Life in Central America

Lincoln never said that

Illinois Historic Preservation Society

Undoubtedly the most famous questioned utterance of Abraham Lincoln allegedly part of a speech delivered in Clinton, Illinois, September, 1858:

"You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

In this case, somebody fooled all of the people for quite a long time.

Self-destruction

I consider myself an expert on this subject, because I am so self-destructive myself. (I don't want to argue with some of you that you are more self-destructive than me, let's just say there is plenty to go around.)

There has been a lot said about our noble opposition in the Second World, but I want to make my own contribution to this subject. All of these countries self-destructed - dramatically. They were all their own worst enemies, and that is the worst kind. I also saw many companies in Silicon Valley self-destruct during my career as a technical writer, and I got to observe this curious activity at close range. It was an interesting experience, but I wouldn't want to do it again.

I saw four characteristics of this action:

1. Grandiosity. They were the perfect people. They were going to do nothing less than change the whole world, and they were going to do this with a simple magic formula. This is also called magical thinking, and it will get you into trouble every time.
2. Militant Authoritarianism. This government was in total control, and they were going to war.
3. Cutthroat political infighting. This so common it’s hardly worth commenting on. It's never a good thing.
4. A divine leader: Hitler, Mussolini, or The Emperor. Reverend Moony might be an example for our own time

I am tempted to add another category: an Enemy. This is useful, but not mandatory, the Italians didn’t have one (to my knowledge), and I don’t know enough about the Japanese to say.

Let me judge another organization by these criteria: the Puritans. Their influence on United States history has been greatly overstated, but they were an interesting bunch. Grandiosity? Definitely. Militant Authoritarianism? Authoritarian, definitely, that's what the witch trials were all about. But they didn't have an army, or a navy, or an air force. Vigorous infighting? Certainly. A divine leader? They had lots of leaders, but no one was dominant. An Enemy? Maybe, but their enemy was the Devil, and in these modern times we need something more definite.

It is true the Puritans self-destructed, but this was a mild process, and not too many people died. They didn't meet all the criteria. They had a good start, but fortunately for the US, they didn't follow through on it.

Islamic terrorists don’t want to destroy the US

9/11 was a total success, as a publicity stunt. It was intended to humiliate the US, and it succeeded completely. But as a military operation it was a total disaster. It produced the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It didn’t weaken the US at all, and it certainly didn’t help Fundamentalist Islam.

There have been no Islamic terrorist attacks in the US since, although they could have done so easily. Why? Because Islamic fundamentalists want to purify Islam, and take control of the Middle East. They have been quite clear about this. They also need an enemy, and the US is about as fine an enemy as anyone could wish for. Why destroy such a fine enemy?

They are mainly interested in the Holy Land, the rest of the world does not interest them, except as it affects their home territory. They are not trying to destroy Christianity, or even the West. They had these ambitions at one time, and it got them into a lot of trouble.

The US did them a favor by invading Iraq, we have made it clear what our interests are. We don’t want another Islamic state, but we may get one anyway - and maybe several of them.

What did the Christian churches do to prevent the Holocaust?

This can be summarized briefly: they did nothing. But it is more accurate to say that they helped it along. Again let me quote from the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners:
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In sum, in the face of the persecution and annihilation of the Jews, the churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, as corporate bodies exhibited an apparent, striking impassiveness. Moreover, in the ranks of the clergy at all levels, numerous voices could be heard vilifying the Jews in Nazi-like terms, hurling imprecations at them, and acclaiming their persecution at the hands of their country’s government. No serious historian would dispute the anti-Nazi theologian Karl Barth’s verdict contained in his parting letter before leaving Germany in 1935: ‘For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart’. …

Perhaps the most impassioned, the bluntest, the most detailed and most damning of the protests against the silence of the Christian churches came from the pen of comparatively obscure officer of one of its auxiliary organizations, the chair of the Evangelical Welfare Service of the Berlin-Zehlendorf district, Marga Meusel. It consisted of a lengthy memorandum prepared for the synod of the Confessing Church which met at Steglitz between September 26 and 29, 1935. The memorandum vividly describes the manner in which the Jews have been persecuted, giving examples of the indignities, torments, and brutalities to which the Germans subjected them. It shows the even German children, nourished in the anti-Semitic culture, had taken to defaming and abusing Jews. ‘It is Christian children who do that, and Christian parents, teachers, and clergymen who allow it to happen.’… Particularly telling was Meusel’s denunciation of the Churches warm welcome of Nazi rule, and the Church’s avowal of fealty to Hitler’s regime. She quotes and concurs with the verdict of a Swedish report ‘that the Germans have a new God, and it is The Race, and to this God they bring human sacrifices.’ ‘How can it again and again profess loyalty to the National Socialist state?’ wondered Meusel.

Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau paid a final homage to the man who was the mass murder of the Jewish people and who had for twelve years served as the beacon of the German nation. Upon learning of Hitler’s death in the first days of May 1945 he ordered ‘a solemn requiem mass be held in commemoration of the Fuhrer’… So that his and Hitler’s flock could pray to the Almighty in accordance with the requiem’s liturgy, that the Almighty’s son, Hitler, be admitted to paradise.

A very pessimistic asessment

This is article is titled Deficit Disorder in Mother Jones.com. It is bleak, but it might actually happen.
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The passage on Tuesday of the $400 billion Medicare bill, within a day or so of the delivery of the $400 billion defense bill, and around the same time as the near-passage of the gargantuan, pork-laden energy bill, brought into sharp relief a surprising but undeniable feature of the Bush administration and the GOP-controlled Congress: they spend money like the Republican stereotype of Big-Government Democrats, with total disregard for fiscal responsibility.

Paul Krugman, writing recently in the New York Times magazine explains that conservatives, far from ditching their deeply held goals, are actually, in a roundabout way, furthering them. There are two types of conservatives, he says: "supply-siders," who hold that government can cut taxes without severely cutting spending, because people will spend the extra money in their pockets, thus driving economic growth; and "starve-the-beasters," who think taxes should be cut, and spending tactically increased, in order to bloat the budget deficit and thereby limit government's (that is, the beast's) scope for future spending. The Bush administration, he argues, is going the starve-the beast route, and, if unchecked, could "move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue ... will make it possible for conservative politicians -- in the name of fiscal necessity -- to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable."

Economists say to combat the burgeoning deficit, either taxes need to increase, spending needs to decrease, or both. What will happen to America if spending continues on its upward path and the deficit keeps getting bigger? Krugman, again:

"America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education."

E-Voting

In the last election, we discovered our voting system was busted. Not only did Americans not want to vote, they didn’t want to monitor the voting process itself, to make sure it was working right. As a result, not surprisingly, strange things happened.

As a result, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which provided $4 billion for states to use in updating their voting equipment. The idea was this: we would replace our incompetent voting organizations with voting computers. We assumed that computers would do everything right. This was a very naïve assumption, and it is getting us into a lot of trouble.

A number of voting machine companies appeared to meet this new demand, and the biggest of these is Deibold. Maryland signed a $55.6 million deal with Diebold to supply the state with 11,000 voting machines. Other using Diebold machines include Ohio (Diebold’s home state) Texas, and California. Overall, there are more than 55,000 Diebold voting machines in use around the country.

There has been nothing but problems. In Fairfax county, a suburb of Washington, DC, paid $3.5 million for their new voting machines, and used them in the last election. The result was the slowest vote count in history. But even worse, when voters tried to vote for school board member Rita S. Thompson, some of their votes disappeared. 10 of the voting machines broke down in the middle of the voting process, and were locked up pending an investigation.

In Georgia during the 2002 elections, some voters using Diebold machines tried to vote for one candidate, but the machine would register a vote for the opponent. Their were six electoral upsets in that election, including one in which the incumbent senator, who was far ahead in the polls, lost by 11 points. Diebold had changed the software used by the voting machines seven or eight times without anyone examining it, and the after the election the company immediately overwrote the flash memory of all the cards used by these machines, so it is now impossible to know what the vote counts really were.

Also during the 2002 elections, machines made by Omaha-based Election Systems and Software erroneously reported that no one in several large Florida precincts had voted for governor.

An Athlete's Dangerous Experiment

Article in NY Times

By all accounts, Taylor was popular and ebullient. He was a cousin of Burt Hooton, the former major league pitcher, and his brother pitched in college. Next spring, he would make his own mark during his senior season. But on July 15, a month past his 17th birthday, Taylor Hooton killed himself. The authorities ruled the death a suicide by hanging.

His parents and a doctor familiar with the case said they believe that Taylor's death was related to depression that he felt upon discontinuing the use of anabolic steroids. The sense of euphoria and aggression that accompany the use of steroids can be replaced by lethargy, loss of confidence, melancholy and hopelessness when a person stops using performance-enhancing drugs, doctors said.

"It's a pretty strong case that he was withdrawing from steroids and his suicide was directly related to that," said Dr. Larry W. Gibbons, president and medical director of the Cooper Aerobics Center, a leading preventive medicine clinic in Dallas. "This is a kid who was well liked, had a lot good friends, no serious emotional problems. He had a bright future."

Taylor Hooton's example is extreme, but the use of steroids by athletes and nonathletes in high school is considered even more troubling than the use of them by elite athletes who are involved in widely publicized scandals in sports like football, baseball and track and field, a number of doctors said.

By nature, teenagers are risk takers, and they are less likely to understand the health risks or to be concerned with potential side effects like infertility, atrophied testicles, high blood pressure, liver damage and prostate cancer, some of which may not appear for 20 or 30 years, doctors said.

"I'm worried about kids," said Dr. Donald A. Malone, a psychiatrist at the Cleveland Clinic, who wrote a 1995 study indicating an association between depression and steroid use. "Elite athletes know the side effects, and they can afford to pay for the real stuff. Kids don't have the knowledge, and they're buying it from some clown selling it at school. Who knows what they're getting?"

The wiring in the new house is messed up

Like I said before, it’s a wonder all Ticos aren’t dead of electrocution, because of the casual attitude they have towards electricity. In developed countries, electricity is considered dangerous, and there are many regulations governing the wiring of buildings – too many it seemed to me when I was a field engineer wiring up radar stations. But down here, life is so dangerous a few extra deaths from electricity are not worth worrying about - at least that seems to be their attitude, which they probably inherited from days when Costa Rica was a more typical third-world country - and which it may revert to if they are not careful.

But anyway, I started to talk about the wiring in the new house. I just took it for granted that it was ok, but then strange things started to happen. The water heaters in the showers quit working. The engineer who built the house (and who is now on intimate terms with Maria and Sonia) claimed the problem was with the power company, that we now have only a temporary power hookup, which won’t supply enough power for the shower heaters. For awhile, this kind of made sense, so I accepted this explanation.

But each time I took a cold shower, I began to wonder, and think about it, and it didn’t make sense. The shower heaters worked fine for the first couple of weeks, and the electric stove never has had any problems. This really bugged me, so I went downtown and bought the cheapest electric multimeter I could find, so I could check out the electricity, this only cost three bucks. Then, armed with this, I started poking around. And I found some interesting things, and some shocking things (no pun intended).

But first, I have to tell you a tiny bit about house wiring (please bear with me, those of you who already know this.) The electricity in a typical house has two phases (don’t worry about what these are.) One phase is supposed to be wired with black wire and the other on with red wire. In addition, their should be neutral wires, colored white, and ground wires, colored green. Most of the house wiring is one-phase wiring, 115 volts. An electrical outlet, for example, should have either a black wire or a red wire (for one phase or the other) a white wire to take the electricity back, and a green wire to protect the people using the electrical appliances. High power appliances, such as stoves, water heaters, and clothes dryers, have 240 volt wiring. They are hooked to both phases, instead of just one.

The electrical outlets in the house appear to be wired correctly, but some of the other wiring is strange, and the wiring for the shower heaters is really strange. It’s a wonder we haven’t all died in the showers. It won’t go into the details, because it would be a bit much for some of you, but believe me it is strange – and dangerous.

So I complained to our engineer friend, trying to explain my findings. He was indignant. I was imputing his authority, and he wants to appear to know everything. He dragged out the wiring diagrams for the house to prove he was right. This was a mistake, because I could then see how screwed up the wiring really was. He must of thought these technical drawings would scare me off, but he was sure wrong there. I started really poking around, and I was amazed.

For example, I found there was a little water heater in the laundry room. It is all hooked up and working, but the hot water doesn’t go anywhere. There is a hot water pipe to the washing machine, but no hot water hose to the washing machine itself. Evidently, Maria doesn’t believe in using hot water to wash clothes. This notion is too advanced for her to comprehend. I discovered some other amazing things about the house wiring too, but I won’t go into those. I will just concentrate on the shower heaters, which were my main motivation in the first place.

There was electricity to the shower heaters, but there wasn’t any hot water. Obviously, there was something wrong with the heaters. So I put a chair in the shower to stand on, and tried to open up one of the heaters, to see what was wrong. The old heaters were held together with screws, and they were relatively easy to disassemble. I couldn’t get the new ones apart at all, they resisted my strongest efforts, and I had to stop before I broke one of them, or fell off the chair and broke my neck.

I think we have a problem. These brand-new shower heaters don’t work worth a darn, and you have to have special tools to fix them. We will have to call in an electrician. He will promise to come in tomorrow, but his actual arrival date is far from certain, and when he does get here he probably won’t be able to work on them either. Meanwhile, we all get to take cold showers, and our engineer friend will continue to blame it on the power company.

The perpetrators of the Holocaust took pride in their accomplishments

From Hitler's Willing Executioners, Part VI
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The perpetrators of the Holocaust took pride in their accomplishments, in their genocidal vocation, to which they were dedicated. They expressed this again and again, in their actions, in the endless stream of choices that made to tread the killing fields - and while they were there. They also expressed this in their words and actions while they were not on their killing forays. If they indeed disapproved of the genocide, then why would they have taken obviously approving photographs of their killing operations and their lives while executioners - and then circulate them and permit copies to be made for others?

The following photograph of a German solder killing a Jewish mother and child was sent home though the mail. On the back of it was penned: Ukraine 1942, Jewish Aktion, Ivangorad. (Ivangorod was the name of a town in the Ukraine). Why would the perpetrators have their wives and girlfriends, even their children, bear witness to their slaughters and cruelties? Why have celebrations to mark significant massacres, killings, or events?

The Delicate Balance of Pain and Addiction

Article in New York Times.

Over the past two decades, conflicting medical ideas have surfaced about narcotic painkillers, the drugs that Rush Limbaugh blames for his addiction while being treated for chronic back pain. And both of them, not surprisingly, have centered on the bottom-line question: just how great a risk of abuse and addiction do narcotics pose to pain patients?

Throughout much of the last century, doctors believed that large numbers of patients who used these drugs would become addicted to them. That incorrect view meant that cancer sufferers and other patients with serious pain were denied drugs that could have brought them relief.

But over the past decade, a very different viewpoint has emerged, one championed by doctors specializing in pain treatment and drug companies eager to broaden the market for such drugs. It held that these medications posed scant risk to pain patients.

The reassessment of narcotic risk comes at a time of skyrocketing rates of misuse and abuse of such drugs. Medical experts agree that most pain patients can successfully use narcotics without consequences. But the same experts also say that much remains unknown about the number or types of chronic pain sufferers who will become addicted as a result of medical care, or "iatrogenically" addicted. The biggest risk appears to be to patients who have abused drugs or to those who have an underlying, undiagnosed vulnerability to abuse substances, a condition that may affect an estimated 3 to 14 percent of the population.

Dr. James Zacny, an associate professor at the University of Chicago and a leading narcotics researcher, said there was a dearth of data about the long-term risks that narcotics pose. "We don't know a lot about the rate of iatrogenic addiction," he said.