zone unless you are a maniac, suicidal or armed to the teeth accompanied by a convey of troops whom the Iraqi children refer to as "targets."

I believe we owe it to Riverbend to take a few minutes to read a few entries in her blog called "Baghdad Burning."
( http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ )
All of you who are US citizens owe her that much, for after all, it was in your name that the Bush war machine created this mess, it was with the approval of your elected representatives and it is going to hang over your heads for a long time to come. It is more than heart breaking, it is criminal and someday, if there is real justice in the United States, George W. Bush and his war managers will be brought to court on charges of war crimes against humanity. Of course, I will not hold my breath in anticipation of seeing that happen...

As Riverbend says in her blog,

"Bush has effectively created more terrorists in Iraq these last 4 years than Osama could have created in 10 different terrorist camps in the distant hills of Afghanistan. Our children now play games of 'sniper' and 'jihadi', pretending that one hit an American soldier between the eyes and this one overturned a Humvee."

Think about your children, do they think about killing Iraqis or even worse Muslims? Think about it, do they? Do you?

My sister refuses to even come near Turkey for fear of her children being the target of terrorists even though I am at least 1,000 miles from Baghdad. The reality is that she is right when she says terrorists target their victims and that Americans (those from the United States that is) are the targets. Of course she does travel by air to other countries out of the US and feels safe, which is of course sad and a bit absurd. The perpetrators of the horrible attacks upon the WTC on September 11 were NOT somewhere in the Middle East, they were in the heart of the American pulsebeat.

This war just goes on and on in spite of the change from Republicans to Democrats in the Congress, and if all of you were to read this girl's plight and take it truly to heart you would demand more of your so-called "elected officials" than they have given you. This war has cost over 359 BILLION US dollars and still counting, how much can you really afford, how many more lives can we all afford? Last year over 30,000 Iraqis died and US troop deaths are now over 3,000. These are good odds I guess if you are keeping score as the US government did in Vietnam, something they called "body count."

The "Real" Newsweek Scandal

2007-01-19T17:24:00.002+02:00

When I first arrived in Turkey, I was a Newsweek subscriber and when I sent a change of address, I was switched to the International edition. I was astounded from the start by how different were the two editions.

The author of the article below, http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4578
Mr. Stephen Richter, tells it well. The debate rages on about the Iraq War and other issues but certainly not in the USA where far too much information is NOT allowed to be published and too many comfortable, middle-class citizens place their heads in convenient sand holes or their hands over their ears and eyes...

A major debate continues to rage in the United States over the fallout from Newsweek's now retracted story on the alleged desecration of the Koran at the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba. But viewed from the rest of the world, Americans are discussing the wrong Newsweek scandal. Stephan Richter explains.

The January 31, 2005 issue, Newsweek International — edited very capably by Fareed Zakaria — treated its readers around the world to a courageous, well-written and extensively researched cover story. It was principally authored by Newsweek columnist and Princeton University political scientist Andrew Moravcsik — and entitled "Dream on America"

An American problem

The article begins by describing just how out of tune President Bush's second inaugural address on January 20 was with how the United States is perceived in many countries around the world.

But the piece quickly moves beyond discussing global anti-Bush sentiment. Rather, the author lays out — in great detail and supported by numerous on-the-record quotes and detailed polling data — that it is the American model itself that many foreigners have become disillusioned with.

Iraq War Now Longer than WWII

2006-11-25T16:46:00.004+02:00

Stars and Stripes is a daily newspaper published for the U.S. military, DoD civilians, contractors, and their families. The Financial Times claims to be "arguably the world's biggest name in business news, is synonymous with integrity, accuracy and authority."

Stars and Stripes - Mideast edition, Saturday, November 25, 2006
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=41733

The war in Iraq will reach another milestone this weekend, when it equals the number of days the U.S. was involved in World War II.

Sunday (November 26, 2006) will mark the Iraq war's 1,347th day the same amount of time American troops fought in World War II. But from there, the similarities are largely over.

While the earlier war saw massive campaigns pitting hundreds of thousands of troops in direct combat, the Iraq war has largely been a guerrilla campaign, with U.S. troops rebuilding infrastructure; fostering elections and governments on both the local and national level; and weeding out insurgents from innocents.

According to historians, some 16 million Americans fought in World War II; more than 406,000 U.S. troops died.

By comparison, nearly 1.5 million Americans have now served in Iraq; more than 2,870 have died in the war.

The U.S. involvement in World War II began on Dec. 7, 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945, the Japanese surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945.

The war in Iraq began in March 2003, and its end date will likely be confused by the fact that the enemy in Iraq is an amalgam of groups largely without a central figure.

In terms of dollars spent, Iraq is becoming one of the most expensive wars in American history. The Congressional Research Service estimates the costs of the war has exceeded $300 billion. The Korean War cost around $350 billion (in dollars adjusted for inflation), and Vietnam cost some $530 billion.

The costs of the war in Iraq are averaging around $8 billion a month, the CRS found.
==================================================================
From the Financial Times:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7f615464-7988-11db-b257-0000779e2340.html

"But the extended tours of duty imposed on volunteer part-timers in the National Guard and Reserves as well as regular units has ruptured military morale, according to Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, Mr Bush's first secretary of state.

As a result the Pentagon has been forced to dilute recruitment standards, waiving academic requirements and lifting the age limit from 35 to 40. This is a war that is being fought by poor people while the rest of the country drives round in its SUVs barely noticing it is happening, said Mr Wilkerson, who served in Vietnam.

Mr Campbell, a former naval officer, describes Iraq as a war that is being “funded by debt on a national credit card that is being financed by China”. America’s public debt has risen by more than a third to over $8,000bn (€6,240bn, £4,215bn) since the start of the Bush administration. China’s foreign reserves, mostly held in US treasury bonds, are close to $1,000bn."

Letter to my daughter

2006-07-14T08:16:00.002+03:00

Wednesday the 12th, was another interesting day of sound checks only this time it was Guns 'n Roses, however their stuff all afternoon was varied enough that it was a bit of a "miniconcert."

Around 9 pm we were treated to the real thing and surprise, surprise, the noise level was not bad and after midnight (yes I was still up) we were only faintly aware of the music. James Brown was in town the same night but at a different venue so we did not hear him, amazing that he is 73 years old. I heard him live in 1963 in the Omaha auditorium, we two couples were the only white faces in the crowd, for that time, it was simply no big deal to the black folks and a totally wacked out experience for me. Later the same winter we also saw the Beach Boys and there was not a black face in the crowd...
"Mem'ries,
Like the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories
Of the way we were
Scattered pictures,
Of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were
Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?"

As I get older I wonder if my mind is playing tricks on me or did I really experience my life as I remember it? Hmmm, neat philosophical juncture which could be juice for a writers thesis I suppose.

I love you

Dad

Microsoft to buy US Government

2006-07-01T09:00:00.002+03:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Microsoft Addresses Justice Department Accusations REDMOND, Wash. - July 4, 2006 -- In direct response to accusations made by the Department of Justice, the Microsoft Corp. announced today that it will be acquiring the federal government of the United States of America for an undisclosed sum.

"It's actually a logical extension of our planned growth", said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, "It really is going to be a positive arrangement for everyone". Microsoft representatives held a briefing in the oval office of the White House with U.S. President Bill Clinton, and assured members of the press that changes will be "minimal". The United States will be managed as a wholly owned division of Microsoft. An initial public offering is planned for July of next year, and the federal government is expected to be profitable by "Q4 1999 at latest", according to Microsoft president Steve Ballmer.

In a related announcement, Bill Clinton stated that he had "willingly and enthusiastically" accepted a position as a vice president with Microsoft, and will continue to manage the United States government, reporting directly to Bill Gates. When asked how it felt to give up the mantle of executive authority to Gates, Clinton smiled and referred to it as "a relief". He went on to say that Gates has a "proven track record", and that U.S. citizens should offer Gates their "full support and confidence".

Clinton will reportedly be earning several times the $200,000 annually he has earned as U.S. president, in his new role at Microsoft. Gates dismissed a suggestion that the U.S. Capitol be moved to Redmond as "silly", though did say that he would make executive decisions for the U.S. government from his existing office at Microsoft headquarters.

Gates went on to say that the House and Senate would "of course" be abolished. "Microsoft isn't a democracy", he observed, "and look how well we're doing". When asked if the rumored attendant acquisition of Canada was proceeding, Gates said, "We don't deny that discussions are taking place".

Microsoft representatives closed the conference by stating that United States citizens will be able to expect lower taxes, increases in government services and discounts on all Microsoft products.

*About Microsoft Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers, and democratic government. The company offers a wide range of products and services for public, business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing and free society every day.

*About the United States Founded in 1789, the United States of America is the most successful nation in the history of the world, and has been a beacon of democracy and opportunity for over 200 years. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the United States is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.

Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock

2006-06-30T21:13:00.002+03:00

Given to us by Philip Greenspun at: http://philip.greenspun.com/WealthClock

For more fun information see Mr. Greenspun's home page at: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/

Captain Ouimette's "Spin"

2006-06-30T16:39:00.002+03:00

A letter I sent to a distant relative in reply to a forwarded email which has been making the rounds of "read this" documents. The document in question is regarding a speech made by Naval Captain Ouimette and his comments on the war on terrorism. I believe there are few people who forward the article clearly read it nor do they stop to think if it has any meaningingful solutions to terrorism.

The original article follows my response to my relative...

Virginia

My dad sent me this and I know you were stirred by what Captain Ouimette has to say. I have read this piece several times as it has gone around and around the Internet.

I would beg Captain Ouimette, you and your friends to please read two books and one article. That should not be more than a couple of week's work, not too difficult for a retired school teacher huh? I believe we all need to read more than an impassioned speech by a Navy Captain to be informed. We all need to understand our history better so we can put these violent current events into proper perspective.
George Santayana told us that: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'
Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, page 284

First is an article by a distinguished journalist at Newsweek:
"The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?" by Fareed Zakaria:
http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/newsweek/101501_why.html

Next are two books by Stephen Kinzer:
"Overthrow : America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805078614/102-2969694-0986538?v=glance&n=283155
AND
"All the Shah's Men : An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471678783/ref=pd_bxgy_text_b/102-2969694-0986538?ie=UTF8

Kinzer is a responsible journalist who documents his sources very, very well. In "Overthrow" he gives great detail to the many countries the United States has overthrown starting with Hawail in 1893 and ending with Iraq. After reading this book I have to ask is it any wonder that most countries of the world fear the United States when its foreign policy for over 100 years has been "regime change" to suit its economic interests?

In his book about Iran, Kinzer lays a direct line from the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government to the horrors of September 11. Kinzer states: ""it's not far-fetched to draw a line" from the attacks of September 11 to Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979 to the Mossadegh affair, which restored the shah's power..." (Middle East Quarterly: http://www.meforum.org/article/650

"We have met the enemy and he is us."
(Walt Kelly in Pogo Comics: http://www.igopogo.com/we_have_met.htm)

After you read the online document and the two books THEN please, please, tell me who bears the greatest responsibility for 9/11? After you read the book on Iran, tell me please, would the US have been better off if it had become friends to Iran? Harry Truman said the US should be friends to poor nations and their people, was he wrong?

I do not condone violence by ANY one for ANY reason. My experiences in the Army taught me many things and I have come to the very strong conclusion that NON-violence is the ultimate solution to world problems. Gandhi taught us that in India and made a revolution against the dominant superpower of the time, Great Britain. Martin Luther Kind taught us that in his struggle for simple rights of black US citizens who just wanted the right to vote and send their kids to neighborhood schools.

What should the US do about the "weapons of mass destruction" of Israel, India and Pakistan just to name three? Shouldn't the government and the military make them give up these WMD's? Why is it OK for one country to have WMD's and not others? Who decides that? And what about the WMD of the greatest nuclear arsenal in the world, the United States? Many people the world over fear the US because of its WMD capabilities. Shouldn't the US start its own disarming before it starts telling others they should also? Why is the United States the world's largest exporter of weapons? How many US soldiers were made by the weapons we gave the Taliban in support of their fight against the Soviet Union or to Saddam in his fight with Iran? It just goes on and on and on...

Once we start violence it comes back to us, and it never stops. WWII only decided who the two 50 year superpowers were to be, then the US outspent the Soviet Union and the poorest one "lost" (whatever that means).

All that being said, if you understand any of my meaning, please note that I have not one shred of hope that the world is going to get better. Globalized corporations now are the rulers of nations who are only doing what is in the economic self-interest of the rulers of those nations, their rich and powerful friends and their corporations. Freedom, democracy and the rights of the common people are no longer any concern to large nation states and their corporate sponsors.

Finally, back to Captain Ouimette's words: "This is not a political thing to be hashed over in an election year this is an AMERICAN thing. This is about our Freedom and the Freedom of our children in years to come."

What does this mean? What would he have us do? What is THE solution? I see none in the article. What does the "wakeup call" mean to the United States, its people and to those who are still friendly to its people? If the US military kills Bin Laden, will that stop terrorism? If we invade Iran, Syria and Libya, overthrow their leaders and setup an Iraqui type government will that stop terrorism? Why not invade North Korea whose leader is even worse than Saddam was to his people? (perhaps 900,000 well-trained troops is one answer?) Will that stop terrorism?

Captain Ouimette also writes "you don't have to be in the FBI or CIA or on the National Security Council to see the pattern that has been developing since 1979." I agree with him, the pattern has been firmly established but he is a bit off on his date, the really significant date was 1893 when the US overthrew the Queen of Hawaii.

I understand the rage and frustration of people in America who are uninformed about the bad habits of their government for the last 110 years, they want to "fight back." However all you need to do is take a cold hard look at Vietnam, Iraq and and Afghanistan to see that such a policy simply does not work. In time, the troops will come back, the US will have lost thousands of lives and killed countless of thousands of Iraquis. When that happens, will the Iraquis be better off than they were under Saddam? Will terrorism against the US and other countries stop?

I ask you and your friends and anyone else who you send this to, what is the solution? Just to say wakeup is not enough, we have to wakeup, get informed and try to find constructive solutions. The solutions will be difficult and take a long time, but if we are to really put teeth into Captain Ouimette's words that "This is about our Freedom and the Freedom of our children in years to come." then we all need to work smarter at finding meaningful, permanent solutions.

I hope you find this useful and helpful, I do not mean to cause hard feelings to anyone, I just felt compelled to question this email bouncing article.

Thanks

Johnny

----Original Message of US Navy Captain Ouimette-------

When WWIII Started****1979
This is not very long, but very informative. You have to read the catalog of events in this brief piece. Then, ask yourself how anyone can take the position that all we have to do is bring our troops home from Iraq, sit back, reset the snooze alarm, go back to sleep, and no one will ever bother us again. In case you missed it, World War III began in November 1979... that alarm has been ringing for years.

US Navy Captain Ouimette is the Executive Officer at Naval Air Station, Pensacola, Florida. Here is a copy of the speech he gave last month. It is an accurate account of why we are in so much trouble today and why this action is so necessary.

AMERICA NEEDS TO WAKE UP!

That's what we think we heard on the 11th of September 2001 (When more than 3,000 Americans were killed -AD) and maybe it was, but I think it should have been "Get Out of Bed!" In fact, I think the alarm clock has been buzzing since 1979 and we have continued to hit the snooze button and roll over for a few more minutes of peaceful sleep since then.

It was a cool fall day in November 1979 in a country going through a religious and political upheaval when a group of Iranian students attacked and seized the American Embassy in Tehran. This seizure was an outright attack on American soil; it was an attack that held the world's most powerful country hostage and paralyzed a Presidency. The attack on this sovereign U. S. embassy set the stage for events to follow for the next 25 years.

America was still reeling from the aftermath of the Vietnam experience and had a serious threat from the Soviet Union when then-President Carter had to do something. He chose to conduct a clandestine raid in the desert. The ill-fated mission ended in ruin, but stood as a symbol of America's inability to deal with terrorism.

America's military had been decimated and down sized/right sized since the end of the Vietnam War. A poorly trained, poorly equipped and poorly organized military was called on to execute a complex mission that was doomed from the start.

Shortly after the Tehran experience, Americans began to be kidnapped and killed throughout the Middle East. America could do little to protect her citizens living and working abroad. The attacks against US soil continued.

In April of 1983 a large vehicle packed with high explosives was driven into the US Embassy compound in Beirut When it exploded, it kills 63 people. The alarm went off again and America hit the Snooze Button once more.

Then just six short months later in 1983 a large truck heavily laden down with over 2500 pounds of TNT smashed through the main gate of the US Marine Corps headquarters in Beirut and 241 US servicemen are killed. America mourns her dead and hit the Snooze Button once more.

Two months later in December 1983, another truck loaded with explosives is driven into the US Embassy in Kuwait, and America continues her slumber.

The following year, in September 1984, another van was driven into the gate of the US Embassy in Beirut and America slept.

Soon the terrorism spreads to Europe. In April 1985 a bomb explodes in a restaurant frequented by US soldiers in Madrid.

Then in August 1985 a Volkswagen loaded with explosives is driven into the main gate of the US Air Force Base at Rhein-Main, 22 are killed and the snooze alarm is buzzing louder and louder as US interests are continually attacked.

Fifty-nine days later in 1985 a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro is hijacked and we watched as an American in a wheelchair is singled out of the passenger list and executed.

The terrorists then shift their tactics to bombing civilian airliners when they bomb TWA Flight 840 in April of 1986 that killed 4 and the most tragic bombing, Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in1988, killing 259.

Clinton treated these terrorist acts as crimes; in fact we are still trying to bring these people to trial. These are acts of war.

The wake up alarm is getting louder and louder.

The terrorists decide to bring the fight to America. In January 1993, two CIA agents are shot and killed as they enter CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The following month, February 1993, a group of terrorists are arrested after a rented van packed with explosives is driven into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. Six people are killed and over 1000 are injured. Still this is a crime and not an act of war? The Snooze alarm is depressed again.

Then in November 1995 a car bomb explodes at a US military complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia killing seven service men and women.

A few months later in June of 1996, another truck bomb explodes only 35 yards from the US military compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It destroys the Khobar Towers, a US Air Force barracks, 19 and injuring over 500. The terrorists are getting braver and smarter as they see that America does not respond decisively.

They move to coordinate their attacks in a simultaneous attack on two US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.. These attacks were planned with precision. They kill 224. America responds with cruise missile attacks and goes back to sleep.

The USS Cole was docked in the port of Aden, Yemen for refueling on 12 October 2000, when a small craft pulled along side the ship and exploded killing 17 US Navy Sailors. Attacking a US War Ship is an act of war, but we sent the FBI to investigate the crime and went back to sleep.

And of course you know the events of 11 September 2001. Most Americans think this was the first attack against US soil or in America. How wrong they are. America has been under a constant attack since 1979 and we chose to hit the snooze alarm and roll over and go back to sleep.

In the news lately we have seen lots of finger pointing from every high officials in government over what they knew and what they didn't know. But if you've read the papers and paid a little attention I think you can see exactly what they knew. You don't have to be in the FBI or CIA or on the National Security Council to see the pattern that has been developing since 1979.

I think we have been in a war for the past 25 years and it will continue until we as a people decide enough is enough. America needs to "Get out of Bed" and act decisively now. America has been changed forever.. We have to be ready to pay the price and make the sacrifice to ensure our way of life continues. We cannot afford to keep hitting the snooze button again and again and roll over and go back to sleep.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto said "... it seems all we have done is awakened a sleeping giant." This is the message we need to disseminate to terrorists around the world.

This is not a political thing to be hashed over in an election year this is an AMERICAN thing. This is about our Freedom and the Freedom of our children in years to come.

----- End of Captain Ouimette's speech-----
(My quote below:)
"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. " - Ambrose Bierce

Israel and Christian Fundamentalists

2006-04-22T07:33:00.001+03:00

A friend recently sent me this article on why the Israeli lobby is so strong in the United States in a time with Christian Fundamentalists led by George Dubya Bush and his neo conservatives want to continue a right wing Crusade upon the rest of the Middle East.

His article complements the Bill Moyers information I posted earlier "Christian Fundamentalism--The REAL Danger"

"I thought you might like this article on a taboo subject. This version is edited. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html

An unedited version of this article is available at http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011, or at
http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=891198.

This is about the third time serious establishment figures have said this about the US/Israel relationship but this is of a higher order of magnitude.

When is the US going to wake up and realise that it is fighting Israel's battles and paying for Israel's expansion--which contradicts US policy; at least its stated policy."

Has Amerika Lost It's Way?

2006-04-21T10:05:00.001+03:00

I am reading a book called "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara (pp. 29 - 31). It is a book about the personal thoughts of men from both the North and the South who fought at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July of 1863, in the American Civil War. I want to share some quotes from that book...

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Union colonel, having to tell some soldiers on the verge of mutiny why they are fighting this terrible Civil War: "he believed in the dignity of man...He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God...This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun here...If men were equal in America...there was really no such thing as foreigner: there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith. The Frenchman my fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom: for the people, not the land...We're an army going out to set other men free....It's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for...What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other.

He also comments on his enemies from the South: "The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men..." What some today might call White Supremacy.

I believe in these words and in the Bill of Rights of the United States and in the freedoms granted to citizens by the US Constitution. I also believe these words have taken on dangerous new meanings in these modern troubled times with war raging in Iraq and Christian Fundamentalism rearing its ugly head in banners leading Americans and their armies into battles neither debated, well thought out or reasoned. These are dangerous times and people everywhere should think about do the means the US government employs justify its supposed ends? My belief is they do not...

Holy Moly, Birds Without Wings

2006-04-09T19:14:00.002+03:00

I recently finished a book by Louis de Bernieres called Birds Without Wings. I will occasionally quote from the book and let the author make his own comments about the stupidity and futility of war and the role of religion in this stupidity.

p. 131: “He was possessed...and, like all who have such beautiful visions, his were predicated on the absolute belief that his own people and his own religion and his own way of life were superior to others and should therefore have their way. Such people...even those...insignificant...are the motor of history, which is finally nothing but a sorry edifice constructed from hacked flesh in the name of great ideas.”

p. 151:
“...it is one of the greatest curses of religion that it takes only the very slightest twist of a knife tip in the cloth of a shirt to turn neighbours who have loved each other into bitter enemies.”

Gandhi said “Where there is love, there is life; hatred leads to destruction.”

Da Crusader
George W. Bush seems to be on a “crusade”, he even used that word after 9/11 (oops); his aides said that was naughty. Some people, especially some in this part of the world, might slightly misunderstand what he meant. (I just have a hard time liking this guy...)

Birds Without Wings addresses clearly George W. Bush's Holy War... against the Iraqui people and "against terrorism". Are we sure it just ain't about the money?

Ya gotta love the sheer moxy of this guy, he wants to wage a war against who? what? A war against Bin Laden I would understand, against the Taliban for harboring him I understand but which "terrorism" is GW waging war against? The state terrorism of dictatorial African despots? Muhbarak in Egypt? Saddam Hussein? (whoops he gave up without a fight I think, if so, then isn't the war against terrorism over?) Who? Unfortunately he has a lot of people fooled...

p. 299 Holy War?
...if a war can be holy, then God cannot. At best, a war can only be necessary.

p. 330
I will say now that I doubt if there is any such thing as a holy war, because war is unholy by nature, just as a dog is a dog by nature, and I will say now...that in my opinion there is no god either...if there was a God He would have prevented all these evil things.

What about murder?

George Carlin, a comedian in the US, tells us that murder is not against the law, it is against the law to violate the monopoly the state, your government, has on murder. Only the state can legally murder.

"...the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien." - Albert Jay Nock, On Doing the Right Thing, and Other Essays (1928).

Murder according to Webster is “the crime of unlawfully killing a person...” Get that, it says “unlawfully” All wrapped up in flags and legal jargon, it is still murder. War waged for any reason is murder, executions are murder, they kill people, let us never forget that for a moment. No one has the right to kill for any reason, and especially not the state.

If we citizens allow the state to continue to exercise its legal murders (executions, assassinations {extra-legal}, and wars, especially when it does so in our name (the people), then we continue to violate the precepts of all organized religions. All of them.

Gandhi said “an eye for an eye makes us all blind.” Those of you who say that the scriptures say it is OK to go out and take a life in vengeance by quoting “an eye for an eye” keep in mind that these same scriptures say “To me belongeth vengeance”, this is the Big Guy speaking. That means vengeance is not yours to wage, nor the state, nor any “legally constituted” body of folks lying around thinking up reasons to stay in power...

Nope, none of ya... Not even you!

Did you know? Facts about Turkey

2006-04-09T19:02:00.001+03:00

Living in Turkey is like the Wild Wild West with cell phones and the Internet. Opportunity knocks everywhere and almost everyone in the country hustles a living. They have to, their “safety net” is stitched pretty thin so if they fall very hard they will fall right through and there ain't nothin' but rocks underneath.

Did you know?

1 - Mt. Ararat (Noah's Ark) is located in Turkey.

2 - First Coinage in history was invented by the
Lydians in the 7th C BC, in Asia Minor.

3 - St. Nicholas known as Santa Claus, was born
and lived as bishop of Myra (Kale) the present day Demre.

4 - Turkish women received the right to vote
and to be elected to office in 1934, earlier than
Swiss, Greek, Italian and French women.

5 - St. Paul was born in Tarsus, in the southern part
of Turkey and undertook most of his missionary
journeys in Anatolia (Asia Minor).

6 - The Seven Churches of Revelation are all
located in Turkey; Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum,
Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelpia and Laodicea.

7 - Turkey is the largest producer of hazelnuts
in the world.

8 - Turkey uses the Latin Alphabet and Gregorian
Calendar.

9 - Tulips were introduced to Holland from
Anatolia by Ogier Ghiselinde Busbecq. He was
the ambassador of Charles V to Suleyman the
Magnificient in 1554.

10 - Two of the seven wonders of the world are
in Turkey:
The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
The Mausoleum at Halicarnasus - Bodrum

Come see for yourself...

Chiselhead

2006-04-09T17:05:00.004+03:00

A story, by Tom Smith (1991)
Once upon a time there lived a history teacher way up north, in far away Randolph, Kansas. Up not too far from the famous Dorothy of Oz. This teacher was very comfortable in the little school of Blue Valley. Some days, as he was teaching history, it very nearly got exciting, but alas, very nearly it was not really exciting. Some students were nice to this teacher and said it wasn't too dull, "it was better than math". We must know, like most history teachers, it was comfortable and not difficult.

Every day the students came to class hoping they would not, repeat not, have to read the darn book, or work on worksheets, or Heaven forbid, write a research paper. Each and every day the students gave this teacher a great many suggestions on how to make the class interesting and break the monotony, and that got monotonous to the teacher.

Welllll, one day a student teacher came to this history class with a new tool and a new method of learning. History at Blue Valley is now never dull, frustrating maybe, but not boring. And even worse the teacher is no longer comfortable. If you want to stay comfortable and have an easy time teaching, tune out the rest of what I am going to say....

Traditional Themes - No More (or) Chiselhead
Traditionally man began writing to record for history. Our first writing instruments were very awkward and storage was a major problem. Sometimes we are overwhelmed with all the storage that is needed for our paperwork today, especially in the classroom. Use your imagination to visualize how many stone tablets or how long an old sheepskin scroll would have to be in order to store just one Steven King novel. I'm sure it would take a gymnasium of old stone tablets just to record a school dictionary. Of course that method would be impractical, but that fact alone is not why we no longer use stone tablets.

There are hundreds of reasons we moved forward from stone tablets to something else. Each one of these reasons may or may not have been completely adequate in themselves to justify each move. Just as sometimes the move we make in a classroom to "progress" may or may not justify itself, if the move has to stand alone.

We have to look at progress as a constantly moving experiment. Some things work for some people and some don't, not a very profound or original statement, but very true. Many times the act of using a new piece of multimedia equipment may seem awkward, ungainly and time consuming, but as we learn this new method it will eventually make things much quicker and more efficient.

The ancient man that was happy using a chisel and hammer could find a great many things wrong with using a feather quill, ink and this dang new-fangled paper. After all, you know the feather would break if you used too much pressure, and you had to keep dipping the quill into the inkwell. "By gosh," he said to himself, "I can use the same chisel for months. When I store stone it stays stored, that new paper stuff can blow away at the slightest breeze. Besides, everyone knows this new stuff will never last. Can you imagine Moses coming down from the mountain carrying paper with commandments written on it? How ridiculous ! You have to write so small no one could read it."

Some of these chisel minded people are still living today, or so it seems. You may even have a couple in your school, masquerading as teachers or students or even in the administration. There is not much we can do with them, just try to work around them as best we can, and of course feel sorry for them or ourselves, whichever the case may be.

I won't go so far as to say I was a chisel head type person, but...I was not an extremely progressive minded history teacher. History teachers as a whole are on the conservative side of most issues. I am not an exception. We have a few computers in school, mostly Apple GS and IIE's, and three Macintosh machines. I had been using my Apple GS as a word processor, as most do, and did not fully understand the capabilities of how computers can enhance teaching and learning, and I wasn't going to try this new stuff on a whim.

Another problem with myself, and I'm sure many others have similar problems, is the available time to learn how to use these durn things. Sure, it is relatively easy to learn to word processor, (really it's just typing), but how to operate a mouse and that little Macintosh really couldn't be all that much more powerful, so I thought.

As I was preparing for the upcoming school year my Principal, Dave DuBois, asked if I would be interested in having a student teacher the next fall. I said sure, thinking maybe it would be a young guy that could help me with our football team. Dave then said it's a middle aged fellow who is a computer hack and is interested in experimenting with multimedia and its uses in the classroom. "Welllll..... OK", I said, "but I don't want someone coming in here and using the VCR all the time". Of course I said this and completely exposed my ignorance of multimedia.

When this new guy, Mr. John Hogue, came to discuss next year and started blowing all this computer smoke at me, I thought to myself, "Sure, try this on our kids and they will blast you out of the water!" To say I was slightly skeptical would be a vast understatement. My hard chisel head just knew this stuff would not work in a small rural school. And I have had a number of student teachers with wonderful and grandiose ideas on how to change schools and make the world a better place to live and learn, they quickly find, some not so quickly, that usually the tried and true ways of doing things work, because they always have worked and will keep on working in spite of the student teacher. I was looking forward to the next fall, not hoping for failure, but knowing that I would always be prepared to jump in and help when he got into trouble.

John came to our school in September, in the middle of the football season, and we began. I gave him some advice and loaned him my lesson plans. We then began to team teach for a few weeks to get his feet wet and feel at ease with the students and himself. After about three weeks of this he seldom mentioned computers but he brought his own computer to school and set it up in the classroom. I knew it was coming, I could feel that machine just sitting there ominously. I felt like a character in the book "1984", and that Macintosh was Big Brother. As he worked himself into the flow of the classes he asked if he could introduce the Macintosh into the class environment. I snickered and said, "Yeah, go ahead." And as I expected, the students came to me, on the side, and complained about having to learn computers, after all, this was history, not computer literacy. But I gave them no sympathy, they had to adapt to the teacher. I was going to give John Hogue all the rope he needed to hang himself before I straightened him out. But to my surprise, after the initial complaints, the students seemed to begin enjoying themselves. Whoa, this wasn't supposed to happen.

John even tried to get me involved with those darn things. But I said, "No thanks, I'll just keep on using my chisel, I mean my word processor." After all I was over 40 years old and too late to teach an old dog new tricks. But a funny thing happened. About three quarters of the way through John's student teaching I began to see some amazing things happen. Students began wanting to stay after school and work on history projects, on their own time, even some of the below average, struggling students. What the heck was happening, was this guy using illegal drugs or what? It almost seemed as if the computer, especially the Macintosh, was an equalizer.

Not that it necessarily brought the poor students up, but rather it gave them a tool that made them equal to most of the others. When I saw this happening I thought to myself maybe this new stuff has some merit. I began taking more of an interest, not completely converted you understand, I had to be a little sneaky, I couldn't just come out and say well maybe I was wrong.
I grabbed John Hogue by the arm one day and asked him to show me a couple of things and he just smiled, a little smugly I thought, and we began and it hasn't stopped yet.

I haven't learned everything and never will. That's one of the nice things about computers, you can keep learning forever. And it's so easy to get the students involved. I had to work twice as hard as my students to catch up to them, and I still haven't, but I don't tell them that. They enjoy learning and working with this new-fangled equipment. Now I give them projects and direct them which way to go and they run with it. Many of the brighter students have far outclassed my meager ability and I have began using these students as aides to assist some of the other kids.
Usually I assign projects to small groups of three or four students and they work with each other and they work off each other similar to what teachers can do in class discussion to stimulate ideas from each other. This group work seems to be the best way to use computers, especially since we only have access to two Macintosh computers. A class with four groups of four students is nearly a perfect size. Two groups work on the computers and two groups do research or put together new ideas and use other resources.

If anyone has an interest in how we do things just give us a call and we will be glad to tell you our ideas of how to work with Hypercard on the Macintosh. The main thing about Hypercard is it gives the ability of programming to students without knowing how to program. It is difficult to explain. The best way to learn it is to do it. Kind of like the Nike shoe commercials, "Just Do It". I have been very fortunate in having John Hogue as a student teacher. We are greatly assisted by Mr. Kent Unruh, of Kansas State University, our resident computer expert. Our student experts are Stacy Larson, Marie Anderson, Danny Peters, Cyrena Kellogg, Kevin Suther, and Melanie Hemme. These students are the ones I mentioned as helpers to our other students and they would be more than happy to share any ideas they have with you and would appreciate any ideas you may have for them

Tom Smith
Technology Coordinator, USD#484
Apple Distinguished Educator, 03
916 Robinson Street
Fredonia, KS 66736
www.fredoniaks.com

Servant Leadership

2006-04-07T21:10:00.003+03:00

In the introduction to the book, "Synchronicity The inner path of Leadership" by Joseph Jaworski, Peter Senge writes about a book called "Servant Leadership" by Robert K. Greenleaf.

"...few (books about leadership) penetrate to deeper insights into the nature of real leadership...He (Greenleaf) says that the first and most important choice a leader makes is the choice to serve, without which one's capacity to lead is profoundly limited.

That choice is not an action in the normal sense--it's not something you do, but an expression of your being...Only when the choice to serve undergirds the moral formation of leaders does the hierarchical power that separates the leader and those led not corrupt."

I have a friend who has been a social worker for over 30 years and is still in the streets. Although not a “leader” in the sense of a CEO she both runs the office, finds the funding to keep it going, and works with clients daily. She said once that being a social worker is what she IS not what she DOES! That really hit me as a profound statement. Her daughter is also a social worker as a direct result of her mom's influence.

I have another friend who was a senior sergeant in the Army and Special Forces for over 30 years with 8 years in Vietnam. When I was in the Army he was my team sergeant for two years and showed me the same style of leadership about which Greenleaf writes. My friend said that a leader “takes care of his people first.” In war, not recommended for children or other living things, people have to depend upon those they lead just as those being led have to depend upon their leader. In a war, leaders quickly come to the surface, if they "take care of their people," those who are being led, will take care of these leaders. If one does not serve the other, the consequences can be fatal...

What my friend showed by his example of taking care of his people first was exhibited in so many different and subtle ways I find it difficult to remember them all.

Some things I remember:

* On Fridays, he would let us know it was time to quit for the day, by grabbing a broom and start sweeping. By this example he showed us that we should all pitch in to clean up the team house so we could go home.
* In the physical training area, if we ran 10 miles in formation, he was in the front of it for every step even though he was more than 10 years older than the oldest of us he led.
* When we went into the field for operations, his rucksack was just as heavy or heavier than any of ours.
* He was always the first to get his hands dirty and the last to wash.
* He would often show someone (me especially) how to tie a proper knot while holding his breath 5 meters underwater.
* He could demonstrate the most complicated of procedures regarding our sophisticated diving rigs in the simplest and most understandable way.
* He was a teacher and by his example he led us.

"When we work," he said, "we do not party, and when we party we do not work." We never drank on duty but oftentimes, when off duty, we would "party" together. We worked as a team and played as a team and loved each other because of his ability to select us and mold us, by his example, into that team. We often called him “top” which was short for top sergeant but he could have been a private and he would still have been our leader.

Over 20 years later, I lived in the same city with him for a while. I had surgery for my thyroid. It was not complicated and I was only in the hospital overnight. When I woke up, he was sitting in the chair in my room, waiting to see if I was OK. He simply asked me if I were all right and did I needed anything.

I was still on his team and he was still serving me...

More thoughts about Turkey, my new homeland

2006-03-26T11:45:00.002+03:00

I read a lot about this country and if I lived here for the NEXT 60 years I would not "get it."

But I try to understand that the very things which make this place frustrating are also the most interesting. Everything here is about 90% finished. Brand new beautiful bus stops going up all over town, but not all the glass gets put into them, or the foundation around them which was dug up to set the new bus stops does not quite get finished. Beautiful street lamps, with the electrical wiring covers off of ALL of them (wazzup wit dat??). Brand new housing complexes of luxury apartments going up in what was a small village where the school I work is located but the streets are such a mess in front of them that they are barely navigable and not paved yet. A brand new, very pretty, brick sidewalk laid down, then someone else comes along, tears up parts of it to lay electrical or some other cable. Street sweepers are everywhere picking up loads of rubbish but many hillsides are literal dumping grounds for all kinds of shit. A woman clad all in Islamic black from head to toe with a very colorful pink coat on the outside of it all in the cold weather and walking with whom appears to be a girlfriend and is casually dressed in tight jeans with no scarf. On and on and on, good stuff to observe.

Istanbul seems to have a magical attraction, people complain about the smog, the traffic, too many people, too many fundamentalists and sheep sacrificing, and yet they write terrific poems and stories about this place which has the ghosts of so many ancients wandering around its streets. I remember one night having crossed from the Asian side on the ferry and landing at Karaköy. I walked up the hill toward the Galata Tower and the small streets were almost deserted, it was a weeknight and Galata was not as popular as it is now. I remember suddenly being struck by the fact that ancient
Ottoman Janissaries with their swords and high turbans walked the same streets along with Genovese merchants and Jewish shop keepers. Before that were Byzantine city dwellers and who knows before that... The same area where Mehmed II or Fatih Sultan Mehmet "the Conqueror" scared the Byzantines shitless by literally dragging half his fleet of ships overland and into the Golden Horn across from the walls enclosing what was left of the Empire. Their clarion call to doom I would imagine... The feeling that strange evening struck me quite strong and had an unmistakable impression upon me like I was some sort of witness to the eons of history covering that street like some magical fog. I almost imagined one of those Janissaries coming out of a side street and proudly walking in front of me, daring me to say or do something about it. Weird huh?

I read James Clavell's "Shogun" twice recently before I started to "get it." A wonderful book on cross cultural communication (or lack thereof) wherein the hosts try to civilize the guest quite against his will. I learned early on in Turkey (where East meets West) that "having a cup of tea" with someone when it is offered is more than just a cup of tea, it is an invitation to me, the foreigner, to learn something about another culture, the rest is more subtle but just as significant.

My students are another matter, a new rich attitude (not all of them but most), spoiled, totally pampered and spoiled, all their physical needs are met no matter what, no sense of discpline regarding schoolwork or anything else except listening to music and talking to their friends. I show them films because they will not read books I give them for homwork. Now they take it for granted and get upset on the days I do NOT show them a film even though I have told them repeatedly that I cannot command the film salon all the time nor do I desire to do so. Of course they love it that they just watch films but then they complain because I pick the films instead of showing them what THEY want to see. I wish I could get The Rocky Horror Picture Show Tto show them, that would be a gas I guess. All films I show are English subtitled even though they also complain because I do not use Turkish subtitles.

Why I am a Vegetarian

2006-03-25T22:46:00.002+02:00

...man's supremacy over the lower animals meant not that the former should prey opon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower..." Mahatma Gandhi, "The Story of My Experiments with Truth"

Vegetarianism is a way of life for me and I try to live it as best I can. My beliefs are considered by some to label me a "pragmatic" vegetarian, others "ideologic", whatever the case may be, then so be it. I mean no offense, I only offer my reasons. If you are easily offended, or dislike or hate animals, then read no more.

First, if you claim to like animals, ANY animals at all, then you gotta be a vegetarian or significantly reduce your consumption of meat. How can you eat the flesh of a living animal? How many Americans or Europeans eat their dogs or their cats? How many of you would eat another human? Hmm, come to think of it, why not? In some societies it is OK to eat cats, dogs and even, occasionally, humans. So next time you have that "leg of lamb", that "filet of fish", or "breast of turkey", think about "human heart" sauteed and grilled exactly to your liking, or perhaps "boiled human hand", with a touch of herbs and spices and served with a chilled burgandy. In fact, cannabalism is a very efficient means of disposing of the non diseased dead is it not? Face it, cannibalism has been around for a long, long time, take a look here

(What would George Carlin say about this?)

Now of course, I am having a bit of fun with you right? After all, all our eating habits are culturally learned and can be unlearned as the above paragraph attempts to show. The majority of humans probably possess enough imagination and honesty to NOT knowingly eat a human hand however it was presented to them. And yet these same people will happily chow down on liver, kidneys, thighs, breasts and other body parts of animals. Many, if not most, of these same people would not have the heart to murder the animals they eat themselves. Imagine if a lobster looked like a cute little puppy, would YOU dip it in boiling water ALIVE?? See what I mean? The feelings which motivate vegetarians to not eat animals are exactly those which motivate the culturally held negative view of humans eating other humans--cannibalism, or in some cultures eating dogs and cats, or lizards, or insects.

Stop eating our animal friends, they are put in our care, they feel, they think, they have families, why do they deserve to end up on your plate? Try broccoli, nuts or apricots, they taste better anyway, and they certainly smell better when cooking. Of course, some carniverous humans may disagree on that point but the smell of flesh cooking can be exhilirating or nauseating depending upon your cultural orientation, nothing more.

What about health reasons? Well, if you all would take a visit to your local slaughter houses of cattle, chickens, pigs, turkeys and even fish, you would see a VERY unhealthy environment. How people who work in animal killing places can still eat animals is waaaaaay beyond me. I HAVE visited these places and they are more than offensive, they are cruel, inhumane, they smell bad, they made me vomit. I used to drive a truck hauling meat to the east coast and I saw rats come on my truck from the delivery point of my truck load, I was still a carnivore then and I NEVER ate meat in New York City nor Boston, NEVER!!

Just for a moment, think about health concerns--SARS, mad cow disease (take a look at this article about mad cow disease and our cuisine artists in France, if it does not make you sick then nothing will), antibiotics and hormones in market meat and artificial coloring. Surely you don't think that "juicy" red looking steak flesh looks that way after it is dead and already starting to decompose, do you? Yum, give me a carrot anyday. Of course this is not to mention high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and colon cancer, all directly caused by, yup, eating meat.

If any of you reading this live in the great Midwest of the United States, you have probably seen some of the cattle "concentrated animal feeding operations" which end up as steaks in your frig. These are animals, not machines and they are force fed, they live in putrid conditions, the runoff from their shit and other waste is so great the even the US Government Environmental Protection Agency pushed legislators to enact laws to try to control the stuff. Although not a strictly vegetarian site, take a look at "Factory Farm.Org".

The waste from these "feeding lots" gets into our soil and our water and pollutes it with bacteria and the other waste products of the junk these animals are fed. These animals are fed ground up bones from other animals, don't that beat all, making carnivores out of cows?? (also a source of "mad cow" disease). They are fed hormones so they grow faster and antibiotics because the places they are forced to live are so filthy they defy description. With all these animals all crammed together into a relatively small place, they get sick easily, soooo, these antibiotics get into the meat and then you buy this stuff atthe marketand eat it!! The FDA does say that feeders have to stop giving these animals antibiotics and hormones about a month before the animal is killed. Unfortunately this is often "overlooked" and a lot of this effluent ends up in YOUR body and if you are allergic to antibiotics you can die...

Fish farming - Known as Aquaculture, is one of the fastest growing sectors in world food production. Intensive fish farms produce high volumes of biological waste, primarily from uneaten food and waste material. Other problems include disease outbreaks, chemical pollution, and escapes of genetically modified fish, which can dilute the gene pool of wild fish and displace them altogether. Lead in fish is good for you, uh huh, as is mercury, both of which are found in even so-called "farm" fish and then there is the issue of ecology and balance--all the cod off the north east coast of the US have disappeared because of excessive fishing practicesThat is why the fishermen in the film "The Perfect Storm" were in such a perilous place, no fish close to home.

OK, so you like chicken huh? What about that nice omelette you had for breakfast? Well, take a look at FARMING SYSTEMS FOR EGGS "In the battery cage system, hens are crammed into a cage so small that they cannot stretch their wings, let alone walk or peck and scratch at the ground. Under these conditions hens are prevented from performing most of their natural behaviours, such as dust bathing, perching and laying their eggs in a nest. Up to 90,000 caged hens can be crammed into one windowless shed. The cages in Europe are stacked between 4 and 9 cages high. Japan is said to have the world's highest battery cage unit, with cages stacked 18 tiers high. There is clear scientific evidence that hens suffer in battery cages. Common sense also tells us that to keep a healthy hen in a barren wire cage, with less space than an ordinary sheet of typing paper, is bound to cause suffering (and disease). These conditions prevent the hens performing their natural behaviours and cause their bodies to degenerate through lack of exercise." Enjoy your breakfast!

Now of course there is the FDA, the food protectors right? Well, it is still common practice to make sure they announce their visits to slaughterhouses ahead of time, they can only visit about 0.2 % of all sites and inspect an even smaller number of animals in that small statistical sampling. They are underpaid and it is not uncommon to hear about an inspector taking a "gratuity" to "fudge" the records or look the other way. So much for them, after all the animal killing industry is its own best watchdog, right? they do a great job of watching out for people like you and me who want to take pictures of their inhumane acts of confinement and slaughter. What about IBP Inc., the nation's largest meatpacker? This is your friendly corporate racketeering company, but before you look, make sure you are near the commode because you may just throw up that piece of steak you just ate...

Did you know there are slaughter houses or meat factories for horses for export to foreign countries? Yup, right here in the good old US of A... There are myths aplenty about meat eating. How about the protein myth, gotta eat meat to get adequate protein, right? Hmmm, wrong on that one. Suppose you're trapped in a junk food warehouse and have nothing to eat but fat free pretzel sticks (1 ounce = 100 calories, 3 grams of plant protein, [ source Frito-Lay ]). You're getting your entire caloric intake- 2,500 calories- from pretzel sticks. 25 ounces of them a day, in fact; that's about two or three bags. Mmm! And how much protein are you getting from this miserably inadequate diet? 25 ounces x 3 grams / ounce = 75 grams of protein a day. Even on this incredibly lousy diet you're making 92% of the RDA protein requirement! Two months in this warehouse and you will develop scurvy, biotin deficiency syndromes, vitamin D deficiency, and a deep, abiding hatred of pretzel sticks. But you will not be experiencing protein deficiency.

Some plant protein sources:
. Beans and legumes
· Cereals and grains - wheat, rye, corn
· Leafy green vegetables
· Nuts - almonds, walnuts, cashews
· Seaweed - kelp, spirulina
· Seeds - sesame, sunflower
· Soy products - tofu, tempeh, soy milk

Take a look at some of the reasons why being a vegetarian is GOOD for YOU as well as the myths about vegetariansm, nutritional reasons, kindness to animals, and finally some vegetarian links to other sources. I am an avid veggie lover, this is true.

Amuse yourselves, but do not forget your health and our planet when you read on...

Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Love

2006-03-25T20:56:00.002+02:00

I read Captain Corelli's Mandolin for the second time recently and in those pages I found this: Iannis, a patriotic Cephalonian doctor speaking to his daughter Pelagia says: "When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But it is!"

Regardless of your feelings about the book or the film, I cannot imagine more profound words about the "temporary madness" which is so glorified in all the books and films which surround us from the time of the first printed word. Being in love is one of the greatest things a human can feel, yet we all tend to use that as a basis for a relationship and there just has to be more because "being in love" alone, will eventually fail us...

Republican Fundamentalists are Killing Free Speech

2005-07-04T10:56:00.001+03:00

Well the Bush guys are at it again. While they are busy killing Iraquis by the thousands and US soldiers by the hundreds in the name of "freedom and democracy" they are killing free speech and dissent back in the good ole' USA.

On this 4th of July, Independence Day, the day the US declared its freedom from England, the day when the brew, the bible, the gun, and a gross expenditure of fireworks prevails, all of us should take a moment to reflect just how revolutionary the thoughts of the founders of the country really were. And we should all agonize over Bush and his regime using the Declaration of Independence to wipe their asses.

Bill Moyers left PBS several months ago and the Republican Fundamentalists are still in an uproar over his lucid and telling comments.

Mr. Moyers recently gave a speech to the National Conference on Media Reform and Democracy Now, wisely, albeit dangerously, published his comments entitled "Bill Moyers Responds to CPB's Tomlinson Charges of Liberal Bias: "We Were Getting it Right, But Not Right Wing."

Mr. Moyers warns us: "Hear me: an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too."

US citizens have to stand up now and demand the Bush regime be tried for war crimes in Iraq and for lying to the US public about almost everything. If Bill Clinton can be impeached for getting a blow job under his desk and lying about it, then Bush should be both impeached and imprisoned for his "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Interestingly I found the Democracy Now article on The World Forum entitled "The Battle For PBS" whereby the author, in his blog, outlines very the essence of Mr. Moyers' comments.

I will repeat them here:

First he (Mr. Moyers) responded to his detractors:
"Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq's oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove's slush fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy. That's who I mean. And if that's editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence. "

"One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at "NOW" didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news. "

He talks about how the rules of the game, in journalism, have changed:
"So the rules of the game permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading. "

"I decided long ago that this wasn't healthy for democracy. I came to see that news is what people want to keep hidden, and everything else is publicity. In my documentaries, whether on the Watergate scandal thirty years ago, or the Iran-Contra conspiracy twenty years ago, or Bill Clinton's fundraising scandals ten years ago, or five years ago the chemical industry's long and despicable cover up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity was not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference. I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies, as well as the big lie of people in power."

Cigarette Butts as Litter-Toxic as Well as Ugly

2005-05-23T11:50:00.001+03:00

As if second hand smoke isn't bad enough, we gotta put up with smoker's throwaway butts, made of a NON-biodegradable material; cellulose plastic. I found this article "Cigarette Butts as Litter – Toxic as Well as Ugly." I will quote below from the longer article:

"95% of cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate, a plastic slow to degrade."

"Cigarette butts accumulate in the environment due to the popularity of plastic cigarette filters and the habit some smokers have to "toss their butt" rather than use ashtrays." More than 97% of cigarettes sold have filters.

"The 470 billion cigarettes smoked in the United States in 1998 translates to a total of 176,250,000 pounds of discarded butts in one year in the United States alone. The filters from 5.608 trillion cigarettes (approximate world production) would weigh more than 2.1 billion pounds. This figure does not include the weight of the tobacco still attached to the filter, or the packaging, matches, disposable lighters, and other "collateral" waste that is generated by smoking".

"The filters on one pack of 20 cigarettes weigh 0.12 ounces (with no tobacco attached) and displaces a volume of 10 ml. With annual world-wide production of cigarettes at 5.608 trillion, the potential weight and volume of cigarette butts becomes enormous."

"Similarly, cigarette butts take up a large volume of space. If one person smokes a pack and a half a day, he will consume more than 10,000 cigarettes in a year. This number of cigarette butts (filters only --not including remnant tobacco) will fill a volume of five liters. Worldwide annual consumption of cigarettes creates enough cigarette butt waste to fill more than 2,800,000,000 liters (2,800,000 m3)".

So, add this to my rant earlier on the hazards of second hand smoke and the waste of human life due to primary smoking, and you get one of the most phenomenal killers of all time. This poison is pushed by cigarette companies upon developing country markets because educated people are finally getting the message, smoking kills more than any other source of death in the world and pollutes at a comparable rate. Why do we continue to tolerate this selling of poison when it would clearly be illegal if it were brought to the market for the first time now?

Stop smoking, everywhere, once and for all, it is not a right, it is a crime...

Smoking, Afghanistan and Third World exports of death

2005-05-22T09:30:00.002+03:00

This morning I read this article from Reuters online titled "US memo faults Karzai over Afghan heroin." The article states in part that "U.S. officials said in a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this month that a poppy eradication program aimed at Afghanistan's heroin trade was ineffective partly because of President Hamid Karzai's leadership."

This is clearly another example of the hypocrisy and stupidity of the Bush (Dubya) regime, and his lackey Condoleezza Rice. First they make a mess out of Afghanistan with almost all the world behind them because of September 11, then they make an even bigger mess in Iraq. With most of their attention on Iraq, this regime of fundamentalist Christian neo-conservatives seemed to forget about Afghanistan, allowed the CIA paid warlords to take control of the countryside again and poppy and hence heroin production started on the rise. Now Afghanistan supplies 87 percent of the heroin sold worldwide. Even the stupid fundamentalist Islamic Taliban eliminated poppy production, why can't the US? After all, don't they control the country? Hmmm, probably not by a long shot.

Even though I abhor what this United States government regime is attempting to impose upon the rest of the world and delight in exposing its culpability and its provoking the killing fields in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries by its foolish actions, I am also saddened that the US, from where I came, could stoop so low. In the eyes of most of the world (outside the US), the US is a bully, trying to cram down the throats of the rest of us, its consumerist ideals and attempting to control the world's oil supply. Saying it is exporting democracy and freedom as its reasoning for unleasing this terror on the world only makes the US a laughingstock.

If the US government is so concerned about poppy production in Afghanistan why doesn't it just burn the fields and help the farmers grow wheat and other crops? Why doesn't the US government decry the sale of tobacco products worldwide? After all tobacco kills more people annually than all the other illegal and poisonous drugs combined.

Smoking Kills More Than Any Other Cause
Why does this happen? If tobacco were to be introduced today it would, without a doubt, be placed on the worldwide list of dangerous drugs next to heroin, crack cocaine and other lethally addictive drugs. It is tolerated because it it big money and because its effects are so insidious and compartively slow compared to other poisons ingested by people.

Here is some alarming data from the good old USA which has seen a decrease in recent years. According to this admittedly anti-smoking website, Smokefree Communities: "According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tobacco use remains the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, causing more than 440,000 deaths each year. In other words, tobacco kills more Americans each year than alcohol, illegal drug use, car accidents, murders, suicides, fires and AIDS combined!"

The same website tells us the disturbing facts about secondhand smoke: "Secondhand smoke is the third leading cause of preventable death in the country, killing 53,000 nonsmokers in the U.S. each year. It has been shown to cause lung cancer, nasal cancer and heart disease in nonsmokers. For every eight smokers who die from using tobacco products, one nonsmoker is killed by secondhand smoke."

In 1997, (according to the WHO) total sales of the US tobacco industry alone amounted to more than $48 billion, compared with only $1.4 billion by gun manufacturers, who have had the backing of a powerful political lobby.

There are 1.1 billion smokers around the world. That makes up around one third of the adult global population. Smoking causes more death and disability than any other single disease, accounting for 7% of all deaths, with about 13,700 people dying each day of tobacco-related illnesses.

The WHO’s projection that states that tobacco will result in more than 10 million deaths annually by the year 2020 would make it the leading cause of death and disability, thus becoming more lethal than HIV, tuberculosis, car accidents, maternal mortality, suicide and homicide combined.

There is an estimated 42% of men and 24% of women that smoke in developed countries, while in developing countries 48% of men and 7% of women smoke. There are 800,000 smokers and an estimated one million people who die annually from tobacco in developing countries.

This UN Chronicle article, "Taking the world up in smoke: a tobacco peril", June-August, 2004 by Namrita Talwar, discusses the rise of tobacco sales in developing countries. "Every eight seconds one person dies of tobacco-related diseases, which kill 4 million people annually. The worldwide demand for tobacco is expected to continually rise for at least another decade....consumption in developing nations is expected to escalate to 71 per cent by 2010, the report states. Population levels and incomes are growing more rapidly in the developing countries, and these are driving an increased consumption of tobacco."

For example in Turkey, an emerging economy and rapidly developing country, sales of cigarettes has been increasing. Euromonitor International states in its article "Tobacco in Turkey" that "In contrast to most developed countries, the smoking population continues to increase in Turkey. The population growth sits at around 2% each year whereas the number of smokers grows by around 3% annually. More than 50% of the total population smokes, which makes Turkey very appealing to many international tobacco companies as a potential growth market."

According to this article written back in 1999, "200,000 Turkish People Die Annually from Smoking". It is a very young country with over 70% of its population below 40 years of age and consequently one of the tobacco industries targets. Turkey is also number five on the top ten list of tobacco producing countries.

Tobacco Supply, Demand and Trade by 2010: Policy Options and Adjustment
Turkey is the fifth largest tobacco producer in the world, with about 1.5 percent of its total cultivated area under tobacco.

There are approximately 600,000 small tobacco growers in Turkey, with total employment in tobacco production employing some 1.5 million persons. More are employed in other tobacco-related activities, such as transportation, storage, trade and cigarette manufacturing. The latter employed more than 20,000 of Turkey's 1.1 million manufacturing workers in 1997.

Turkey is a major trader of tobacco on world markets, exporting about 150,000 tonne (60 percent of its total production) and importing about 50,000 tonne of processed and unprocessed tobacco. Turkey ranks fourth among tobacco exporting countries, with a share of 6-8 percent in total world exports. In 1999, total tobacco exports amounted to US$561 million, 23 percent of total agricultural export value.

Cigarette taxes amounted to US$2,300 million in 1998, which was more than one eighth of total indirect tax revenue.

Also, according to the Euromonitor article, not only is there an increase in Turkish smokers, cigarettes in Turkey have very high tar content, another addictive ingredient and high health hazard: "Around 80% of cigarettes smoked in Turkey are high tar, and some even exceed 10mg tar yield. The smoking population is addicted to high tar cigarettes while light and ultra light varieties are relatively new to them. Since the product variety is wider in high tar cigarettes due to the historical sales patterns, the Turkish still smoke high tar cigarettes. Retail sales of high tar cigarettes reached US$5,232 million in 2004.

The UK and the EU have their share of problems as this article titled "Smoking Kills - A White Paper on Tobacco" tells us: "Smoking is the single greatest cause of preventable illness and premature death in the UK. Smoking kills over 120,000 people in the UK a year - more than 13 people an hour. Every hour, every day. For the EU as a whole the number of deaths from tobacco is estimated at well over 500,000 a year."

Some will say that stopping tobacco farming will hurt the economies of many emerging countries. This is also a myth, probably put out by the tobacco industry. According to this article, "Tobacco Supply, Demand and Trade by 2010: Policy Options and Adjustment" "These studies suggest that, while it is clearly the case that some people in some countries may suffer, the impact of any moderate contraction in the tobacco market, particularly if it were to occur slowly, might have only a limited impact on most tobacco producing countries."

The data speaks for itself and is extremely alarming. The rise in smoking in poorer countries without the benefit of advanced anti-smoking campaigns and and educated populace is clear. If you sell tobacco, you sell death and help increase the cost of health care which affects all of us economically and morally...

Tobacco
consumption            Actual      Projected
'000 tonnes            2000        2010

World                  6,137.1     7,151.5
China                  2,627.5     2,659.5
EU (15)                  724.1       690.6
India                    470.3       563.8
USSR (former area)       442.4       442.3
USA                      434.4       433.8
Brazil                   202.5       257.9
Japan                    169.5           -
Indonesia                156.1           -
Turkey                   133.6           -
Pakistan                  90.0           -

Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

* More tobacco deaths occur in developing than developed countries.

* By 2030, 70 per cent of all tobacco deaths will occur in developing countries.

* In Bangladesh alone, over 10.5 million children could be saved from malnutrition if parents redirected expenses from tobacco to food.

* In many countries, scarce land is used for growing tobacco instead of food.

* Net income from tobacco crops is less than for food crops. Also, deforestation occurs due to flue curing of tobacco, which burns wood. This is a significant problem in some parts of Africa: for example, in southern Africa alone, an estimated 140,000 hectares of woodlands disappear annually to cure tobacco.

* Most cigarettes consumed worldwide are international brands, and many countries lose foreign exchange dollars on tobacco. For example, in 1997/1998. Bangladesh earned $5.5 million in foreign exchange from exporting tobacco, but spent $20.5 million importing the product, resulting in a net foreign exchange loss of $15 million.

Lies, lies & more lies, impeach & remove Bush

2005-05-08T21:41:00.001+03:00

How can we all just sit by and watch Bush commit murder, discredit any credibility the United States MAY have had around the world, and continue to blatantly erode the safeguards of the Constitution under the guise of "fighting a war on terrorism." When are all the "good Nazis" in the US going to get really fed up with this war criminal and his handlers, the ones who really manipulate him and keep him to their bidding?

I just finished reading an article in the New York Review of Books, Volume 52, Number 6 · April 7, 2005. The article is titled "Review of Inside the Pentagon Papers" edited by John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter, University Press of Kansas, 248 pp., $29.95

Read just the below and if you get as sick as I did when I read it then read the entire article. If you do not get upset or do not care then just stick your head back up your ass and kiss your ass goodbye...

More Than Fit to Print By Anthony Lewis

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17890

The crucial lesson of the Pentagon Papers and then Watergate was that presidents are not above the law. So we thought. But today government lawyers argue that the president is above the law—that he can order the torture of prisoners even though treaties and a federal law forbid it. John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who wrote some of the broad claims of presidential power in memoranda, told Jane Mayer recently that Congress does not have power to "tie the president's hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique." The constitutional remedy for presidential abuse of his authority, he said, is impeachment. Yoo also told Ms. Mayer that the 2004 election was a "referendum" on the torture issue: the people had spoken, and the debate was over. And so, in the view of this prominent conservative legal thinker, a professor at the University of California law school in Berkeley, an election in which the torture issue was not discussed has legitimized President Bush's right to order its use.

The notion that we have a plebiscitary democracy in this country would have astonished James Madison and the other Framers of the Constitution, who thought they were establishing a federal republic of limited powers. So would the idea that the president can ignore laws passed by Congress. One of the fundamental constitutional checks against abuse of power, as the Framers saw it, was the separation of powers in three branches of the federal government: executive, legislative, judicial. If one overreached, they thought, another would curb its abuse.

Congress as an institution has hardly exercised its checking power since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It gave President Bush greatly expanded investigative and prosecutorial authority in the Patriot Act. It has only intermittently challenged the unprecedented secrecy he has imposed on government activity.

That leaves the third branch, the courts. In the context of the "war on terrorism," would they decide a case like the Pentagon Papers the same way today? No one can be sure. But lately there have been signs that judges are unwilling to be cowed by the claims, made since September 11, of unreviewable presidential power. The Supreme Court ruled last year that citizens held without trial as "enemy combatants" must have an opportunity to answer official suspicions, and held that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay may file petitions in federal courts for release on habeas corpus.

The Supreme Court made its decision on citizens held without trial in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi. Rather than tell him its reasons for holding him and letting him answer, the government sent Hamdi back to his home in Saudi Arabia. Then, the other day, a federal district judge in South Carolina ordered the release of the other American held as an "enemy combatant," Jose Padilla. The judge—Henry F. Floyd, nominated by President Bush in 2003—said: "The court finds that the president has no power, neither express nor implied, neither constitutional nor statutory, to hold petitioner as an enemy combatant." To allow that, Judge Floyd said,

"would not only offend the rule of law and violate this country's tradition, but it would also be a betrayal of this nation's commitment to the separation of powers that safeguards our democratic values and individual liberties."

It was only a trial judge speaking, and officials immediately said they would appeal. His decision affected one American citizen while mistreatment of prisoners overseas during interrogation, as FBI reports among other things have shown, remains inadequately investigated, much less forbidden. But that a trial judge reached those conclusions, and had the courage to express them, meant something. Perhaps, in the courts, the spirit of the Pentagon Papers lives.

What is Life without me?

2005-04-25T21:01:00.003+03:00

Read my title statement in a quiet room all by yourself and ponder just what does it mean? I saw a film with the same name recently which is about a 25 year old woman who learns she has terminal cancer. It goes through the last weeks of her life with her two children and her husband. She writes a list to herself of all the things which are so important to her that she must do them before she dies; see her dad who is in prison, leave tape recordings to her daughters to be played on each of their birthdays until they are 18, make love to a man who is not her husband, find a wife for her husband, get a haircut.

As I wade through several satirical “reviews” of this film and I keep running into the word maudlin, I wonder if these “reviewers” have any other words in their vocabulary. I found the film refreshing and uplifting considering its potential for the opposite. I looked around a while until I found a review with which I could agree and I found it at World/Independent Film.

I hope I can die the way she did, with dignity and courage, maybe, if I'm lucky and know when, not telling anyone just as she did. What an incredible feeling that must be to know your days are seriously numbered and no one you know has any idea just how numbered are those days.

In one short scene she walks through a shopping mall and talks about how truly trivial are the things in the windows and on the models and the store dummies, how really worthless are the things with which we surround ourselves.

Just what do we live for? Can anyone tell me? What is this purpose? Is it to listen to the birds sing in the trees, or the wind whistle through the leaves? Perhaps it is to listen to or look at the few aberrations of humankind-- music, dance, theatre, film, paintings or photography? Most of the rest of what passes for society anymore has no real value. We work so we can buy things we neither need nor can afford so we can go out and pay for them with money we do not have. We drive fast cars and eat at fancy restaurants, animals are slaughtered by the millions so we can drive through and not waste time from our appointed rounds—all for what?

Yeh, I know, we all ponder the “meaning of life” yet so few of us really live that I have to wonder what all the fuss is about when people say they are so afraid of dying. If we aren't really living then why not die? Does it really matter? It must not be in the grand total of things. If I die the world comes to an end, yet if someone in Iraq dies as the result of a murderous war policy no one seems to care. The threat of death is always with each of us, and we still go on as if we have forever to live.

What would each of you really do if you found out, as the woman in the film, that you only had three months to live? Would you really continue as you are or would you do something different? If you would do something different then why aren't you doing that now? Why do we waste such beautiful and delicious opportunities on such trivial and worthless matters as the so-called “modern” lifestyle?
In the comtemplation of just such a question I stumbled across a web site called “The Longevity Game? It is interesting to see what the “experts” (an insurance company) say about our age and our lifestyle. So if I'm supposed to live so long why won't they lower my life insurance premiums instead of raising them?

If you have any clues about the meaning of our lives and what you believe waits after you die, lemme know, I would like to hear all about it.

Gloom & Doom?

2005-04-18T10:59:00.001+03:00

It is interesting and frightening to know that in his effort to expand the Amerikan Empire throughout the world, "Dubya" Bush uses the words freedom and democracy so frequently when his government is so actively trying to stifle freedom in the United States.

Stephen Kinzer, an American author who has written about Turkey, Guatemala, Iran and the US government's meddling into their affairs through coups and assassinations, is a favorite author of mine. His work is well documented, well written and exciting to read, I hope you can enjoy him as much as I did.

You can see some of his writing for the NY Review of Books at:
http://www.nybooks.com/authors/1448

Also see and excerpt from his book on Turkey, Crescent and Star
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=2285

Here's one about being an unofficial goodwill "ambassador" to Turkey:
http://www.lightmillennium.org/summer_fall_01/kinzer_bu_esssay.html

Stephen Kinzer in his book All the Shah's Men.
http://hnn.us/roundup/archives/12/2004/07/
"It is not far-fetched to draw a line from [the Iran coup] through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York,"

All is not gloom and doom I hope, I am now out of the country and away from the repressive Bush regime and intend to stay that way.

Ekonomik Demokracy in Amerika?

2005-04-16T20:59:00.001+03:00

Always one to attempt to tweak the toes of the giant called Amerika (the USA to some of you) I recommend to the serious reader who is trying to make sense of the Amerikan empire the following web site:
Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle for the 21st Century (3rd Edition) by J.W. Smith.

Some quotes from his page on Suppressing the World's break for Economic Freedom:

The Cold War, battling Communism for freedom? Fuggedaboudit...
"The (American) public has...been conditioned to believe that they were battling communism all over the world but, of the governments overthrown, only Afghanistan and Chile were originally communist."

America as an Empire predates the Cold War
"...corporate powers, working in part through missionary groups first to gain control of indigenous societies and then to gain control of their land, had been behind...destabilizations and genocides throughout the 20th-Century. Since WWII the CIA had been deeply involved in the same process for the same purpose."

What about Vietnam?
"At the officially acknowledged cost of $800-billion (1990 dollars) to conduct that war and another $800-billion for the cost and damage incurred by the Vietnamese, for a total of $1.6-trillion, America could have given every man, woman, and child in Vietnam (62-million people) $13,000 or about $90,000 per family."

Bush's Understanding of the World

2005-04-15T19:01:00.002+03:00

The original Abbott & Costello dialogue of "Who's On First" from which this parody was derived. You can also download an audio recording of the Abbott & Costello dialogue.

Confidential tape recorded in a White House somewhere in the world
(We take you now to the Oval Office.)

George: Condi! Nice to see you. What's happening?

Condi: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China.

George: Great. Lay it on me.

Condi: Hu is the new leader of China.

George: That's what I want to know.

Condi: That's what I'm telling you.

George: That's what I'm asking you. Who is the new leader of China?

Condi: Yes.

George: I mean the fellow's name.

Condi: Hu.

George: The guy in China.

Condi: Hu.

George: The new leader of China.

Condi: Hu.

George: The Chinaman!

Condi: Hu is leading China.

George: Now whaddya' asking me for?

Condi: I'm telling you Hu is leading China.

George: Well, I'm asking you. Who is leading China?

Condi: That's the man's name.

George: That's who's name?

Condi: Yes.

George: Will you or will you not tell me the name of the new leader of China?

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Yassir? Yassir Arafat is in China? I thought he was in the Middle East.

Condi: That's correct.

George: Then who is in China?

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Yassir is in China?

Condi: No, sir.

George: Then who is?

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Yassir?

Condi: No, sir.

George: Look, Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of China. Get me the Secretary General of the U.N. on the phone.

Condi: Kofi?

George: No, thanks.

Condi: You want Kofi?

George: No.

Condi: You don't want Kofi.

George: No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk. And then get me the U.N.

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Not Yassir! The guy at the U.N.

Condi: Kofi?

George: Milk! Will you please make the call?

Condi: And call who?

George: Who is the guy at the U.N?

Condi: Hu is the guy in China.

George: Will you stay out of China?!

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the U.N.~

Condi: Kofi.

George: All right! With cream and two sugars. Now get on the phone.

(Condi picks up the phone.)
Condi: Rice, here.

George: Rice? Good idea. And a couple of egg rolls, too. Maybe we should send some to the guy in China. And the Middle East. Can you get Chinese food in the Middle East?

Shogun and cross cultural understanding

2005-04-14T19:25:00.002+03:00

I have been reading James Clavell's book Shogun. The novel and later film are both loosely based upon a real character named William Adams.

It has been said that Clavell's book is the best ever written on the complexities of cross cultural communication, its hazards and its rewards. As a former US citizen now living my life in Turkey I can seriously relate to what Blackthorne, the main character in the book, goes through. Learning the subtleties and nuance of a new culture, especially if not learned yet in the language, can be fun, serious and possibly dangerous. Certainly that was the case in 16th century Japan where a person could literally lose their head for breaking a cultural rule or taboo. Only those who learned fast lived long.

Zen and Buddhist philosophy heavily influences the main character, an Englishman who came by luck to Japan. His struggles to understand the Japanese undergirded by their Zen philosophy and customs are sometimes hilarious to the reader, often dangerous to the Englishman and always serious to the Japanese.

Some of Clavell's passages are pure poetry. I was especially struck by both the simplicity and the complexity in the following passages.

pg. 413: "Karma is Karma. Be thou of Zen. Remember, in tranquillity, that the Absolute, the Tao, is within thee, that no priest or cult or dogma or book or saying or teaching or teacher stands between Thou and It. Know that Good and Evil are irrlevant, I and Thou irrelevant, Inside and Outside irrelevant as are Life and Death. Enter into the Sphere where there is no fear of death nor hope of afterlife, where thou art free of the impediments of life or the needs of salvation. Thou are thyself the Tao. Be thou, now, a rock against which the waves of life rush in vain..."

pg 431: "Karma is the beginning of knowledge. Next is patience. Patience is very important. The strong are the patient ones. Patience means holding back your inclination to the seven emotions: hate, adoration, joy, anxiety, anger, grief, fear. If you don't give way to the seven, if you're patient, then you'll soon understand all manner of things and be in harmony with Eternity."

I recently came across another quote from Nichiren Daishonin which I thought enlightening:
http://www.sgi-usa.org/buddhism/buddhismtoday/bc010.htm

"Suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life, and continue chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, no matter what happens"

Christian Fundamentalism--The REAL Danger

2005-04-07T06:45:00.002+03:00

I like to read the New York Review of Books. It is one of the most literate of literary papers or newsprint magazines. If you can't read above the 12th grade level don't bother, you are either too stupid to understand or too lazy to find a good dictionary.

I just read Bill Moyers'

article "Welcome to Doomsday" (full text here) and it is one of the best explanations I have found so far of why the Christian right wing and their nutty following are so supportive of Israel. I always wondered why these nut cases were so supportive of the "Christ killers" and now I know.

Here is a small sampling of what Moyers tells us:

"The plot of the Rapture—the word never appears in the Bible although some fantasists insist it is the hidden code to the Book of Revelation—is rather simple, if bizarre...Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned the Messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be transported to heaven where, seated at the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents writhe in the misery of plagues—boils, sores, locusts, and frogs—during the several years of tribulation that follow."

If there are any US citizens out there who still believe in the "real" Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and Snow White, then this is a tale for you. The rest of you should read Moyer's article and then get out of the madhouse called the US of A as soon as possible because "fat city" is going to be the scene of the new rapture if Bush has his way. A utopia for the Christian right.

And you thought Bin Laden was dangerous???

Science and Artificial Intelligence

2005-04-02T15:37:00.002+03:00

The two articles below I find profoundly disturbing much the same way I do when I read about cloning experiments, DNA research, and other “scientific” experiments.

A New Company to Focus on Artificial Intelligence
(The NY Times may require you to register)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/technology/24think.html

Palm founders start artificial intelligence company
http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=159905937

I find it difficult to believe that the progeny of the scientific community which brought us germ and gas warfare and later the atomic and hydrogen bombs and other military madness (remember WMD's and Saddam Hussein?) can do little but move us more rapidly toward our own destruction. All species will have or have had their time on earth, when is the reign of humans to be over?

Skynet (don’t let the first two quotes stop you from reading on)
If you have not seen the Terminator films you should see I & II, especially II but it makes more sense if you have seen the first one.

Read this document carefully and fully, take into account the nature of the military and who knows what secret stuff is out there, couple that with the inquisitiveness of the scientific community and the rich rewards they reap when given government grants and the following scenario is not far fetched.

http://www.goingfaster.com/term2029/skynet.html

And finally, if you are not paranoid enough by now...

The below is from terminatorfiles.com, sci-fi but still we should think about what we as humans are doing to our future...

ROBOTS BECOMING SELF-AWARE?!
http://www.terminatorfiles.com/reload.htm?extras/articles/robotics_001.htm

“If we remove the structural difference between biological and artificial brains, the question of artificial consciousness can only become religious. If human consciousness is determined by divine intervention, then clearly no artificial system can ever become self-aware. If, on the other hand, human consciousness is an electrical neural state spontaneously developed by complex brains, then the possibility of realising an artificial self-aware being remains open. If consciousness is a physical property of the brain, then the question becomes, when will a computer become self-aware?”

Shaking hands with Saddam Hussein

2005-02-08T23:15:00.003+02:00

In the "bad old days" when the US government was still sleeping with any enemy of an enemy, Saddam Hussein looked like just the whore to sleep with. He was fighting the Iranians who everyone knows were (and still are) the bad guys in the international arena. (Ever wonder who are the good guys?) They are still Dubya's Axis of Evil which also included North Korea. So take a look at "Shaking Hands: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983" Ole Rummy just did not know how bad Saddam was at the time I guess...

The article, in part says, "Prolonging the war was phenomenally expensive. Iraq received massive external financial support from the Gulf states, and assistance through loan programs from the U.S. The White House and State Department pressured the Export-Import Bank to provide Iraq with financing, to enhance its credit standing and enable it to obtain loans from other international financial institutions."

"The U.S., which followed developments in the Iran-Iraq war with extraordinary intensity, had intelligence confirming Iran's accusations, and describing Iraq's "almost daily" use of chemical weapons..." So here is the US intelligence community documenting the use of chemical weapons (remember WMD?) by Iraq against Iranians and even its own people.

What was the US response to this use of WMD?--"National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 114, dated November 26, 1983, concerned specifically with U.S. policy toward the Iran-Iraq war. The directive reflects the administration's priorities: it calls for heightened regional military cooperation to defend oil facilities..."Because of the real and psychological impact of a curtailment in the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf on the international economic system, we must assure our readiness to deal promptly with actions aimed at disrupting that traffic." It does not mention chemical weapons

If you are or were a Gulf War veteran, you were probably shot at with weapons either manufactured in or financed by the good ole' US of A and these were given or sold to Saddam to make sure the flow of oil was not disrupted from Saddam's coffers. Whooppee, are we havin' fun yet?

It is one thing to overthrow a tinpot dictator with a ragtag army of unmotivated recruits like Saddam's troops in Iraq. It is quite another to fight fanatical Iranians and especially North Koreans who have over 900,000 troops, well trained, well-fed, full of propaganda and ready to fight. So Dubya, watcha got to say for yourself about all this?

He never makes a mistake folks...

Life is a great secret... we just try to solve it.

2005-02-07T22:38:00.004+02:00

What is life? To some it is being born, live and die one day. As unexpected as when you are young or when you have gone as much as 80! It dont matter. Death comes as a surprise to all. Don't know why; it hasn't come to me yet!

Villagers, women, religion and politics

2005-02-07T20:31:00.003+02:00

By law, Turkish women have the same rights enjoyed by women in the US or the EU. You will sometimes see in the cities, the symbols of the conservative Islamic communities, the black head to toe coverings of conservative or fundamentalist Islam. Seeing this is usually a shock and not common. Istanbul especially is a very modern city grappling with an emerging nation economy and an influx of village people seeking to share the gold with which the city allegedly paves its streets.

Village women have always been slightly more emancipated than their city "cousins" on the long road from Islamic rule under the Ottomans to a free, democratic and secular (non religious) state...

Even during the time of the sultans, village women, in general, were accepted by the men as more equal than city women because their labor was so essential to the survival of the household and, by extension, the village. A village man tended to be a bit more circumspect before he abused his wife, there were customs and rules which must be obeyed handed down over the generations and even though the men had superiority, they only exercised it when a women fell out "of her place."

I do not believe this is different, for most of past history, from Europe or the "New World" in America. A woman's road to greater freedom has been a long struggle against repression, brutality, bloodshed, rape and humiliation in most of the so-called "civilized" world.

The reality in the more remote villages is a bit different, especially in the far eastern part of Turkey and some of the fundamentalist enclaves. Women there are still treated as property "owned" by their men and especially their families. This is a conservative country, with traditional values and no more so than in these villages. Traditional values outweigh considerations of the laws freeing women from rape by their husbands or the "honor killings" often perpetrated by fathers or brothers against a sister or daughter who has an affair with someone before she is properly married.

An interesting and detailed bibliography of women's issues in Turkey could make for good reading or research for those of you so inclined.

It is an interesting irony that the Justice and Development Party or AK(Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi), which came to power two years ago under Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his foreign minister Abdullah Gul, has so-called "Islamic roots" and yet is rightly credited with moving the country toward the west and EU membership.

Ataturk started the revolution by turning the ship of the Turkish State around from East to West in the '20's and '30's. Now a conservative and slightly "religious" political party, which Ataturk would have probably repressed or eliminated, with a broad base of support, especially among those who could be called "fundamentalist" is trying to make Turkey an important and emergent power broker between the Middle East and the West.

This is an interesting country...

Amerikan dreamin'

2005-02-06T01:04:00.002+02:00

Well we moved, Ayşe, the two cats and me, the 900 km from Kas to Stamboul on Friday. When we left there was snow on the ground, something which almost NEVER happens in our little village close to Kas. A harbinger of things to come. We arrived late that evening and on Saturday morning more snow, guess what, still MORE SNOW today!! School was called off for tomorrow and maybe the next day. What is with this snow? I said when I lived in Florida that if I never saw snow again it would be too soon.

Had an emotional goodbye from a couple of our village neighbors. They think we are moving for good and simply cannot understand why we just do not stay. Hard to argue with their logic nor their perspective. Have to wonder why myself...

People from the US, those beings who call themselves "Americans" as if there were not other people other than those in the US on the continent, are in a state of perpetual fantasy about their lives.

Andrew Moravcsik wrote a recent article entitled "Dream On America" in which he writes "For years, much of the world did aspire to the American way of life. But today countries are finding more appealing systems in their own backyards."

Gasoline in Europe and Turkey costs the equivalent of over 7 USD per gallon now and US drivers whine about 2 USD per gallon. They complain that Europeans take too many holidays while they work way over 40 hours per week just to keep their heads above middle class values which they do not need nor cannot afford. In addition, if they are lucky, or a rich CEO, they MIGHT get a two week vacation after several years on the job.

US citizens have the lowest percentage of passport holders, a dearth of speakers of any language but English, and they think the rest of the world should be looking up to them. Mr Moravcsik debunks that myth.

He writes "The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world. Not only do others not share America's self-regard, they no longer aspire to emulate the country's social and economic achievements...Countries today have dozens of political, economic and social models to choose from." In other words, the US is no longer the only game in town. The world is changing and the imperials hopes of the US are not.

I believe this administration, like almost all the previous ones clear back to Harry Truman, just wants to throw its weight around. Except this time, Dubya (da Prez), is on a mission from God!...

Scary

Rhythms in the village

2005-02-02T19:00:00.004+02:00

Village people live their lives according to a very definite rhythm. As I was standing on our terrace this evening looking onto the village houses below, I noticed that all of their home fires started burning at about the same time. They go to bed relatively early (but not usually "with the chickens") and they all get up and can usually be seen moving out of their houses after 7 am...

The goat herder (coban) Hassan and his mother Emine teyze (which means aunt in Turkish), have a certain and definite time to move their goats from higher to lower foraging. Hassan takes them up to an ancient Lycian site called Phellos a bit above our place in the morning and brings them down around noon. Then Emine teyze takes them to lower areas in the valley and brings them back close to dusk. The goats are like not so well behaved children but seemingly easily manageable for this mother and her son.

Goats are a fact of village life as every village has them. There is at least one herder in each village and their foraging creates an ecological mess of the foliage which has taken its toll on the Turkish countryside over the centuries. If you do not fence your property, the goats will eat almost anything available. Trees cannot grow tall because they eat the young saplings and shrubbery, which will grow several meters when left alone, barely survives. Goats are cute I admit, but, I cannot get out of my mind the image of an "eating machine" when I see one.

As the day dies the voices of the villagers get softer in anticipation of the night falling over the valley. Perhaps it is just because of moving indoors for the evening meal and a time to rest or perhaps it is in respect for the spirits which inhabit the night, or it could be both. Even the wind respects the night and although it is not often windy where we live, it can whip up a breeze in the afternoons. When evening falls a blanket of silence starts to descend as if it is what wraps around the entity we call night and darkens the sky with its thick covering. The silence can be deafening. The ordinary household sounds take on a whole new significance. After some time the refrigerator sounds like a truck passing by and a remote controlled stereo waiting its signal to awaken humms like a cloud of bees in the room. Sitting in the dark and listening to the silence is an awakening experience and has a Zen property to it which puts us in awe of the power of nature.

Another day in the life of the village...

Mustafa Amca Died

2005-02-01T21:06:00.005+02:00

Mustafa Amca, our “crazy neighbor” died today. He was almost 70 years old and had been under heavy sedation in a hospital in Antalya for over two weeks as the result of a massive stroke which struck him down at his home immediately across from us. Amca (Amjuh) means uncle in Turkish and is usually a title of respect for an elder man.

Mustafa Amca was a bit of a bother to say the least...

We bought our house in July of 2003, an old stone village house with the idea to renovate and live in it. We found a local architect and after much work with her agreed to start construction around the last weeks of November. We did not reckon with Mustafa Amca.

Most of the villagers here go to another village (the “yayla”) in the summer months, usually June through October, in the mountains about 70 kilometers from here so almost no one is left here during the summer months. Mustafa Amca did not know we had purchased the house until he returned from the yayla in November. When he saw us getting ready to start our construction he came up to the house and asked us what we were doing on HIS land?!? Imagine our total surprise. My wife told him that we had a deed (tapu in Turkish) for our land and that it had been measured and we were sure that we had everything in legal order. As she tried to talk to and reason with him, he became more and more agitated and told us to get off his land. I stepped in and told my wife to tell him that we were going for the Jandarma and if he was still there when we came back he would be trespassing. He started for his house and said he had a gun and was not afraid of dying since he was an old man anyway.

Well, we did get the Jandarma and they came and the old man seemed somewhat subdued in their presence (they are a force to be feared in most areas) but still insistent that he had a tapu somewhere around that would prove his claim against our land. We decided to delay our construction until this could be straigntened out.

We started to dig around a bit and found out that the land and house we bought was the childhood home of Mustafa and his three siblings. We bought the house from the widow and son of one of Mustafa's brothers. The original land was owned by their father and he gave a parcel of adjoining land to each sibling but none of the other parcels had a house on it, only ours! We had a meeting of the surviving siblings and found out they all disliked, and in Mustafa's case, hated their deceased brother. They claim he cheated them out of part of the house we were going to renovate!! They were each making a claim to one room of the house and Mustafa was saying that at least 1000 square meters of our land, adjoining his, was actually his land! What a mess. In addition, Mustafa's son claimed he was consulting a lawyer in Istanbul who would block us unless we settled with the siblings to their satisfaction. We knew that to get tied up in a court in Turkey can take years before a land dispute would be settled.

Villagers until very recently have always had some special privileges regarding their land rights and boundaries. Foreigners and “outsiders” (Turks from the cities) had less rights and often could be beaten in a court dispute. This has thankfully changed but defending your rights can be costly and time consuming. So we made an offer to pay them a small amount for each of “their” rooms of the house. (This was what we believed, at the time, to be the less costly solution to this problem.) This payment was contingent upon each of them signing away any future claims, in the presence of each other, a land officer, the old muhtar (a mayor like office in Turkish villages) and, of course, us. So we finally had a document drawn up, each of them signed an original and were also given a copy of the land boundaries which they also agreed were correct. So, then we thought, our troubles were over and we could start construction. Little did we know...

Our next contact with Mustafa was when we had some village workers pruning the trees and pulling thistles and he started to harass and harangue them that they were on his land and they should get off and so on. This happened a couple of times but since he was not actually on the land we sort of blew him off. A bit later, when a couple of the guys were fertilizing the almond trees he almost came up on the land and his shouting and cursing was so prolific the village workers got scared and started to leave. I saw this as they were leaving and stopped them, got my wife, the architect and another construction worker and asked my wife to tell the guys to continue to work and we would protect them. I also told her to tell Mustafa that we were about to call the Jandarma again if he did not stop. I then went to the land wall next to the road where Mustafa was shouting and told him in my limited Turkish that the land was mine and the tree was mine and he should go. I started to video his actions and then he started to leave, a bit cowed but still shouting over his shoulder.

Our “victory” was short-lived. A couple of weeks later we received word from an assistant to the Muhtar that we were to go to the Jandarma station that afternoon. When we got there we were treated well but had to respond to a written complaint from Mustafa, which he submitted to the prosecutor's office and claimed that I threatened him with bodily harm and tried to strangle him!!! He also made a written complaint to the land office that we had stolen and were trespassing on his land! We then spent the next three hours responding in writing to his complaints that he was totally wrong, that if anyone, it was he who had threatened us and so on. The Jandarma guys were very sympathetic calling my wife “hanim” (a sign of respect) all the time and letting us know they also believed the complaint was frivolous but none the less, they had to respond to a complaint lodged with the prosecutor's office. My wife was fingerprinted, we were both read our rights and we had to go to the local hospital to be seen by a doctor to swear we had not been tortured into making our statements!! What a day...

A short while later, the prosecutor's office called us all to come to wait for their decision to either throw the case out or take us to court. In their wisdom they saw the claim was frivolous and threw it out. In Turkey, unfortunately, a frivolous claim can be made and unless the people who make such claims are countersued, no harm will come. We chose not to go the court route unless forced to defend ourselves.

After that Mustafa continued to occasionally shout at our workers but in general left them alone. When we would meet him on the road he would pretend we did not even exist and look right through us. If we offered him a ride back from Kas he would curse us and tell us to go on, so much for neighborly relationships!!

Our next encounter was a complaint he made that we were trespassing on village land on the end opposite to his border with us. He made this complaint to the village council and the muhtar. The muhtar came to visit and since he is young and was new to the office at the time he thought he could convince us that Mustafa was right. When he left our meeting he was shown how wrong he could be unless he got his facts straight. He had listened to all Mustafa's frivolous claims and believed them until we showed him otherwise.

We were relieved when the village council told Mustafa he was wrong and that our borders were correct according to our tapu. Again we were fooled into believing our troubles were over. Wrong again...

Next came the infamous “almond tree attack.” Late last year during the end of our almond harvest, I was out with a friend while my wife was overseeing three village workers who were harvesing our almonds. This harvesing consists of using very long tree branches, often three or four meters long, to bang the branches of the almond trees and knock the almonds out onto plastic sheets laid around the base of the tree to catch them. As they set onto Mustafa's claimed portion of OUR land, he actually came up on the land shouting and cursing the most vile of things. He shouted at them all to get off his land and that they should all get cancer first on one side of their bodies and then on the other and really awful things according to my wife. One of the workers was so upset about what Mustafa was saying he almost hit him with one of the almond tree branches. Fortunately my wife stopped him or he might have killed Mustafa!

My wife called the Jandarma and they came and were quite stern with Mustafa this time, as if they were out of patience with his actions. The officer asked him what was the problem as Mustafa seemed still agitated against my wife. Mustafa claimed she and the workers were trespassing on HIS land. The officer said that if that was the case why didn't Mustafa call the Jandarma? Why did my wife call instead? Mustafa's reply was that since it was Sunday he did not think the Jandarma were working. At this, the officer was a bit upset and asked Mustafa if this were true then the crooks and criminals must be having a lot of fun on Sundays since the Jandarma did not work that day. He warned Mustafa that if my wife called him again, he would take him to jail. He also told him that because my wife was such a good person and did not wish to make a complaint against him was the only reason he was not going to jail right then.

A short while later, my wife met Mustafa's wife and asked her why there was so much trouble between them. She again made the claim we had “stolen” their land and that the authorities did not “listen” to her husband. She is at least as crazy as him of course otherwise they could not have tolerated each other all these years.

Again, we thought this might be the end of our “crazy neighbor” problems but alas, this was not to be...

A few weeks went by and one day the Muhtar came by and said again my wife, me and the Muhtar himself had to go to the Jandarma office to answer another complaint. We had recently sold a parcel of our property, the piece Mustafa claimed to be his own. We warned our British buyers about Mustafa before they bought the land but they said it would be no problem to them even though I insisted they reconsider. They bought the land and started construction, with our written agreement, before their formal deed or tapu came back in their name. They were starting construction of their new house on what was technically, our land. So when the muhtar came by we had to go because the land was still in our name.

Mustafa, true to form had made another written complaint that a roadside wall our new neighbors were building was too close to the road and it had to be moved back even though much of the concrete had already been poured. He further claimed that one lone almond tree on the opposite edge of our property was actually on village land and that we were stealing the almond crop from the village. (A major haul of which, when shelled would have made a nice snack for the average US couch potato while watching a football game.)

Again we marched into the Jandarma office, this time the Jandarma guys actually were laughing about the entire episode and were making jokes with my wife at the same time they were apologizing for the inconvenience. Again we had to write responses to his complaints and again we were taken to the hospital to ascertain any “torture” we may have endured. This time the trip was a lot more lighthearted.

This complaint, since it also named him, really pissed off the Muhtar and he went to Mustafa and told him he should withdraw the complaint otherwise he would have another failure to his name in the prosecutor's office and that we were losing patience and might initiate a counter complaint against Mustafa for trespassing to which we were legally entitled due to the aforementioned “almond tree attack.” Weeks went by and nothing more came of the complaint. The villagers, along with Mustafa and his wife, went again to the yayla in the mountains and we were free of him for a while.

When they returned we thought they might give our new British neighbors a hard time since they were the “cause” of so much trouble due to their construction but they were surprisingly friendly to the Brits and they told us it was “much ado about nothing.” We doubted it but hope this were true.

Then a little over two weeks ago, Mustafa's wife was again out in her yard, screaming profanities at the top of her lungs that the new neighbors were building too close to the road and even called her neighbor, one of the village elders, down to her house to put him through a grilling over this accursed wall. She was shouting that we should all get cancers and such things and started to get Mustafa riled up and excited again. At this he evidently collapsed and they called a doctor from Kas who said when she was examining Mustafe he had a stroke and she had him taken by ambulance to Antalya, some four hours distant. There he remained until his demise, early this morning.

Today, the entire village seemed to be present awaiting the arrival of the body of Mustafa Amca, our "crazy neighbor." Muslim tradition means that a person is buried not later than the 'morrow of their demise'. When the body arrived, a sad and mournful din rose up from the family and many of the women. They carried the body into the house and then a few minutes later took it to the mosque. It is interesting that the majority of the people of this village who previously commented vigorously (behind Mustafa's back) not to like him, when he was alive, attended his funeral. Custom dictates and funeral customs dictate absolutely I guess.

Today there was a steady procession of visitors to the family of Mustafa amca. Village people walking wearing their best clothes, women with snow white head scarves and men in their best coats and hats. City people in their nice cars and clothing marking them as NOT from the village. This procession continued all day and into the evening. It is an interesting thing to watch this ritual being played out. It seems if one of them does not show up, then perhaps no one will attend their own demise, they may go friendless or the "evil eye" may cast its pall upon them. Who knows for sure what is on their minds as they come and go? Perhaps it is just that they are curious.

Never has the axiom of “what goes around, comes around” been more true than in this case. Over his lifetime Mustafa made many enemies, many feared or hated him and it seemed almost no one loved him. Such a waste and such a pity, our stupid, foolish pride and unbridled anger will always do us in if we succumb to its seduction.

May Mustafa Amca rest in peace now, for his life was full of anger and conflict.

Easy Rider in Amerika

2005-01-31T21:11:00.001+02:00

Easy Rider was a heavy trip the first time I saw it when it was released in the cinema. The ending was a numbing and shocking scene and I literally sat stunned and then cried. Afterwards I was too sad for words for several days. Still a not so subtle reminder that Amerika is a dangerous place for too much dissent.

Amerika then was a very heavy trip for anyone who dared to stand out, to be different, to take the unbeaten path, or whose hair was long or skin was darker than white. So much for "rugged individualism" huh?

When the film came out in 1969 the civil rights movement was under full steam and also under a heavy pall because of the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. The war in Vietnam was in full swing and bodies were coming home a planeful a day. Of course we cannot even count the Vietnamese who died. Anecdote: I remember reading that someone had kept careful count of all the "viet cong" who had been reported killed by US troops and the total was greater than the population of BOTH North and South Vietnam!!

I just finished reading Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" which was first published in 1955!! (Made into a movie recently starring Michael Caine, read the book AND see the film) 1955 was fully 10 years before US Marines waded ashore and escalated the war into the nation dividing gut wrencher it was to become. 1955 was a year after the French were finally defeated at Dien Bien Phu and if you read Greene's book you will, I hope, wonder how anyone in their right mind who read it then could have continued with US policies in the area. 1955 was only two years after the US Government and its new CIA pulled off its first "regime change" in Iran and toppled a constitutionally and democratically elected prime minister and replaced him with the Shah, a cruel tyrant by even conservative estimates.

In the late '60's, The Black Panther Party members ruled their neighborhoods, they were "niggers with guns" and they scared the s--- out of the white establishment. They did very, VERY revolutionary things like giving free breakfasts to community children whose parents could not afford to feed them or stopped crime in the neighborhoods their members patrolled. Imagine that a black woman could actually walk home from work in the late evening and not be afraid of violence to her body.

Fred Hampton, a prominent and actually moderate Panther leader in Chicago was shot to death in his bed while sleeping by several of "Chicago's finest" who broke into his apartment without a warrant.

The Democratic convention of 1968 was totally wrecked by internal division and tremendous demonstrations in the streets heavily marred by Mayor Daly's police who were later branded by a "blue ribbon" commission as having created the riots which eventually got outta total control.

Soon after the Chicago debacle, seven men were put on trial for causing the riots in place of Mayor Daly's cops because they had long hair, advocated freedom of assembly in public parks and smoked marijuana among many of their more heinous crimes. They were called The "Chicago Seven" even though Bobby Seale was tried along with them. Seale, a Black Panther who was not even in Chicago during the convention, was tried along with the yippies and commies who did go to (legally) demonstrate. He refused the lawyers who freely represented the other 6 and wanted to make his own defense. The judge refused him this constitutional right and had Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom and tied to a chair so he could not move nor make a sound. Thus, he was "tried" by a judge and jury of his "peers" and they were all found guilty.

In 1970 the National Guard shot and killed four university students at Kent State University in Ohio and wounded many many more. In almost the same week, Mississippi State police opened up with rifle and automatic weapon fire at a dorm building on Jackson State University in Mississippi. JSU was an all black university. Two students were killed and many wounded. These students in these and many other instances were exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. The Kent State students were given national publicity and songs were written about them (4 dead in Ohio by CSNY) because the parents of the dead kids were upper middle class and...white! How many of you even KNEW about JSU?? So much for the land of the free...

My ex-wife, whose parents were both from Mexico and who looked very "ethnic", introduced me to white and brown racism by just being who she was and hanging out with me, her "hippy" boyfriend. We were thrown out of places to eat in Oklahoma, hassled by small town kops in Kansas and warned explicitly by Houston gestapo (police) that we were in the wrong part of town and we should leave (we were in a public park).

Sooooo, it is not surprising some young people who see Easy Rider today find it somewhat depressing. The subtitle says something like, "a man went looking for America...and found it!" which seems to sum it all up.

I guess if I have any regrets about my life they are that I did not do more. My contribution to all the above was so small I have to wonder if I did anything at all. So, please forgive me if I do not ever get homesick for the US, I want to leave its violent, fat food culture behind. Like all empires its demise is emminent, whether it takes 10 or 100 years, and all the killing and bloodshed in the name of freedom and democracy will be for McDonald's and Walmart.

Amerika WAS depressing but at least there was the semblance of a movement for social change (we literally called it "The Movement") and so the streets of Amerika were very much alive. When the war started to wind down, the draft was ended so rich kids no longer had to worry about trying to find a dodge (like Bush and Cheney), and many of the more troublesome politicos were safely in their graves. Then the "movement" started to sputter out, to splinter and fall apart and most leftists realized they had again been sold out by the middle class and this time the working class had been successfully coopted by being allowed to integrate into the lower niche of the middle class and everyone started to stay home and watch WWII John Wayne movies.

Now? Amerika is just depressing...

Movin' to Stamboul

2005-01-30T07:57:00.001+02:00

We are about to make a temporary move to Istanbul from Kas. I took a temporary teaching position at Koc School, a private, US oriented K-12 school started by the Koc Foundation from one of the financially richest families in the country. This is like Georg Carlin's commentary about "stuff". We gotta decide what stuff to take with us and what stuff to leave in the village house. We are taking our babies of course, Frida and Fatih our cats, some underwear, a change of clothes or two and who knows what else. We are leaving on Friday, 04 February and are still not sure what stuff to take. I guess the night before we will run through our usual frenzy and then just take it easy on the road up.

More later...

Doing the Turkish "limbo"

2005-01-26T21:59:00.001+02:00

We live in a kind of strange limbo between the villagers and the lives we left behind. My wife was educated in Bogazici (Bosphorus) University, the oldest and still the most prestigious in Turkey. Besides Turkish, she speaks fluently two other languages, French and English. She learned her French in her early years at another famous Istanbul school--Notre Dame de Sion. It seems she is full of prestigiousness while me? Well, there is a country song which says "I'm just an old lump of coal but I'm a gonna be a diamond someday."

I was raised in the US, therefore I speak two languages, profanity and broken English! My Turkish is slowly limping along, I know a lot of words, just not enough of the same kind of words to put together a credible sentence!! I converse with our village neighbors occasionally when they catch me outside. My little scraps of Turkish and their ability to gesture and make significant faces allow us to communicate in a way which I often find remarkable.

My wife speaks Istanbul Turkish which is to say "proper" Turkish. The village people speak their own brand with plenty of accents and occasionally words which when used in a sentence take on a completely different meaning. Since many of them often speak fast, even my wife, on occasion, has difficulty understanding what they are saying.

We own the DVD of a very interesting film called "Snatch" by Guy Ritchie, the writer and director who also wrote and directed "Lock, Stock and Three Smoking Barrels", two very funny films. There is a scene in the film "Snatch" where two British guys are listening to Mickey, played by Brad Pitt, speak to them in a version of English called "pikey" which is also a derogatory term for a gypsy. After a few conversational passes at them with what appear to have some meaning only to the pikeys, one of the British guys says "yeh I understand, allow me a moment to confer with my colleague" whereupon he turns his back to the pikeys with his friend and says "did you understand anything he just said?" This scene is so funny to us because this is what my wife occasionally goes through with our village neighbors.

I recently finished reading a book about people in Turkey along the south coast where we live and set from 1900 until the end of the Turkish revolution in 1923. It is called “Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres who also wrote “Captain Corelli's Mandolin” which became a bit famous when Nicholas Cage starred in the film version. My wife is reading it now, she says that she is learning many things about her country she did not know because of our marriage. I am an amateur historian and love to read all about that “old stuff”. Many highly educated Turkish people still do not have a good grasp of their history. Somewhat because until the last couple of decades it was not too healthy to have an overly inquiring mind as several violently deceased journalists found out. Also Turkish history makes a huge deal of the Ottoman Empire and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. Both of these historical sagas are the stuff of legends for sure, but that is not all there is to know and far, far too many citizens just do not know or do not want to know.

I am not certain it is much better in other countries, just different I suppose. Any citizens who question the legitimacy of the nation in which they reside do so at their peril. Even, even, in the grand old US of A... I will write more about that later.

I have taken a teaching job in Istanbul for the remainder of this school year. An unusual event for a school to hire a teacher mid term unless a teacher is fired, resigns or dies, none of which is the case with me. The Headmaster of the school and I have known each other for several years and he kindly offered me this job when his technology administrator told the Headmaster he needed more time to work on the development of a school wide technology plan.

So, next week, my wife and I take off for five months to “Ole Stamboul” for life in the huge, noisy, dirty and traffic choked city. Ahhh, will I never learn? Last night late I stepped out on the terrace and listened and could hear---absolutely nothing!! I will miss that for the interregnum of our time away. By the way, Istanbul is the largest city in Europe!!!

Dawn, silence and the military

2005-01-25T23:00:00.002+02:00

Dawn comes slowly to this valley, creeping over the hills like a villian in a cheap cowboy film, waiting to spring upon all us unsuspecting settlers waiting below. The quiet is deafening, I unplug the speakers on my computer because even though they are turned off, the hum of juice through them is too loud to tolerate like the drip of a leaky faucet at one in the morning which reverbates through your skull until you are ready to tear out the offending appliance with your bare hands. The refrigerator sounds like a small truck cruising through the kitchen every time it awakens and the noisy click of the laptop keys when I press them is so loud I am afraid I will disturb my sleeping wife in the next room. Yeh, our village gets downright quiet before the dawn lightens up the sky with its promise of a day of warmth and sun.

On a normal day, we get from three to five cars coming down the path which passes for a road in front of our house. The roar of this traffic when it comes is always a bit of a shock because of the quiet. When a bird whistles or calls, when our local owl hoots or when a neighbor's donkey brays; the sounds are crisp and clear like the outline of an ink drawing on elegant stationery paper.

In contrast...
During the late 1950's strife and dissent started to spiral out of control on the streets of most of the large cities in Turkey. This resulted in an ever increasing inability of the government to control the brutality and killing and the frequent clashes between the left including communists and Alevi Muslims who consider themselves to be part of the wider Shi`a movement, meaning those who revere Ali (Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law) and the Twelve Imams of his house as opposed to the Sunni Muslims who hold themselves as the followers of the sunna (practice) of the prophet Muhammad as related by his companions. Sunnis are the majority in Turkey.

Many Alevis are on the left and have experienced frequent and recurring clashes with the right and other ultranationalists and fundamentalists, thugs and conservative Sunni Muslims since early Ottoman times.

On May 27, 1960 the military stepped in with a military coup to stop the violence and restore order.

The Armed Forces Coup and Interim Rule, 1960-61
Turkish army units, under the direction of the chief of General Staff, Cemal Gürsel, seized the principal government buildings and communications centers and arrested President Bayar, Prime Minister Menderes, and most of the DP representatives in the Grand National Assembly, as well as a large number of other public officials. Those arrested were charged with abrogating the constitution and instituting a dictatorship.They dissolved the government and eventually imprisoned, tried and hanged the Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes who was blamed for the collapse of law and order and because it seemed he was trying to move the country increasingly toward a more religious (sharia) type of government.

The Turkish military has long been viewed as the last bastion of protection from fundamentalist Islam and upholders of Kemalism or secular civilian government and those who would turn the country into another Iran or Saudi Arabia. When anyone in the civilian government started to move in that direction, the military gave very stern warnings that there was a line these people should not cross. Those who did were removed or “asked” to resign.

Earthquakes, cold and hot wars

2005-01-24T23:13:00.001+02:00

Late last evening we experienced an earthquake of 5.5 magnitude. This was the first we have known since we moved to the south coast of Turkey. Our old village house shook quite considerable. The cats were so afraid they ran under the couch and we had some difficult time to coax them back out. My wife was frightened for a while, understandably so. She experienced the terrible Marmara sea and Istanbul earthquake in 1999 where more than 15,000 people died, mostly from shoddy construction practices. We went outside and all was so very quiet and calm, the sky was clear and the stars and moon were full out against the very black sky. We felt a couple of more shocks a bit later. It was very cold for us, about 4 C so we kept the fireplace burning strong.

The Turks were US allies during the Korean War. When I was a kid I knew several Korean War vets who spoke highly of the Turkish troops. I never met a US soldier who knew a Turkish soldier during that war who had anything but praise for him. The Koreans and Chinese also found out how formidible a foe a Turkish solder could be. This was the first time large groups of Turkish soldiers left their country and traveled a long way to fight under a UN sponsored agenda. Their “reward” was their acceptance in the community of nations and Turkey was an early member of NATO. They have been a staunch and contributive member ever since.

Turkey, along with Greece, were the original “dominos” in the line of what was then believed Russian expansion and influence in the area. Turkey and Greece were considered strategically important by both the continental Europeans and the US during all of the “Cold War.” Turkey’s traditional enemy until the Turkish revolution in 1923 was Russia and their mutual distrust was used by Turkey’s western allies. President Harry S. Truman enunciated his “Truman Doctrine” in light of the threat to Turkey.

Turkey was an issue during the October of 1962 Cuban Missle Crisis when President John F. Kennedy stood Khruschev down and the Russian missles were subsequently ordered out of Cuba. Few people realize that Khruschev, as a face saving measure to his Politboro, asked Kennedy to dismantle US missles in Turkey, which the Russians saw as a direct threat equal to their missles in Cuba. Kennedy ordered them dismantled.

During that same “Cold War” the Turkish military was given and sold arms and extensive training by the United States. This resulted in the largest and most sophisticated military in this region. Turkey even manufactures F-16 fighter planes. The Turkish Air Force is considered one of the best in the world.

For over 50 years, human rights abuses in Turkey, made under the guise of “fighting communism” were usually overlooked by the “democratic” powers and never seemed to be a problem for the US and Europe until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then it became increasingly fashionable to bash the Turks for these abuses and three military interventions of 1960, 70 and 80 and their admittedly heavy handed treatment of drug dealers, dissidents, communists and Kurds.

During this same period, tin pot military dictators rose and fell throughout South America and the Arab countries of the Middle East. Most of them were supported by the United States because these dictatorships were right wing and rabidly anti communist. The adage of “the enemy of an enemy of mine is a friend” was never more true. What distinguished Turkey's military “coups” or interventions from these tin pot dictatorships was that when order was restored and the “usual suspects” were rounded up, the military turned the government back to the civilian Parliament and told them to try to clean up their act. That has been a difficult task since the death of Ataturk for many reasons.

Turkey today is a VERY different place than even 10 years ago and has gone through tremendous change.

The sun shines on Turkey

2005-01-23T22:50:00.001+02:00

The rain stopped for most of the day and the sun came out and we left the refuge of our village house for a bit of the "high life" in Kas. During the off tourist season (winter) Kas is actually kind of boring although the British seem to find it delightful no matter what the weather. It is getting cold tonight, down to about 5 C (41 F), we are staying close to the fire.

We live in a renovated stone village house which is over 80 years old with walls of stone about 62 cm thick. We have installed a steel fireplace insert in the location of the original open stone fireplace. Brrr..

Turkey is my “adopted” country of choice. I am off a Kansas farm in the United States. I am married to a Turkish woman and we met on the Internet. I belong to a widening community of expats and I do not expect to live in the US again.

We used to live in Istanbul and last year moved to Kas and now the small village of Cukurbag.

Turkish people are friendly to a fault. You cannot refuse their offers of hospitality without greatly offending them. They can be great friends, formidible enemies and confusing business people. This country has a history as old as it gets and many of its people are as modern as you think you are.

The very first Christian communities were spawned in what is now a country of mostly Muslim people. The government of the country is NOT Muslim although the AKP, the current majority political party in the Parliament has its "roots" in Islam, akin to the Christian Democrats in Germany.

Turkey's military is one of the mightiest in the entire region (including most of Europe). There are many, different and varied shades of Islam practiced here, similar to the differences between Catholics and Protestants in the Christian community.

Most US citizens are profoundly ignorant of Turkey and its people. I was, and you may be equally and possibly, blissfully, ignorant as well.

The Ottoman Empire reigned for over 600 years and the Mediterranean was its “lake”. The Turkish people are both proud of and sensitive about its Ottoman past.

The Ottoman Empire was finally overthrown by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the revolution of 1923. Ataturk made the cover of Time Magazine in 1923.

Currently Turkey is being held accountable for an alleged massacre of thousands of Armenians during WW I during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish government has written extensively on the issue.

The events surrounding the loss of so many Armenian lives during WW I may never be fully brought to light. However, even if it were well documented, it would pale to insignificance with the willful destruction of the Indian people in the Americas starting with Columbus and ending at the Massacre of Wounded Knee whereby well armed and well fed US troops killed hundreds of nearly frozen and starving women, children and old men.

At least 5 million Indian people were killed with some estimates ranging over 15 millon. No one knows for sure how many Indians were on the North American continent when Europeans first appeared. What is known is that during those 400 years the primary objective was either the enslavement, the removal to undesirable lands or the deliberate murder of the Indian people. Even "biological warfare" (a contemporary Weapon of Mass Destruction) was waged by US federal troops who gave the Indians smallpox infected blankets from which they had no immunity. Indian people were systematically murdered or driven out of their ancesteral homelands by the encroachment of the white man, many of whom were, in a cruel twist of fate, escaping genocide or repression in their native country only to come to the US and wage that same repression upon the red people.

I hope you have a nice day...

Inaugural soup for the cold

2005-01-22T19:55:00.003+02:00

It is raining and cold. 8 C (46.4 F). on the usually sunny Teke Peninsula of the southernmost coast of Turkey. We live among the ghosts of the ancient Lycians who inhabited this region over 2500 years ago. The sun came out for a couple of hours and now the sky is starting to cloud over again. We live beside the Mediterranean and the people who have long lived here have an attitude to match. Theirs is a rather laid back, casual and “take things as they come” perspective which can fool the casual observer into believing they are just plain lazy.

The attitude of the people who live here is far removed from the corridors of the White House in Washington, DC, yet the attitudes of the people in those corridors affect the lives of those of us on this quiet peninsula, trying to simply live our lives.

Gandhi wrote that we cannot separate the ends from the means ..."in fighting evil, there is a danger that in using evil's weapons, one may become evil oneself. Your belief that there is no connection between the means and the end is a great mistake. Through that mistake even men who have been considered religious have committed grievous crimes. If I want to cross the ocean, I can do so only by means of a vessel; if I were to use a cart for that purpose, both the card and I would soon ind the bottom... The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree." You cannot wage war and expect to gain peace.

In his 2005 inaugural speech, George W. Bush has once again told us of his messianic vision to bring liberty, peace and freedom to the entire world. Mr. Bush has consistently exercised means which are completely contrary to his stated ends. (Please note that I did not put Mr. Gandhi and Mr. Bush in the same paragraph.)

1) How do you bring peace to a nation like Iraq which the US, in a pre-emptive, non-defensive invasion, shattered and splintered like so much kindling and since that invasion has sparked so many fiery conflagrations? What kind of peace do you bring to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqui people whose family members have died or disappeared as a direct result of this war and to the families of the US, British and other military killed in this invasion?

2) How do you bring liberty and freedom to the tortured inmates of Abu Gharib or Guantanamo or to the thousands of persons who are “detained” in the US? All of these people have been denied fundamental human rights and they have not been given any of the legal rights guaranteed by the US Constitution Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention nor the “rules” of the US war machine, the Military Code of Conduct. "the enemy has no right to try to force a POW to provide any additional information."

3) How do you justify the staggering cost of such a debacle not only in human terms but in economic terms? How much good could the US be doing instead of ...

Many other comments regarding the speech can be found at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26409-2005Jan21?language=printer

Hmmm, maybe it won't rain tomorrow.

Rice 'n Beans on a rainy day

2005-01-21T06:31:00.001+02:00

Rain, rain go away, come again some other day. There are usually more than 300 days of sunshine in our little village close to the sea. This is probably why when the winter rainy season comes, it feels so depressing for a while. It rains hard and often with lightening and thunder. The electricity usually goes out when it rains hard and so we have candles and oil lamps and a fireplace to keep warm. The upside of course is that everything becomes green and flowers almost overnight. The weather seldom dips below 7 C (44.6 F) or 8 C (46.4 F) so things grow easily here.

It seems that NO ONE in the White House fantasy farm is grounded in anything resembling reality and NO ONE seems to be trying to find out “why do ‘they’ hate us so much?” (See Fareed Zakaria:
The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?)

Condoleeza Rice, a seemingly erudite, educated and sophisticated woman has allowed herself to become the obsequious help mate of George W. Bush in a shameful display of (un)righteous indignititon in response to a well deserved grilling by another equally talented woman, Senator Barbara Boxer from California. Ms Rice seldom answered a question directly, stated that no mistakes were made in the Bush administration’s previous term, and was in a serious state of denial over the current state of the war in Iraq.

And US citizens continue to wonder and to ask all wide eyed and innocent, “why do THEY hate us so much”? Of course defining who THEY are is a major task in itself. Are THEY Osama Bin Laden? Are THEY the Taliban in Afghanistan? Are THEY Saddam Hussein and his henchmen? Are THEY simply all Arabs and Muslims? Just who do you KNOW they are and why do you think they hate the US so much?

By the way, please do not waste my time and yours just giving a simple IMHO, I want some factoids to back up your rants when I rave against the war machine... Please?