WAR. CRIMES, ROBERT BALES, WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS

The last ten years, beginning with a horrible tragedy at home and punctuated by two vicious and unnecessary wars abroad have had negative effects on America. Not only have the Iraqis and Afghans suffered from George Bush, Dick Cheney and Barak Obama's preemptive wars of choice, but it is all too clear now that as a nation we have suffered deeply too. Not only have we been weakened economically by the waste of trillions of dollars in treasure over this decade of war (a foray into neocon adventurism which was one leg of the three-leg-stool which caused the Great Recession) but these unwarranted conflicts, left our nation's infrastructure worn and outdated, sacrificed the blood of our youth in far away lands, and forced Americans at home into the role of citizens of an occupier nation, a world imperium, which maintains more than 900 military bases world-wide, keeps two million in uniform, and spends more on its military than all other nations in the world combined to satisfy the monetary goals of expanding markets for an oligarchic corporatist elite. We do not wish to admit it, or perhaps are unaware that our nation, silently and without serious objection support a brutal military occupation in Palestine and we ourselves engage in or have engaged in most recently similar brutal military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In our role as occupier (and facilitator of occupations ) we have morphed from the innocent settlers and colonists of our American origins, a people who simply yearned to be free from British tyranny, into the very kind of imperial state which we so heroically resisted in the late 18th century War of Independence. In the process, we have turned a blind eye to the evils of occupation and imperialism, and ignore or are ignorant of what our military forces do to others at our government's behest. But at rare times, the consequences of our stated goals to maintain military and economic dominance in the world are revealed and we can see ourselves as we really are: a state which sanctions torture, kidnapping and rendition, assassination of those we consider our enemies, and most recently extermination of our own citizens abroad without judicial review or sanction, we use terror tactics to quash rebellions, aerial drone warfare to kill as many innocents as enemies, and start preemptive wars having nothing to do with "defense" of our homeland. Thus the accumulated brutality of a decade and more of war as well as our government's determination to maintain world domination has hardened and brutalized us. Too many of us can not recall the ideals of the America of our father's time or of our own once deeply held myths and dreams of America.

Americans have little perception of the horrors of war. Somehow those in control have sanitized war so to most of us it seems more like a particularly violent video game. We don't have that visceral intimate understanding of such conflicts as perhaps the Germans, British, or French, some of whom can still recall the horrors of WWII. who still have lived lthrough recent conflicts around the world. Thankfully we have largely escaped direct attack--until only very recently.

Thus we embark so easily and innocently on loose talk of war, threats, and thoughtless verbal and economic attacks on other nations, and enter into any military fray as if it were just one big chess game in the sky. In the aftermath, we like other colonial powers before us, strive to hold on to the land and resources we are sitting on, won with so much blood and treasure. But as is always true, no one loves an occupier, however heinous the last dictator or last regime. To stay and reap the benefits of war we must suppress the national aspirations of the vanquished. To accomplish this our generals and Congressional leaders espouse a policy called "counter-insurgency" which entails "winning hearts and minds" of the insurgents. That doesn't sound so bad, in fact it seems less threatening than say "coercion" or "arm-twisting". But just as the whole process of war has been sanitized so have the terms used to describe this brutal process. What does winning their hearts mean, killing them? For that's what happens to far too many. What does winning their minds mean? Keeping them so frightened that their minds are numbed with fear. That's what happens to most.

In every conflict where home-grown forces (what shall we call them, al Qaida, Taliban, French partisans, Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, freedom fighters, American minute men?) attempt to oust a foreign invader, the the circumstances and conditions of unequal warfare are much the same. During the American Revolutionary War we were the insurgents and the British were the occupational forces. The objective of the British was to deny Washington's troops resources, ammunition, food, water, hay for their horses, camping sites, and safe places to sleep. To do this they had to come down very hard on colonists who either had sympathy for the men in gray, or actually provided Washington's forces with such aid. The British had no compunction or restraint in dealing with these Americans, especially later in the war, they arrested and transported colonists, to prison ships in N Y Harbor where they were confined under brutal and unsanitary conditions, many died on the ships, others were summarily hanged or shot.

Little has changed during the ensuing centuries. During WWII German atrocities against French partisans are well documented. The French treatment of the Algerian insurgents was also particularly vicious. The Israeli attacks on the Palestinian insurgency was and remains a text-book example of how to debase, and dehumanize a population so as to maintain control over it and the land on which they live. The American occupation of the Philippines, Japan, Germany, South Vietnam, Iraq, and of Afghanistan were and continue to remain no different than past occupations. The names change and the weapons of the occupiers and insurgents alter but the process remains the same. The slightly vared, so called "insurgency strategies" of the several American generals who were in charge at various times in Iraq and Afghanistan were only variations on the same theme used by the British, the Nazis, the Japanese in the Philippines, and all the other occupation armies. It's written in the military textbooks which state: Be brutal, the native indigent population must be more frightened of you (the occupier) than of the insurgent forces, (Viet Cong, al Qaida, Taliban, etc. etc.). If the natives (American colonists, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans or French Resistance fighters) are suspected of harboring or aiding the insurgency, they must be treated harshy and made an example of, just as Nazis war criminals did to the small French town outside of Limoges (Oradur-Sur-Glan) where the SS slaughtered 642 men, women and children-the whole population of the town--then razed the entire village in reprisal for Resistance activity in the area. Thus the night raids, drone attacks, bombings, and other means of slaughter of innocents in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere is not simply "accidental collateral damage" but part of an actual plan of terror. The natives must be more frightened of the occupiers than of the insurgents.

We do not wish to admit it, but the US without public qualm, supports the brutal occupation in Palestine. The USA was until very recently the military occupier of Iraq and remains in Afghanistan. In this role as occupier and facilitator of occupation we are engaged in the suppression of others. We are not "setting these occupied nations "free "as some would have it. We are in rose places for keeps to exploit resources. We freedom loving Americans have evolved from the innocent settlers and colonists of our colonial origins----a nation of a people who simply yearned to be released from British tyranny. We have morphed into the very kind of imperial state which we so heroically resisted in the late 18th century War of Independence. In the process, we have turned a blind eye and become hardened to what our military forces do to others at our government's behest. As a consequence of its goal to dominate the world, our modern imperial state sanctions torture, kidnapping and rendition, extermination of our own citizens and others abroad without judicial review or sanction, terror tactics to subdue rebellion, aerial drone warfare, which kills as many innocents as enemies, as well as preemptive wars having nothing to do with "defense" of our homeland. The accumulated brutality of a decade and more of war has hardened and brutalized us. Too many of us are no longer the Americans of father's or our most cherished myths and dreams.

Today, the airways and TV are full of a horrible story that seems to underscore our new dystopian world and our self-image.

I make reference here to the My-Lai-type massacre of seventeen innocent Afghan men women and children, slaughtered by a three-tour, wounded-in-battle, US non-com officer, one Sargent Robert Bales. Bales left his barracks last Sunday night on a mission of unimaginable and horrific violence, breaking into Afghan village homes, one after another and slaughtering innocent men,women and children as they cowered in their beds, and then mutilated and burned their bodies. (I do not use the "My Lai " term lightly, for in that infamous US Army massacre an estimated 44 members of Lt. Calley's platoon, killed 500 innocent Vietnamese villagers. On a per-man basis of death-dealing, Sargent Bales' efforts at (17) exceeded the horrors of the My Lai murderers (@11). Today some unable to swallow the story of American brutality (we are always the exception) there are in play strenuous efforts to characterize this incident as an aberration, the bizarre behavior of a single man, and perhaps his inability to cope with the multiple traumas to his psyche, of his three deployment into a war zone. Others now try to implicate the effects of certain psycho-active anti-malarial drugs which Bales may or may not have taken.

It is difficult for many of us to accept that Sargent Bales' behavior is not so very far from the norm. Indeed much of this is simply the result of the disparity of what we think and what really goes on. Brutality and hatred is what we quietly request of our men in arms. It is the nature of war-that part that is hidden from us who support it. We only see the Hollywood version on TV. That version and our news is sanitized for us and is much different than what our troops actually do in our name.

But to absolve Bales of blame or to subscribe his actions to some aberrant cause we would have to ignore so many other examples of similar behavior these excuses do not stand up to scrutiny. I need not enumerate the cases here. One need only recall the news reports of Abu Ghraib; the vicious cold blooded murder of an Iraqi Reuters reporter and journalist and those who came to his aid, slaughtered (it seems to observers of the video--just for fun) by the laughing US pilot of an Apache helicopter as revealed by video footage posted on line by Wki leaks; the infamous Mahmudiyah gang rape and murder of a 14 year old girl; the now infamous Marine killings of 24 innocent Iraqi civilians (women, children, a toddler, as well as an old man in a wheelchair) at Haditha; the 76 innocent Afghan civilians killed in a US air strike in Azzizabad, Afghanistan in Herat in 2008; and the numerous and continuing atrocities and killing of innocents in night raids ans drone attacks in Afghanistan are legion. They are part of the policy of "counter insurgency". It is policy. I we are unhappy with Bales we must force ourselves to scrutinize more carefully the policies our government supports.

It is not only the front-line troops who are infected with violence. Recently those at the highest levels in government are involved When our President himself orders or sanctions brutal violence, how can his troops in the field practice restraint. In 20o9 President Obama ordered an attack on what he thought was an al Qaida training camp in Majala in Yemen. The attack was carried out and publicized as a great success "by the Yemeni air a force" which the White House gloated killed dozens of "suspected al Qaida members". None of this was true. The target is now considered to have been a refugee camp where no al Qaida, only innocent citizen families fleeing from violence elsewhere in Yemen were killed by US cruise missiles. When the US bragged of the deaths of so many enemy al Qaida and attributed the attack to Yemeni forces, an inquiring and brave Yemeni journalist, Abdulelah Shaye, 35, visited the site and posted a story indicating that the attack was a US operation. Leaked cables between the Yemeni government and General Petraeus, now fully support that contention. Shaye also unearthed evidence indicating that the attack took the lives of thirty five innocents (fourteen women and twenty-one children). Shaye took pictures of fragmented US munitions (reputed to be US Tomahawk cruise missile components and "made in USA" markings on cluster bombs) and posted them on the Internet. (See: Jeremy Scahill, the Nation, March 13, 2012). Following the publication of his report in 2009, Shaye was jailed by the Yemeni government, reputedly as a result of a US request. Recently, having served three years of a five year term, he was slated for a pardon and released from prison. But our US President intervened against him. Based on secret cables posted on line by Wiki-leaks, President Obama requested that his release be rescinded--- presumably to keep the story quiet during the upcoming elections.

The atrocities, assassinations, drone and cruise missile attacks, night raids and other forms of unspeakable violence, often perpetrated on innocent women and children, seem so at odds with the traditional fabric of America, so at variance with our good will and better natures and alien at what we think of ourselves that one might be led to believe that the incidents must have taken place at the behest of some foreign nation...not by or in the "land of the brave and free", the land of our births. But this is the violent face of America today--the one we must face when we all look at our images in the morning mirror.

One recent and interesting psychological study, published in the Israeli paper, Haaretz, and authored by psychologists Nofer Ishai-Karen and Joel Karpel (See www.haaretz.co.il/haste/spaces/905287.htm) entitled in Hebrew,"Hamedovevet" which appeared in Haaretz September 21, 2009. This study documents the effects of violence on the Israeli soldiers who served in the Palestinian town of Rafah, in the Occupied Territories during the 2009 Palestinian uprising or intifada.

Nofer Ishai-Karen had served with a similar platoon twenty years earlier and had a rapport with the soldiers who spoke freely with her. The authors conclude that the troops, all recruits and members of a citizen soldiery, often coming from liberal or progressive homes, became brutalized by their posting in the occupied territories. They report that it the soldiers in the study enjoyed the "intoxication of power" and actually enjoyed the violence that they often instigated themselves while they were posted in the occupied territories (OT). The study quotes one soldiers as stating : " I love this mess....It's like being on drugs!" Another interviewee stated: "What is great is that ...you are the law. You decide. Once you go into the Occupied Territories you are God!". The respondents gave examples of how they behaved towards the Palestinians, indiscriminate shooting and killing, unspeakable violence against women and children for which they felt no remorse. The data reveals that officers and non-com officers often "encouraged" brutality and violence and often their violent behavior became the modles of response or examples to the troops. As an example of this phenomenon Karen and Karpel report that, on the arrival in Rafah, a new NCO took his men on an early morning tour. The streets were deserted as a result of the curfew. But a small boy, a four year old, was observed by the new non commissioned officer playing in the sand in front of his home. The NCO stopped the vehicle and chased down the little boy, and catching him, without hesitation he snapped his arm at the elbow. On subsequent tours the men reported that they started to imitate the harsh behavior of their leader. When excessive violence of this new NCO Rached beyond the point that what some few of the new recruits could bear, these men reported him to the senior group commander. The new NCO was reprimanded and punished. But the platoon leader, immediate superior to the new NCO, reprimanded the "conscientious solders for defaming the platoon". Karen and Karpel state that loyalty toward fellow combatants or "fighter solidarity" was valued above all else. The platoon protected the over zealous and brutally violent members, while the conscientious solders were regarded as traitors and ostracized. Soldiers also testified that the longer they served in the OT the more violent and brutal they became.

Was Robert Bales' act, that of some madman whose behavior was far beyond the norm? The reports in our press and from the war-front seem to suggest otherwise. No, the average GI does not behave as Sargent Bales did. But such actions-- kill squads, purposeful terror, indiscriminate killing are the strategies used to oppose an insurgency. These are part of formal policy. It does exist. Bales' actions were only different in scope and in the fact that it was not officially sanctioned. But Bales was doing only what the military trained him to do. The brutality is what we "bought into" when we agree to go to war not for defense of our homeland, but for economic gain in preemtive wars and conflicts of choice where we end up as occupiers. Our disgust and disdain should be directed less at Sargent Bales but more at the policy makers in Washinsgton and at the Pentagon who set policy which puts our fine troops s into the role of an occupier force.

Get the picture?

rjk

THE WATER IN WISCONSIN, AND THE GOP "RYAN BUDGET PLAN"

What's in the water in Wisconsin? Or is it in their cheese? Wisconsin has in the past given us the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy of the 1950s, and the presently infamous Governor Scott Walker (soon to be recalled from office) and now we have Congressman Paul Ryan, all from Wisconsin, all Republicans, all with radical ideas, all from modest family and educational backgrounds and all with no empathy for the other guy, or deserving and needy Americans in other states. Is there something rotten in Wisconsin?

Today, I read with some dismay the so called " Ryan Budget Plan" dubbed by the Congressman from Wisconsin as the "Path to Prosperity". It would be more accurately termed the "Path to Greater Prosperity for the Prosperous". In this plan, Mr. Ryan attempts to reduce the federal deficit and balance the budget by spending cuts alone--no tax increases--but he focuses those cuts not equally across the board but mostly on those who can least afford it---the poor, the unemployed, the elderly, the sick, and middle class. He does this while he protects the wealthy, the "one percenters" the corporatists, bankers, financiers and Wall Streeters with reduced taxes, favorable actions and wide open tax loopholes. The plan, though it claims to "protect the safety-net for future generations" instead it guts the meager social safety network we have in this nation (the most paltry, and least inclusive of all western industrial nations) to cut the deficit, but on the other hand raises government spending for the Pentagon and for so-called "defense spending" which is just another form of welfare for the rich and powerful.

What are the major points?

In an attempt to decrease the deficit and "grow" the economy Ryan, using discredited voodoo economic theory from the Reagan Era, would drastically cut back non-defense discretionary spending to the levels we had in this nation in the 1950s when our population was less than half of what it is now. Ryan's plan would cut expenditures to the bone in effect shutting down the FBI, all national parks, farm programs, air traffic control, medical research, Pell Grants, and food inspections.

But the main target of Ryan's plan is to end Medicare as we know it. He would push the sick and elderly off the proverbial cliff by replacing the present system, which is almost universally applauded by recipients, with a privatized "voucher system" which would hand out stipends to elderly to use for individual purchase of medical insurance plans on the open market. It would be a great boon to the giant health insurance companies. Of course, Ryan does not envision provisions to protect the elderly from the harsh unethical practices of the health insurance giants such as those protections which are incorporated in the Obama Affordable Health Care Act. Any protection that act would have provided would not be available to citizens under Ryan's proposal since Congressman Ryan would have had that beneficial act repealed. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that under such a voucher plan, a senior's medical expenses would quickly exceed the value of their set-value stipends. They estimate that by 2022, the typical senior would receive aid for only one-third of his or her medical expenses and the other two-thirds would have to be paid for out of pocket. But for those who did not have the financial wherewithal for these outlays for medical treatment would have to simply succumb to disease. Because Ryan also proposes to gut Medicaid, the last resort for the sick and needy. These Republican Wisconsinites don't seem to care about the sick and elderly.

Medicaid, the last resort for the poor and needy, would be eliminated and turned over to the states to administer as they saw fit. The so-called "block grants" to the states would have no strings attached. They would permit the state legislatures to decide how to spend the money. Yes the very same state representatives which are today requiring women to submit to unnecessary and invasive transvaginal sonograms prior to medically necessary abortion would be in charge and decide how that federal money was spent and who gets what kind of treatment. Think of that, those of you who decry the Obama Affordable Care Act, claiming: you want to: "keep government out of my personal medical decisions," and "keep my own doctor". Under Ryan's budget you will have the whole state legislature peering under your hospital gown to decide if and what medical treatment you might need.

Finally, the Ryan Budget plan ignores the elephant in the room, the giant, bloated defense budget which rather than taking a much-needed budget hair-cut has its funds actually increased under this plan.

Then too, there is no provision to raise revenue by increasing taxes on the super wealthy...who have as a result of the Bush Tax cuts and other factors accumulated and sequestered enormous wealth in the last several decades.

But perhaps that is the problem, money talks. The super wealthy, the financiers, the military-industrial complex all have bigger pockets a bigger voice than the People! They use that financial clout to support and advance their goals by supporting radicals from Wisconsin who do their bidding in Congress and the Senate.

Get the picture?

rjk

A BEAR ON THE BEACH! A SIGN OF HOPE FOR FLORIDA BEARS

In the winter of 2009, my wife and I left our our home in Peru, Vermont to arrive in lovely St Augustine Beach for our winter vacation. We gave up the snow, icy roads, and the daily stuffing of hefty maple, oak, and hickory logs into our big "Momma-Bear" Fischer wood stove, for the sun, balmy sea breezes, and carefree strolls along the fine, sandy beaches of this lovely part of Florida.

Here in Florida it was my habit each day to leave our 5th Street beach-home and walk north up the strand, passing under the the popular St. John's County Pier ("the fishing pier") and into Anastasia State Park. This Atlantic facing park encompasses over 1600 acres of bay-side hammock, salt marsh, beach dunes, and dune blow-outs, as well as four miles of fine sandy beach with an unencumbered view and pounding surf. That day, I walked passed the extension of Pope Road at the beach-end, just beyond the Resort Beach Hotel--and entered the State Park lands. The fine sand crunched softly under my feet, the sun warmed my face and the sea breeze ruffled my hair. I took a deep breath of clean sea air and felt I could easily walk the more than four miles up to the north end of the Island at St Augustine inlet. But I never got there.

As I proceeded north, the black and white spiral of Anastasia Light came into view and I was struck by the possibility of a fine-photo composition of the distant lighthouse with waving sea oats and sand dunes in the foreground. The picture would be best taken from the State Park beach walkway. Framing the picture in my mind, I struck out north-westward toward that place, across the back-beach, scattered with patches of sea oats, sea-side portulaca, and Atlantic beach golden-rod. I soon reached the State Park walkway which is confluent with Park Road, and the beach parking lot. It is here that visitors and campers make access to the sea side. I climbed the few sand-grimed wood steps and began composing my picture of the Anastasia Island Lighthouse on the far side of Salt Run about two or three miles away. Finally, I took out my camera and leaned on the north walkway-balustrade to steady my arms as I got ready to snap the picture. And at that point something in the sand surface below me caught my eye. The markings in the fine sand just below me in an area protected from the wind looked very familiar but also very much out of place.

I am an inveterate tracker, I often practiced the art as a boy on Long Island, and as an adult on and around our home in Vermont. As a youngster, some of my most enjoyable walks were taken after a light dusting of snow, when tracking was at its very best. The thin layer of snow provided the best circumstances for tracking, a thin, fine surface material underlain with a firm subsurface that resists distortion, often revealed an amazing variety of animal life residing in some small patch of wood or empty lot. On these winter walks and others along a muddy shore, or in patches of wet soil I learned to identify most of the native animals in my area by their footprints. Raccoons, cottontails, and squirrels must have been the first and most common animals I could identify from their tracks, but soon I was able to recognize evidences of deer and even a buck deer from a doe, and a fox from a small dog and also identify the spoor left by a variety of less common small critters such as the weasel, muskrat and even some common varieties of mice and voles. In Vermont, I encountered bigger game which left tracks such as moose, (though rare, we're obvious when they were encountered) and the tracks and scat of coyotes, river otters and even bear were fairly common on some paths deep in the woods of the Green Mountains.

My first sighting of a black-bear track was in a patch of remnant snow on a spring camping trip with my cousin Bill when we were both about fifteen years old. We took a bus from our homes in Brooklyn into the wilds of the Catskill Mountains one early spring, telling our parents we were going on a "supervised" Boy Scout Jamboree. But we secretly planned to be alone in the woods, testing our ability to survive with some simple camping gear--a fry pan, and a couple of GI war-surplus canteens (with that useful aluminum cup insert) as well as a compact tent Bill had carefully made from bed sheets, laboriously waterproofed with a home-concocted solution he read about.

As we trekked uphill through a small meadow in the central Catskills we came across a patch of remnant snow with a fresh bear track. We stopped to stare at it. The big flat hind foot and the five long pointy claws were clearly visible. These latter made it so plain ,to us how easily such a beast might tear apart our flimsy tent. Particularly frightening was that we might be taking shelter within it at the time.

The vision of the bear track took a bit of enthusiasm out of our plans, and the soaking rain which poured down on us that night did the rest. The rain seeped though the fabric to drip down on our upturned faces. The weight of the soaked fabric caused the main ridge-seam in Bill's carefully sewn and waterproofed tent to part and collapse around us. Huddled together in our damp clothes and covered by the wet-(though waterproofed) fabric of our collapsed tent, we tended our fire against the chilling rain and tried to calm our pounding hearts which responded to every forest sound which we attributed with certainty to a marauding bear, all night long. We took turns to brave into the edge of darkness around our blazing campfire to drag in more dry wood to keep the fire blazing brightly--and keep that bear at bay. The next day, dawned damp and drizzly, finding us cold and tired and dispirited. The thought of our warm home and dry beds beckoned to us--but we knew we couldn't go home. Arriving early from the Jamboree would have surely revealed our perfidy. So that morning, we packed up the wet and useless tent and came down off the hill (where the bear might have lived). We arrived at the main highway where we slept soundly under a dry, highway overpass. I have forgotten what explanations we gave our parents when we finally did arrive home- a day early--disenchanted with the rough life under that dusty roadway with its noisy vehicle-traffic overhead.

In this way was the memory of my first bear-track sighting permanently imprinted in my mind.

I tracked other black bears up in Vermont. One prowled into my back yard to raid a bird feeder, and another which, after sloshing through the muddy bank of Flood Brook, made a fine set of brown-prints across the smooth-white, crushed-rock surface of Glen Road. So I was well familiar bear tracks when I saw them under the walkway at the State Park beach entrance that day.

But, on this sandy beach, in warm, urbanized, St. Augustine, I really could not believe what I was seeing. Over the wind-rippled sand, I carefully followed the trail of prints which led under the boardwalk where the wind-blown deposits were even finer and the tracks more distinct. Each footprint was clean, and sharply delineated in a fine sediment which settled on an underlay of well-packed sand. Tracking conditions were nearly perfect. I determined that the bear was a small one, by Vermont standards, pointing might have been a sow. The fore paws showed the five toe pads and the pricks in the sand where the sharp tips of five long, curving, claw prints. The heel of the rear foot appeared clearly. In the dust-like sand, even the larger creases and network of fine lines on the soles of the bear's feet were visible. Brush-like markings made by the longer wisps of hair on the upper part of the foot were also visible in the fine sand.

I heard someone walking above me, and hunched over under the walkway, I had to scuttle over to the edge of the substructure to look up. There, above me, walking toward the beach was a middle-aged man whom I could share my discovery with and also confirm my conclusions. The fellow wore a bathing suit, and flip flops and strode down boardwalk to the beach with a rolled up towel under his arm.

"Hey there!" I called out, my head about even with the floorboards of the walkway.

"You want to see something real interesting?" I continued. From my position, I could see the man clearly- but he could not see me. The man stopped short to look around for the source of the voice.

"I'm down here mister..." I called, waving my arms over my head.

Finally seeing me, the man moved tentatively toward the side of the boardwalk where he peered cautiously over the edge.

The quizzical look he gave me, made me pause, but I was so excited about my find that I just couldn't help blurting out, "There are bear tracks down here!"

My pronouncement did not impress him. After my outburst, I recognized how bizarre it sounded even to my own ears.

The man said nothing. He just stared at me, his forehead wrinkled up as if he was working on some difficult puzzle.

"I know it seems strange, but, there they are," I continued defensively, pointing to the sand under the walkway, and realizing too late, that this man probably thought I was some weirdo from up north.

Without answering me, the fellow averted his eyes, tucked his towel further under his arm and turned to scurry off down the stairs and across the beach, looking back over his shoulder every now and then, perhaps to be sure I was not following him.

Before this person was out of sight, an elderly couple, who seemed to have heard the conversation I had with the first man, ambled down toward where I was standing. The man was of a chubby build and wore a colorful bathing suit and carried a beach umbrella and two light sand chairs. They too were apparently headed toward the beach. They were more curious, and appeared to change course to bear down on me.

"Whatca doin' down there? Find somet'n?"drawled the man, pressing his hairy exposed belly against the wooden side-fence, to peer down at me.

"There are a good set of bear tracks right here in the sand," I said, now after my last encounter trying to sound as nonchalant as possible.

V

The man looked around toward the barren sand of the wide beach, then over his shoulder toward the highway from which we could hear the distinct sound of rushing auto traffic, then toward the barren sandy dunes, and finally to the concrete parking lot behind him.

"Ain't likely," drawled the man. His wife smiled and silently shook her head, covered in a wide straw sun bonnet, in agreement.

"I didn't think so either, but here they are," I countered.

"We live here in town, and we ain't never seen no bars," said the man with certainty.

"Nor heered of 'em neither," added the wife.

"Betcha, it's the tracks of a big 'coon," he said, and his wife nodded in agreement, her big bonnet flapping vigorously as if to emphasize her assent.

They wandered off chatting and giggling to themselves.

I photographed the tracks and turned toward home a little disappointed in the level of curiosity of my fellow beach goers. On my way, I stopped in at the Park Ranger Station where I obliquely queried the attendant about the native wildlife in the park. I made no mention of bears. The man dutifully presented me the official list of native mammals in the Park. No Ursus americanus appeared on the list. At the entrance toll-booth, I queried another Park Ranger. There being no incoming toll-traffic, I felt there was time to specifically inquire about bears. When I asked "were bears ever observed in the Park, he just laughed at me.

"Ain't no bears in this park, Sir. Why do you ask? I bet you seen some garbage canisters turned over? We got no bears but plenty of good sized and hungry 'coons though.

"No, but I did see some tracks in the sand on the beach."

"Tracks?"

"Yeah, on the beach."

The man, waved me into the small toll booth where he patientlyn proceeded to inform me about the habitat of the black bear, how many square miles of woodland they need for survival, what its food-requirements are and so forth. Behind him on the wall, hung a lovely map of the St. Augustine area with a big green patch representing Anastasia State Park. The green patch was clearly surrounded by on the east by the blue Atlantic Ocean, and on the west ans south by the yellow and brown-colored urbanized areas and networks of roadways which completely surrounded the Park.. When he finished his discourse he just twisted around in his chair to look at the map, again and then turned to me as if to say..."think again."

Over the next few days, I developed the pictures I had taken of the tracks and I searched for more tendencies on the beach. I did find other tracks. Some I encountered along the southern park boundary just north of the the Resort Beach Hotel, where the bear had skirted and possibly explored a dumpster. I followed it past the Park beach boardwalk and into the extensive dunes and blowouts of the northeast portion of the facility. I did not find any scat or bear fur to collect, nor we're there any "bear signs" such as dug holes, pulled-over branches, or torn-up rotted logs. But I was now convinced that Anastasia State Park had a resident black bear--even if its professional staff did not know it. Yet I still yearned for someone to confirm my observations.

I decided to call the Florida State Wildlife Commission (FSWC)they would know about any bears in this vicinity.

That afternoon I made the call.

The operator directed me to the wildlife section and then to the person who was in charge of mammals and finally, I spoke to the State's "bear lady". After explaining what I had seen and where as well as what I had recorded on film, I paused, half-expecting another lecture on bear habitat....

"Oh," she said, happily "That must be Sarah, #43846". She's a collared, black bear sow."

"Collared?"

"Yes, she is a nice ole, gal-bear and has caused no problems. We have placed an electronic collar on her and have been tracking her position regularly from the air. But the last time we located her she was well south of where you describe seeing the tracks in Crescent Beach. She then crossed over to the southern end of Anastasia Island from Matanzas State Forest."

"Wow, Crescent Beach, that's like ten miles down the coast---quite a distance from here."

"We lost contact with her and thought perhaps she might have gone back over the river into Faver Dykes or someplace west."

"So that means she must have wandered north all along the beach side, past all those houses and hotels and even right past my place on 5th Street! I'm amazed at their ability to be so secretive," I said, bubbling with enthusiasm.

"And, think of it, no one noticed her--until you saw her tracks up there at Anastasia State Park!"

"Suggesting to me that perhaps wildlife and humans can maybe live together amicably!" I said.

"As a wildlife scientist I dearly hope so," she said with sincerity.

"Tell me what will happen to her up there in the Park?"

"Well, if all goes well and she behaves herself, stays away from camp-sites and garbage cans and mostly keeps over on the Atlantic side of the Park she will be fine. We won't bother her. But if we get complaints, such as garbage cans being knocked over and dumpsters being raided, we'll have to go up there, trap her and bring her back down south."

"But I'm so surprised that Sarah was able to make it up to Anastasia, past all those hotels, private residences, well-used beaches, all the while traveling beside a high traffic roadway, and without being noticed. Perhaps both our species are evolving--the critters are getting more secretive, and we--humans-are getting more tolerant."

"I'm surprised too," said the "bear lady", but it sure makes me optimistic, that given a bit of open space, some legal protection and lack of hunting pressure--you know that bears are still on the protected list--that with some luck we can keep a healthy bear population in Florida for generations to come.

Get the picture?

rjk

RISING OIL PRICES, REPUBLICANS TRY TO BLAME OBAMA

RISING OIL PRICES:REPUBLICANS TRY TO BLAME OBAMA

The Republicans, sensing a possible victory in the upcoming 2014 elections have been floundering around for an electioneering focus and talking point. It seems anything will do whether true or false. First, they tried to pull themselves up in the polls using the economy, but that rope frayed when, thanks to some modest Keynesian policies employed by this present administration the economy appears to be (by fits and starts) reviving. They shifted gears to social-wedge issues, such as abortion and women's personal health and family planning like contraception--which has underscored their reputations as the anti-female-party. This has proved a political failure and a definite "no no". So most recently at a time when gas prices have spiked, they have now taken up the oil cudgel.

Oil prices have risen sharply in recent months. The Republicans are trying to pin this on Mr. Obama. But there are three main causes for rising oil prices. None of them are related directly back to Mr Obama. They are basically these: first, our own traditional wasteful use of oil, second, the fact that the resource is a non-renewable finite quantity and world production has passed into a post "peak oil" period, and in this situation when demand for oil from China and other developing nations has grown exponentially, which leaves the USA and other older industrialized nations all competing for the same limited resource.

The USA is a former major oil producer, but those "oily days" are gone now. Today we hold only about 3% of the world's reserves. Our glory days are over but our old use-habits die hard. Oil was first commercially exploited here in the US in the 19th century in Pennsylvania. We grew up as a nation on cheap oil. Since we produced our own, the commodity remained inexpensive for us through the first half of the the last century. (It is still cheap here in the US. But at nearly four dollars a gallon, we complain, but in the UK, motorists are currently paying the equivalent of ten dollars a gallon!) With good quality, cheap oil in our backyard we simply became inured to low prices for energy and fell into practices which encouraged wasting oil. We developed our concepts, policies, and practices in a nation where energy was cheap. We built and drove big inefficient cars, and designed and produced houses which wasted fuel oil. We scattered our homes over the countryside so that to knit them together we had to build an extensive road system upon which we used oil powered buses and autos. At the behest of the powerful oil interests we undermined and made obsolete our efficient rail system for hauling freight and turned to trucks for haulage. We developed agribusinesses dependent upon cheap oil. It focused on using petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides which were once cheap but as oil prices climb have become increasing,y expensive. We sites farms wily nilly and most often at great distances from major population centers so that today with packaging, transport costs, refrigeration etc. each calorie of heat energy derived from the food we eat takes seven calories of heat energy from oil.

We are profligate waster of oil. The US has only between two or three percent of the world's reserves yet uses nearly 20 % of the world's oil production. Today, we remain the world's greatest consumer of oil. We burn more than the sum of the oil consumed by the next five top oil importing countries. Yes add up China, Japan, India, Russia and Germany's oil consumption and that is what we use daily. We consume just about 19 million barrels of oil each day. Were we to put that amount in standard oil barrels and line them up over the earth's surface, the line of barrels would stretch from the North Pole to the southern tip of South America just south of Tierra Del Fuego! That's how much we use each day! China which has a robust economy which is considered a challenge to our own, yet it uses less than half the oil we use. It also has a population of more than four times our own at 1.3 billion, but a billion-plus Chinese use less than half of the oil we use each year. There must be enormous waste in our pattern of usage. So when oil prices climb, we are like a motorist rolling in to an isolated, windswept and desolate Mojave-desert gas station with our gas needle buried at the "E"----we need that gas to get to LA and will pay any price for it.

Oil production worldwide is past its peak. According to some predictions the maximum rate of global extraction was reached in 2000. Here in the US we reached "peak oil" in 1975 and since then our production has been in terminal decline. There are no new lands or new fields which remain undiscovered new sources which will change the overall picture. Now, what is left is the known or "proven" resources in Russia, Saudi Arabia, the Middle East and Africa. These are being exploited fully and will continue to produce oil at a steady but slowly declining rate of some 50-80 million barrels a day for some time to come.

Due to natural development, population growth, and world industrialization, since the 1980s oil demand has crept up from 59 million barrels per day (1980) usage to about 89 million barrels a day in 2009. That amount is close to what the world uses each day, i.e. somewhere between 59 million barrels to 89 million barrels. The amount varies with the world economy and related world demand. So we are in a roughly stable position. Some of those sources such as as Libya are off production right now because of the recent revolution there. Iran's oil may soon be unavailable to the west or taken off the market due to the smoldering Israeli-Iranian conflict. Saudi Arabia has promised to pump more oil to make up the difference but it is only interested in producing enough to satisfy basic needs. Its policy is naturally to keep production low enough and oil prices high for the product it is selling. Therefore all the consumers are competing for the same pool of available oil and that hi demand is what keeps the price high.

Since there are no major new sources of this finite commodity the amount which reaches the market is relatively constant. World demand for oil has risen in concert with industrialization and mechanization. Another factor keeping prices high is that because producer nations wish to maintain a higher price for their product they tend to decrease production when demand slows and increase it a bit when demand spikes. So demand nearly always exceeds supply and so high prices will not ever go back to the cheap range. Right now with a barrel of oil at $126.00 dollars "extreme" sources of oil such as those from very deep ocean water, or Arctic areas--all difficult and expensive places from which to extract and transport oil from-can now come on to the market at competitive prices. For example, the oil sludge from the Athabaskan tar sands costs much more than sweet crude to extract, to process and to transport (and to clean up when it spills). It is too expensive to compete with normal crude. But when prices spike up to over $70 dollars per barrel, it becomes a salable commodity.

So it is the fact that oil is a commodity of diminishing production, our profligate and wasteful use of that commodity, as well as the fact that we grew as a world power nation with cheap oil and continue to think of it as our nation's "birthright" to have cheap oil, as well as our failure to foresee this clearly predictable situation and plan for it in the 1960s (mostly because as now, our government was in too cozy a relationship with the oil companies), and finally, the growth of the economies of other nations which now compete with us for a now increasingly scarce product. So don't blame Obama for that!

Get the picture?

Rjk

THE RECENT HISTORY OF THE US ECONOMY IN A NUTSHELL

THE US ECONOMIC COLLAPSE IN A NUTSHELL

Note: This blog appeared before in January 2011. It appears here slightly revised and updated from that original period.

Just after last Christmas and the New Year, I stopped into my favorite liquor retailer. The proprietor, Mister Aga Agra is a tiny Indian man who hails from Bombay. He is always pleasant and helpful and on this day he smiled a greeting from the dark corner where he sat quietly waiting patiently for his next customer. His large white teeth, with many prominent gold fillings, transformed and illuminated his dark, craggy face.

“How was the Christmas season for you?” I asked, as I placed a few bottles from the “Specials” selection on a well-worn but neat, counter surface.

He shuffled over . “For me?…You know, I am a Hindu, so we….,” his voice trailed off and he smiled again.

“No no, not you, I mean, for the business. How did it go here in the store. Well or poorly?”

“Ah yes!” He noted and smiled broadly as he happily and quickly tallied up my selections on the side of a thick brown-paper bag.

“Well enough, so you will not want to return to India?” I persisted, with a smile and a wink.

“Oh no..not go back…oh no no no. Now of course I have my family here. There is no return for me.”

“But I hear the economy is very good there,” I pressed on. There was no one else in the store.

“Yes. That is true. They are doing much better in the economy than we are here.”

“Why?”

“The Indians make many things there. They import very little.”

“Only food?”

“Oh yes. Some food, yes,” he agreed, then turned serious, brushing aside my question. Then after neatly folding the top of the paper bag so it would be easy to hold, he added, “But we here in America are not doing so well as we used to. It is simple. Here we make nothing, and we only import from China. And then too we import our energy from the Middle East. He smiled up at me, and while shaking his head left and right gently, he added “We must begin using less oil and making things here too!”

I agreed whole-heartedly with Mr. Agra.

I remember back in the 1950 and 60s when I was growing up, we did make things here---in fact all our clothes, shoes, hardware, autos and just about everything else. They were made right here in the USA. We were also an oil exporting country then too. Then too, many of our parents had good-paying jobs as well. “Made in the USA” was seen on most of the products we bought. But even then, on occasion, you might find some poorly made, inexpensive item, perhaps a copy of some American product or original idea, perhaps a child’s toy or a bit of low-cost hardware that would have the “Made in Japan” (not Made in China then) sticker on it. It was a sure indication that whatever it was--a pocket knife, a camera, a hand tool, ceramics or pottery, etc.,--- it was not up to US standards. But then, there was very little unemployment here at home. Workers had good jobs and paid their bills and their taxes. People were confident that their children would fare even better than they did in the US economy. And for a while we did. But sometime in the 1970s things changed for us.

About that time too we began to import oil…our domestic supply having “peaked”. But our cheap oil was a curse—it made us sloppy and inefficient. We used too much to run our our big cars and heat (or cool) our oversized houses.

I read with great enthusiasm and interest Richard Wolff’s article “The myth of American exceptionalism implodes.” in the guardian.co.uk (January 18, 2011). Prof. Richard Wolff (Economics, University of Massachusetts) clearly lays out the sources of the economic crisis we find ourselves in today. This is a great piece and Wolff and the Guardian should be commended. Unfortunately, we do not get this kind of candor in the US press. It’s too bad, because perhaps with a truly unshackled press might the public to better understand what is happening to their economies and their and their children’s lives--and their paychecks.

Wolff understands that the basic problem of our democracy is that both parties depend on the oligarchs, the barons of Wall Street and the large corporations (i.e. oil companies too) to fund their campaigns and protect their political survival. The workingman has today no powerful advocates in Washington (with a few exceptions such as our outstanding Senate team in Vermont) Wolff also seems to appreciate too, that the economic policy of basing the stimulus and sustenance of our wealth on unfettered domestic consumerism is over. As Mr. Agra the liquor store owner from Bombay says…”We don’t make anything here.”

According to Professor Wolff conditions were fine up to the 1970s. Prior to that time, the rich were getting richer faster than everyone else, but the middle class was prospering as well. According to Wolff “A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of the labor supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees…….until the 1970s“. After that time, things went down hill for the middle class and real wealth of the working class declined and continued to do so through the end of the 20th century and the early years of this century. But since 2008, rather then helping the working classes, the government has turned on them, to make them pay for the foolish and careless mistakes the government and business made. The bailouts were necessary, but the enormous costs fell on the backs of the middle class in the form of higher taxes and reduced services.

How did we get here in the economic crisis as we are today? After 1970 real wages stopped rising as US businesses redirected their investments and found means to increase profits in the wider global market. Prosperous local companies saw a way to be even more profitable. They began eliminating well-paying manufacturing jobs here and moving their production and assembly aspects of their business out of the country. They began “off-shoring jobs” and whole factories to Mexico, Taiwan, India, and elsewhere. The thinking of a typical small-company owner was this: why should I maintain a high-paid 5000 person workforce here in the US, when I could eliminate these costs (and the worker’s jobs) by moving the production and manufacturing parts of my business offshore and just keep a skeleton administrative and executive office here in the US? That way I can increase my profits and contend with my competitors more effectively. Thus, a former, well-run functioning American enterprise here in the USA which provided employment to say 5000 workers and executives, all of whom paid taxes, and who bought refrigerators and shoes and automobiles--and houses (on time payments) overnight became a US company in name only, with perhaps a 50-person executive cadre ensconced in fancy offices in some major US city with a well-used telephone line to somewhere in Mexico, India or elsewhere. The forty-five hundred workers of whose jobs were “offshored” were out of work and had to seek employment elsewhere--but in an increasingly tight job market.

To add to the effect, about this time too, the US was undergoing a massive technological revolution in which computers and computerized machinery began to replace human labor. Fewer men and women were needed in these modern manufacturing and other facilities. Then, as well, the women’s liberation movement as well-meaning and as necessary as it is…it simply provided business with more cheap labor, as more and more women entered the work force. For US business there was no end of cheap labor and no need to respond to labor’s demands for a fair wage. And when seasonal or holiday patterns caused a business spurt of growth, executives used part time help to fill the gap and limit hiring of more expensive full-time employees. These were not only sales personnel, but accountants, attorneys and other professionals.

As these events developed workers responded by working harder (for rightly they felt insecure), increasing their productivity, and working longer hours--to try to keep their uncertain jobs. To maintain their lifestyles in face of deceasing income, many families had to send “mother” out to work as well, and become a “two-wage-earner” family. Often, in real dollars, the two-earner family was earning not very much more than a single earner family of decades earlier. These families were simply maintaining their lifestyle, but at a heavy cost to family health and happiness. With no one home for very young children, grandparents had to fill the gap and take over mother‘s duties (where such relatives were available) or additional expenses had to be incurred--and perhaps more debt--when the services of a child care center were needed. When the financial burden became too great, many families turned to their credit cards then increased their indebtedness perhaps by leveraging money from their homes or raising their mortgages.

Then the system broke down in 2007 when oil costs peaked and the housing bubble burst.

While all of this was happening the rich and super-rich just got richer still. It’s simple, as Wolff explains it: if workers salaries were flat and their productivity was rising…there were increased profits for businesses. “While workers delivered more and more value to employers, those employers paid workers no more. The employers reaped all the benefits of rising productivity: rising profits, rising salaries and bonuses to managers, rising dividends to shareholders, and rising payments to the professionals who serve employers (lawyers, architects, consultants, etc. “

The result of the growth of wealth of the business class since the 1970s simply increased the existing top-heavy distribution of wealth in the US. In the 1970s, the top 1% of wage earners held about nine (9%) percent of the nation’s wealth, but in the next three decades their percent of the GDP increased nearly three-fold to a whopping 23% of the nation’s wealth. That figure is the highest in the industrialized western world--even monarchial England and Sweden do not have such a distribution of wealth. In fact, such unequal wealth distribution rates are more typical of tin-pot dictatorships and banana republics than modern western democracies.

Recall such countries as Ecuador and pre-Castro Cuba. What do these wealth distribution figures (known as Gini values) mean? That the top 1% of earners glean nearly a quarter (23% )of all wealth…leaving the lower 99% to scramble and compete for a smaller and smaller portion (67%) of the nation’s wealth. That is not a sound economic situation since the high wage earners spend their wealth very differently than middle income people do. It is the middle-class person who buys stoves, appliances, furniture, and pays school taxes and purchases local services, and supports the mechanisms which generate a healthy economy from the bottom up. The high-wage and high income earners do not.

As a result of this inequality more and more wealth has been concentrated in high places…and how was that wealth used?

According to Wolff the rich cashed in on their windfall “by speculating wildly and unsuccessfully in all sorts of new financial instruments (asset-backed securities, credit default swaps, etc). The richest also contributed to the crisis by using their money to shift US politics to the right, rendering government regulation and oversight inadequate to anticipate or moderate the crisis or even to react properly once it hit. “ The result of these investments and financial skullduggery was the financial crisis we faced in 2007 and continue to suffer from.

But these same super-wealthy also used their money to shift government policies to the right. To encourage less and less regulation---policies which only exacerbated the financial crisis. Then too they used their wealth politically to widen the gulf between the haves and have-nots through government action (or inaction). As Wolff puts it “First, they utilized both parties' dependence on their financial support to make sure there would be no mass federal hiring programme for the unemployed (as FDR used between 1934 and 1940). The absence of such a programme guaranteed that real wages would not rise and, with job benefits, would likely fall – as they indeed have done. Second, the rich made sure that the prime focus of government response to the crisis would benefit banks, large corporations and the stock markets. These have more or less "recovered".

There you have it in a nut shell. But what can we do to make it better? Perhaps it is as simple as using less of the expensive foreign oil and somehow bringing our jobs back home, as Mr. Agra suggested.

Get the picture?


rjk

LYSISTRATA AND THE GOP WAR ON WOMEN

In Lysistrata, a Greek play of early 5th century, Aristophanes, Greece's preeminent comic writer of the Classic Age and perhaps the "Neil Simon" of ancient Greece, entertains us with a play about women who turned the tables on men--exposing the ills and hypocrisy of a strictly male-dominated society. Aristophanes' most famous play "Lysistrata" appeared in Athens in 411 BC and relates the comic tale of how one Athenian woman, Lysistrata (her name in Greek means "war-plan-'breaker-upper'") organizes the women of Greece into a pact in which the fair sex all agree to abstain from carnal relations to force their husbands and lovers away from war and into negotiating a peace to end the interminable conflict between Athens and Sparta. The strategy works in part, but ends up inflaming that other interminable war--the war between the sexes--and permits Aristophanes to expose the underlying injustice and structure of the Greek, male-dominated paternalistic society.

Today nothing much has changed---the war between the sexes goes on--and male paternalism has it seems in some circles been little altered over the millennia. In our modern age, we see the same paternalism and hypocrisy and in a new war on women which has been launched by the Republicans.

This is exemplified most notably in the recent (interminable) Republican primaries. Led by Rick Santorum, a professed Catholic--right out of the Middle Ages, and foolishly parroted by Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, the GOP field have abandoned the issues that most Americans are rightly concerned about, jobs..jobs jobs, ending the wars, and the economy stupid--and taken us on a 1950s-era sexual and gynecological tour of women's issues. Republicans have turned back the clock fifty years or more to focus on: a cheap alternative-Republican-prescription for contraception (keep an aspirin between the knees), the hows and whys of abortion, the instant when life begins in the womb, a Republican sponsored law which would mandate intra-vaginal sonic evaluation of a fetus prior to abortion, Rush Limbaugh terming a young female law-student a "slut" over the air, because she supports government expenditures for female health and contraception; and whether a well- known woman's organization is spending funds on breast cancer or abortions and how much? Apparently, Mr. Santorum who has led the pack in this area, is getting "traction" in these dear-to-the-Republican-heart issues of its rabid far right wing-- issues which are "red meat" for what has become the Republican party in the early 21st century.

From Santorum's "rich-old-man" PAC-sponsor and supporter, Forster Freiss, who suggested that modern women should go back to the "aspirin between the knees" contraception method, and Santorum himself urging "abstinence" and "the rhythm method", to Republican legislators redefining rape to favor the attacker, and to a Republican-proposed change of the term used to describe a rape-victim as an "accuser" rather than "victim" the party which would take the Presidency from Obama are driving over a cliff of gender issues. All-in-all over the last few months--(since the Great Recession has shown signs of improvement and the "economy" issue may be less useful as a club to attack the President with in the coming election) the GOP has launched a Quixotic attack on women (and on the men who love, respect and support them). They are using a scatter shot of old wedge-issues, perhaps in desperation. The issues are the mental flotsam which apparently continually rattles around in the reactionary minds of those who live in the dark crannies and under the rocks of the nether world of this nation, and which each quadreenial year are revived by the GOP and poked into life for the elections.

With this foolish strategy, the GOP has cast itself as a male-dominated, paternalistic party of old men poking their noses under women's skirts and into women's bedrooms with male nostrums for the fair sex's very personal health issues. These matters are best left out of the public and political forum. Perhaps it's time for a new Lysistrata, a women's revolt against male stupidity and paternalism such as which occurred near the end of the long Peloponnesus War, between the Athenians and Spartans.

Time for you women to come out fighting!

Hit them where it hurts!

Get the picture?

Rjk