Leaking of "Secret" Info Not Always a Bad Thing

I don't think that the leaking of classified or otherwise secret documents is necessarily a bad thing. Often, the White House and the Pentagon use their classification power, not to keep information from the "enemy" that would damage our national security. That power is as often, or more often, used simply to keep the public in the dark about mistakes, failures, and lies of the Pentagon or the White House.

It's part of the arrogance of the government and their power to manipulate public opinion that they've been using for decades. They are smart and we are dumb. That justifies keeping information out of the hands of us, the public.

If anybody remembers the era of the Vietnam War, there were multiple examples of the purposes for which government secrecy was used. For one thing, the Pentagon did not want the news media to be able to show images of the bodies of soldiers who'd been killed as they arrived back on U.S. soil. Why? Because when people are more vividly shown the cost of war, in the form of the bodies of dead soldiers, they are more apt to oppose war.

Also in the Vietnam era, the so-called Pentagon Papers were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. In 1996, twenty-five years after that leak occurred, the New York Times wrote that the Pentagon Papers

demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.*

Wikipedia says,

The papers revealed that the U.S. had deliberately expanded its war with carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, none of which had been reported by media in the US . . . .

But the most damaging revelations in the papers revealed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled the public regarding their intentions.**

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
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* Apple, R.W. (1996-06-23). "Pentagon Papers". New York Times. Quoted in Wikipedia s.v. Pentagon Papers.

** Wikipedia, s.v. Pentagon Papers.

SUVs, Oil Demand, and the Gulf Oil Spill

An article on the Gulf oil spill that appeared a couple weeks ago said that it's hypocritical of people to criticize the oil spill or bemoan all the harm done—as long as they themselves are driving their thirsty SUVs that create the oil demand that in turn necessitates drilling in the Gulf.

I have a friend who is very enthusiastic about electric vehicles—should I say "coming electric vehicles"? He forwarded to me an article that mentioned an estimate of how much oil would be saved when we are driving electric cars. Quoting Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the article says,

Our goal should be to electrify half our cars and trucks within 20 years, which would reduce our dependence on oil by about a third. . . .

That sounds good. But I'd be very curious to know how that would compare with the percentage of oil that would be saved if we could move people out of their SUVs and into reasonably fuel-efficient vehicles.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

It Takes Nerves of Steel to Drive in the City

In New York City, every part of the state that is not NYC is "upstate." Here in Illinois, the corresponding term—for any thing that is not Chicago—is downstate.

I have friend who lives downstate, and he avoids visiting Chicago because he is terrified of driving in the Chicago area.

I can't entirely blame him. I've lived here for a long time, and I can still see how it can be scary. It's even hard for me to take it in stride sometimes.

There is definitely a big-city style of driving. On the expressways, people drive very aggressively. They change lanes when, rationally, it would be to no advantage, and they will cut in front of you very sharply. No one wants to drive in the right lane, it seems, so when it's time to exit they will just cut across several lanes and cut sharply in front of you.

And people rubber-necking if there's any incident: a car pulled over by cops or an accident or a car on fire, or whatever. I wish people could overcome their desire to gawk and not slow down, because that creates the proverbial "gapers' block."

And of course (as I mentioned in another blog posting), everyone is in a hurry these days. And I find it pretty scary when people follow too closely, and are talking on their cell phones, to boot. If they are not giving their undivided attention to driving, and they have to stop suddenly, they are going to crash right into the rear of some poor schlub like yours truly.

And driving on non-highway streets and roads has its own set of perils. Streets unmarked by road signs, speed bumps, bad pavement, red-light cameras, double-parked cars. Plus, again, crazy drivers, like taxi drivers, who drive very, very aggressively. Last time I used a taxi the driver wanted to use his cell phone while driving. I had to tell him not to. I'm told that's actually common, but I'm incredulous.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

The Fast Pace of Life

I have a friend who, when he calls me, is always doing something else at the same time. Either he's driving as he's talking on his cell phone, which I think is a bad idea; or he's shopping, so that what he's saying to me is interspersed with his comments to someone in the store; or he's doing something that makes crashing noises, thus affronting my eardrums on this end of the phone.

I've asked him why he can't call me while he's just sitting at home and not doing anything else. He said, Yeah, his grandmother would just sit and talk on the phone. He doesn't have the time to just talk on the phone, he has to use what time he's got to take care of more than one thing.

And of course the compulsion to multi-task is not unique to my friend. I have seen how common it is, and you have, too. I once worked for a man who would be doing at least three, sometimes four things at once: talking to me as well as someone else in his office, fielding phone calls, receiving delivery of a suit. I know it would simply make me nuts if I tried doing that.

Another time I was at Starbucks and a young woman came in and made her coffee purchase, all the while talking on her cell phone. Once she left, besides having her coffee to drink, she lit a cigarette, got in her car, and drove off —and might have still been engaged in her phone conversation. How do you manage all that: the phone, the coffee, the cigarette, plus driving the car? Well, first you set the coffee down on the roof of the car while you unlock the door. . . .

Yes, like my friend, people—at least people younger than I am—feel that they are not using their precious time efficiently if they are not doing more than one thing at once. Think what this means. We all feel so much pressure, we feel we haven't got enough of time in our day. We can't even imagine idleness.

And we not only must busy ourselves with multiple tasks at once, anything we accomplish must be executed quickly. Take driving. Anyone who drives can see how so many drivers clearly are in a hurry. Drive like crazy, even if you're hurrying to get to that red light up ahead! (Note to drivers: you're wasting gas by doing that.) In the downtowns of big cities, people walk real fast: hurry to get to work on time, hurry to get back from lunch on time, hurry to catch your commuter train home. Woe be to him who has to cross the surging stream of humanity or worse, try to swim upstream!

There is an expression in Italian, dolce far niente, meaning It's sweet to do nothing. Well, nowadays it must make people feel guilty if they have an idle moment or a moment to relax. What ever happened to taking a moment to breathe, to smell the roses, to clear your mind? To get your bearings, to reflect? I have to think that people who meditate, and maybe those whose religious practices include praying several times a day, may be on to a good thing if it just gives them a moment's pause from the hectic pace of their lives.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

A War on Men?

I've commented before on the characters on two cartoon TV programs, Homer Simpson on The Simpsons and Peter Griffin on Family Guy. These guys are stupid, they're foolish, they are disgusting fat pigs. And, not least, they're incredibly insensitive.

Their wives, on the other hand, are smarter, wiser; they embody all possible good sense and compassion. Their main lack of good sense might seem to be that they tolerate and forgive their husbands, as they always do, even when it's mind-blowing that they do. I'd like to see Marge or Lois say, "That's it, I've had it, this time you've gone too far. I'm through. I want a divorce." Don’t you think divorces have occurred with less provocation? So these women gotta be saints. And, even more strangely—here my non-mainstream sensibility might be coming into play—they continue to find their husbands sexy.

And there are a couple of TV commercials that depict men (a husband in one case, and a husband and father in the other) as stupid. In one, the husband set out to kill the weeds in the family's lawn, and killed the grass in the process. His wife has to indoctrinate him with the mantra, "weeds, not grass."

In the other one, for AT&T high-speed Internet, the husband—a middle-aged guy--can't seem to grasp that their new Internet service lets all the family's computers connect wirelessly, and keeps asking for his "Internet cord." Even his young daughter is far more savvy than Dad and keeps trying to explain to him.

It looks like there's a pattern here: at least four instances in which a male is depicted as stupid. The poor, patient, long-suffering females have to try to put up with them. I guess it's just part of the superior nature of women that they not only understand men and recognize all their foibles, they know it's woman's lot in life to forgive her man. Men are terribly flawed but hey, you know, they're good for something so we gotta keep them around.

I think the tables have turned: we used to have TV shows about shrewish, intolerable wives who got murdered by their husbands. And, as often happens, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.

Nowadays, if it were women who were depicted as unfavorably as the men are in my examples above, we'd have all the feminist organizations up in arms and calling for a boycott of the TV show or the product sponsor. Note just the fact that we have the word feminism. What is the word for advocacy or defense of males? There is no word. I rest my case.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein