[Note to readers: If you notice problems with fonts, spacings, etc, in the next few posts, be assured that it’s neither your eyes nor your computer.  WordPress geeks in their infinite wisdom eliminated the W-button I used to employ to insert post rough drafts from MS Word.  I’ve found a temporary fix, but I’m still exploring work-arounds.  Apparently, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” isn’t a workplace motto at WordPress where they’ve adopted a policy that users are beta-testers, just like Microsoft, the company they hate.  I won’t apologize–they should.]

This question is appropriate when considering Afghanistan.  The good Afghans don’t seem capable of standing up to the Taliban.  The bad Afghans—and these aren’t the Taliban, who are worse than bad—are poppy farmers and the people like Karzai, who, through graft and corruption, exploit everyone and everything.  Karzai bites the hand that feeds him too: he has to know that his life wouldn’t be worth a Russian ruble if the Taliban take over again.  And, let’s face it, the Afghan landscape is more desolate than the moon’s; only Iceland’s is worse.

The recent murders of three doctors is but another instance of why we should write Afghanistan off.  There are good people there.  These doctors were on a mission to help them.  One, I believe, had been doing so for seven years.  The Taliban don’t care.  These doctors were Christians, foreigners, and not supporters of the Taliban’s vicious brand of radical Islam.  The Taliban’s ideology is one of death.  Doctors, a little girl making appeals for the right of women to educate themselves, and many others who dare to work for peace and a better life and naysay Taliban fanaticism, are targets.  They are now claiming they shot down a NATO helicopter (the Pentagon claims this is false—I’m not surprised, because the Taliban would probably take credit if Karzai got a cold).

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Nuclear technology is with us to stay…well, as long as we don’t destroy the Earth!  On one hand, we have the frightening scenario of a nuclear exchange; on the other, we have the possibility that nuclear power plants can contribute as alternate energy sources.  Somewhere between these polar opposites, one finds nuclear medicine.  I’m a person that believes that nuclear technology is not inherently good or bad, but human scientists and engineers who handle it need to ensure its safety.  More than most technologies, human error can have devastating consequences.

The reactor problem in Japan is one egregious example.  That region might require millennia to recover.  The same can be said for Chernobyl.  Estimates are all over the board.  Both cases are examples of human complacency, stupidity, and terrible miscalculations.  For Japan’s case, one can ask: Who would build a reactor close to a fault line?  We do!  California is one of the most active earthquake areas in the world, yet there are reactors on the California coast.  The one on the Hudson in New York State only seemed to have the problem that the river provides an easy access.  I rode by it on a tour to West Point—I didn’t see any special security arrangements.  Moreover, an earthquake did occur not long ago.  I was writing when the room started swaying and felt like I had returned to my youth in Santa Barbara.

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After two lengthy wars in these countries, it’s time to step back and analyze what we’ve gained.  It’s clear what we lost: war casualties—our combatants, their combatants, and innocent civilians; national wealth—billions and billions of dollars; good will in the Middle East; and good feelings among present and former allies.  Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo showed an ugly side of the war on terror that seems to contradict our worship of democracy and democratic institutions—whether you think that non-U.S. enemy combatants can be tortured or not, the fact that we did doesn’t sit well everywhere in the world.

Many Marines who participated in the battles of Fallujah were distraught when al Qaeda in Iraq (or are they from Syria?) captured the city.  They saw compatriots fall there.  The survivors brought home physical and mental wounds from the battles.  They have a reason to ask, “What did we do that for?”  This is a common theme in the Middle East.  No matter the national sacrifice in personnel and wealth, no matter the diplomatic overtures, and no matter the good will of many civilians living in the region, extreme elements come back to haunt us like antibiotic-resistant bacteria reinvading the body politic of the region.

Karzai in Afghanistan is showing his true stripes.  He and his corrupt family and friends have no real interest in turning that country into something beyond an opium-producing state.  Noises are being made about deals with the Taliban.  You can expect that any advances made during our time there will disappear, leading to the horrendous treatment of women and the slavish following of sharia law once again.  This is a tribal society—a collection of warlords and their fiefdoms, not a modern state.  There’s little chance it will ever become one.  Moreover, we might see this relic of the Dark Ages corrupting Pakistan in the future in a major way, leading to terrorists with nukes.

Whatever you have against Joe Biden (ex-SecDef Gates in his new book expresses no love for the man), you’ll have to admit he was right about Iraq (Gates is too stupid to do so).  There are three Iraqi states at least—Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd—and possibly four now with the incursion of al Qaeda from Syria.  The absurdity of this situation is that the Shiite Iranis possibly feel threatened by the al Qaeda Sunnis and other Sunnis in Iraq, which might explain somewhat their recent diplomatic overtures.  But, like in Afghanistan, Iraq’s central government is corrupt and inept and completely incapable of holding all the different factions together.  Syria, Iraq, and Kurdish Turkey are like the old Yugoslavia.  To hold them together, you need a tyrant.  With the tyrant gone, you need multiple nations, one for each ethnic group.

The whole Middle East is like quicksand—even when the situation seems favorable, you can start to sink.  Israel isn’t helping either.  Their resistance to a Palestinian state is always a sore point for the most tolerant of Muslims and offers a rallying point for the most bellicose.  Pakistan, long at odds with India, has gone its own way, and the Indian government is showing its backward ways in their unreasonable support of an exploitative diplomat.  Turkey, the only NATO member in the area, isn’t stable and also a fair-weather friend, for both EU and US.  From Istanbul and the SSR Muslim republics to Sri Lanka, the Middle East and from Morocco to Bangladesh, you have unstable governments whipping up ethnic and anti-US sentiments.  It’s hard to find a friend anywhere.  No wonder “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has been the corner-stone of American foreign policy in the region.

Europe doesn’t help.  European governments love to see the US spending money fighting terrorism that they don’t have to spend.  They love to see the US take the foreign policy hits.  The US is the EU’s biggest competitor, of course.  What Europe doesn’t see is that their myopic policies for treating the ethnic minorities providing their cheap labor will become their Achilles heel in the future.  Many of these minorities are poor Muslims—they have no love for the rich Europeans in charge of the economies throughout the EU.  They will place demands on the great socialist democracies of Europe and, if not met, there’ll be hell to pay.

Putin’s Russia is a loose cannon.  While the US and EU are debating same-sex marriage and human rights, homophobic Russia is heading in the opposite direction.  Led by Putin, that dark nation is returning to Stalinism, making a farce out of any democratic inclinations.  There are worse tyrants (the spoiled brat in North Korea is one), but narcissistic Vladimir rules the old land of the czars with an iron hand too.  He’s like the Godfather.  He and his friends form a mafia that is much stronger than any found in the old USSR, and they hide under the cloak of democracy.  Putin and therefore Russia deal with the Middle East erratically, as the contradictions between their support of Syria and their criticism of Iran show.  Again, there’ll be hell to pay because those former SSR Muslim republics haven’t forgotten the heavy boot of Stalin and his successors.

Given that the Middle East is so problematic in general and Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, what are we doing there?  The region won’t ever amount to anything.  Taking the region as a whole, you have a huge, mostly uneducated population that has never learned to get along.  I’m counting Israel here—if not the former (Bibi’s emotional responses don’t show much education, in my opinion), at least the latter.  It’s a strong argument for isolationism, by which I mean isolating the region and letting them settle their differences without our interference.  Becoming embroiled in the disputes in the region hasn’t proven to be a good idea historically.  One can say that “hands off!” should be our foreign policy mantra.

On the other hand, that huge population is a huge market and certain countries in the region provide oil, more to the EU than the US.  I’d suggest that we let the European countries assume the peace-making role.  Let them try to broker the diplomatic deals that might win peace in the Middle East.  They have more to lose.  Unfortunately, Europe has shown that they’re inept in most things diplomatic.  We’ve more or less taken the attitude that it’s a dirty job, but someone has to try to make the different parties sit down and make peace.  I don’t see that ending well.

And so it goes….

In many states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures—even here in NJ with a Republican governor and Democratic legislature—teachers’ unions and public school teachers have come under fire.  The issue here isn’t black and white—issues rarely are.  I can’t pretend to be comprehensive in a simple blog post, but let me throw in some loose change to up the ante and gray up the issue even more (forty shades, remember?).

Most of us have heard the adage that goes something like “People who know, create; people who don’t know, teach.”  Like many stereotypes and adages, there is some truth to that statement.  Back in prehistoric times when I attended college (I’m a product of state-run universities–when I started, I paid about $300/quarter + room and board and everyone with a B+ HS average could enter some state university), this adage was somewhat formalized, at least in the math department—there was a track for math majors and another track for students who wanted to teach primary and/or secondary mathematics.  This bifurcation engendered a bit of what nowadays we call bullying.  Moreover, for whatever reason, students in the first track seemed to do better than students in the second.

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If you haven’t already realized it, President Obama is a lot better at winning elections than he is at foreign policy.  There’s a huge cow-pie out there called Syria and he’s about to put both feet into it—possibly even trying to take a swim.  Maybe he already has by the time I make this post.  If so, take this as a plea to get the hell out of Syria.  If not, let’s make sure he doesn’t jump into the fray.  Syria is different.  I hope to show you why, but frankly the issues are about as clear as that cow-pie.

I’ll start with the bottom line: An attack, any attack, on Syria will have unpredictable consequences.  Moreover, given that Mr. Obama has disavowed Mr. Bush’s policy of a pre-emptive strike—we should defend ourselves only when attacked or in imminent danger of attack.  The situation in Syria doesn’t meet either of those conditions.  As messy and violent as the Syrian civil war might seem, the fighting there doesn’t threaten the U.S. or any of its interests in the region.  Mr. Obama himself has said this.  One should ask: what the hell is he doing?

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Activists often just protest and offer no solutions to fix the problems they’re protesting about.  It’s a sign of the times, I suppose.  During the era of the Vietnam War draft, we were willing to go to jail or flee to Canada for our beliefs that the war was unjust—that probably wasn’t a solution either, but it was more effective than simple protest.  People of all races put their bodies where their mouths were too, just like in the civil rights movements.  Thousands still work quietly behind the scenes trying to solve problems, not simply pointing them out—working towards peace and tolerance of others.

There’s one lost cause you don’t hear much about anymore, even at the level of protest.  We continue to wreak havoc on our environment in many ways.  We’re not attacking Gaia with drones and special forces.  We’re attacking Her on all fronts and the innocent victims will be measured in the millions unless we change our ways, not just the few innocents that the terrorists make march along with them as human shields.  A simple protest falls on deaf ears in cases involving the environment much more than any of the protests against the treatment of Manning, Snowden, and the folk hero, Julian Assange, which often get media attention but accomplish very little.  Moreover, protestors need to prioritize their causes and work on issues that can bring the greatest good for the greatest number, and not protest for protest’s sake.

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You win a few and lose a few in this life—and you just hope by the end the balance is positive.  I’ve always felt this wonder about life and the universe around me.  If you haven’t looked in the mirror in the morning and asked “Why am I here?” something is terribly wrong with you.  My “why?” was often projected outwards, a pitiful soliloquy to an unresponding Universe that seemed to pose great mysteries I must strive to solve, a scientific sleuth tracking down answers.  I did my small part and relished the successes of others.  I’ve never stopped wondering.

I was an avid reader from the time I discovered comic books at age four—or was it three?  I wanted to fill in my own balloons and make my own comics.  My mother helped me.  My love of reading was helped along by an older brother who joined a sci-fi book club.  Writing and wonder made for a heady mixed drink that addicted me to both science and the written word.  You might know me for the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” (my interest in mysteries and thrillers came later) or “The Clones and Mutants Series” (futuristic or techno-thrillers), but “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” my Foundation series, is more closely related to those early days spent reading books from my brother’s collection (Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun were my introduction to the mystery genre).  By the time I ended junior high, I had forsaken those comic books and perused all the sci-fi books in our public library…and decided I wanted to be a writer.

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Whether good or bad, our economy depends on consumers.  When young people have to enter the working force with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, it’s a drag on the economy and detrimental to their future security.  How can we attack the problem?

First, let’s analyze the root of the problem: higher education in this country suffers from the same disease that the medical system does—the incorrect idea that colleges and universities have to make a profit.  Whoa! you say.  Aren’t they non-profit organizations?  Some of them say they are, but more and more are admitting their goal is to make money, especially online outfits and those “professional schools” who pay their professors very little and charge their students big dollars to “learn a trade.”

Even prestigious schools are in it for the money.  Harvard, for example, is connected to hospitals in Boston, MIT has its Lincoln Laboratory, Cal Tech its JPL, Berkeley its Lawrence Livermore, and so forth.  Institutes and national labs funnel taxpayers’ money into big universities, many of them private.  And these schools charge the most—obviously, prestige, earned or otherwise, is worth gold.  I’m not saying that a full professor at MIT or Harvard makes a hefty salary compared to a corporate CEO, but they’re both overpaid.  Academia also sports the tenure system—there’s a lot of deadwood among those tenured professors.

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It might seem like forever, but only two weeks ago the American public had to face two acts filled with terror.  One of them was avoidable; the other, probably not.  The avoidable one was the fire and explosion at that fertilizer plant just seventy plus miles from Dallas in West, Texas.  The unavoidable one was the bombing at the Boston Marathon.

It’s ironic but expected that the event in Texas occurred where states’ rights and minimal federal government intervention is strong.  Our federal inspection system has been anemic at best, traditionally starved for funding and personnel and filled with corruption.  The GOP in general and the Tea Party in particular don’t want to fund anything that even carries the faint aroma of meddling in the affairs of the States, unless that meddling implies sending bacon back home to their constituent areas.  The sequestering will only exacerbate this.

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There are many important issues in the never-ending battle between the 99% v. 1%.  One such issue is likely to affect the 1% just as much as the 99%–the environment human beings live in.  Worldwide, many of the 99% live in poverty, experiencing war, famine, and filth without shelter and clean water.  This could be the future of the 1% too—when Gaia suffers, we all suffer.  Gaia, Mother Earth, or whatever you call Her, is currently being violently gang-raped by the 1% for power and profit.  Her silent scream is what I see in the famous Edvard Munch painting.

The 1% and its power brokers, i.e. most conservatives, America’s GOP, and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, are notorious Gaia rapists on America’s most wanted list of environmental criminals who are repeatedly indicted for their sociopathic abuse and lack of concern for Mother Earth.  To be fair, some born-agains, a large constituency of the GOP, have expressed concern about environmental issues.  Even some Republicans revolted against Romney’s leadership and voted for tax breaks for wind farms, a small victory probably aimed at vocally environmental constituents they need to appease in order to be re-elected to a second term.  Nevertheless, the political sycophants to the 1% generally turn a blind eye to Gaia’s rape.

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