Blog entries for walterrhett

Strands of Frogs' Eggs: Nobel Voices from GA, MS, NC, DC, Iran and Kenya

walterrhett — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:23:35 GMT

Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs' eggs, believing they were beads. --Wagari Muta Maathi, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Winner

The Nobel Prizes have a long history, having been awarded for more than a century, starting in 1901. The Nobel Foundation awards the prizes, named for Alfred Nobel, who cited his intent to establish the foundation and the Prizes in his will.

Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1833. Educated by private teachers in St. Petersburg, Russia, he learned Swedish, French, Russian, German, and English. His family had a vast technical background—his father developed aquatic mines used to protect St. Petersburg's harbor, and built bridges and buildings. His brothers developed an oil business in Southern Russia. His grandfather was a leading Swedish technocrat.

Alfred, after much experimenting and many accidents--one of which killed his brother, invented dynamite (a solid, controllable form of nitroglycerin, and safer to handle) and a detonator cap to set off the explosion. With industrial uses rapidly expanding for controllable high explosives, dynamite earned Nobel a significant fortune—and the inaccurate but oft-repeated tag of being “a merchant of death.”

His foundation also began in controversy, with different factions vying for control of the Nobel fortune. When he died, the country of Nobel's legal residence was up in the air, the fund to provide for the prizes was not yet established, his will had procedural and filing issues, his family considered contesting the will, and many thought the idea of having the Norwegian parliament select the annual winners was heretical.

Finally in 1901, the first Nobel Prize for Peace was shared by Jean H. Dunant and Frédéric Passy. Dunant, born in Geneva, founded the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Geneva Convention (1864); he died alone and never spent any of his prize money. Passy, born in Paris, lived their his whole life. He organized peace congresses, and worked as an activist to promote international peace, and wrote about political economy.

Since 1901, the Nobel Peace prize has been awarded 90 times to 120 recipients.

Recently, the definition of activities related to peace have branched into new territories. The 2003 prize went to Shirin Ebadi, a Iranian born lawyer, mother, wife, and activist for children rights. But he faced controversy for calling herself a Muslim woman rather than extolling her identity as an Iranian. A leading Iranian human rights organization wrote after her award:

“We were stunned to hear you calling yourself a Muslim woman instead of an Iranian woman. Have you forgotten that Iran has been a defeated country and Islam is a foreign religion forced on the Iranians for centuries?”

Another writer agreed: “If Ebadi were genuinely for the Iranian people and wanted to see them free, why is she identifying herself as an Islamic woman – as a part of the religion that has oppressed the Iranian people for centuries?”

The human rights organization also asked “Also didn’t we hear you advocating the separation of mosque and state?”

The writer agreed again: “It seems if a person wanted to liberate the Iranian people, especially someone like Ebadi, they would advocate the separation of religion and state. But she isn’t. Why not? Ebadi insists that Islam and human rights are compatible. Yet even Islamic Scholars such as Kadivar have stated that Islam is the religion of discrimination and separation.”

Finally, the Iranian group asks in its letter: “Dear Mrs. Ebadi, how can you be working for human rights and then accept the Islamic laws of torture, amputations, stoning, beating and flogging?”

In Iran, her university was forced by the State to cancel a reception in her honor.

Ebadi's 2003 win was followed in 2004 by the award of the Peace prize to another woman, Wangari Muta Maathai, of Kenya. Maathai, the first Kenyan woman to earn a PhD., is a professor and department chair (veterinary anatomy), and an activist for sustainable development.

In her Nobel lecture, Maathai said, “Although this prize comes to me, it acknowledges the work of countless individuals and groups across the globe. They work quietly and often without recognition to protect the environment, promote democracy, defend human rights and ensure equality between women and men. By so doing, they plant seeds of peace. I know they, too, are proud today.”

Maathai joined six other Peace Prize winners from Africa, including F.W. De Klerk, the South African President who presided over a country divided by the racial policy of apartheid, which he helped end;--and Chief Albert Luthili, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela, South Africans who, since the 1940s, struggled against the apartheid De Klerk oversaw for rights, freedom, and justice for all South Africans. The other African winner, Egypt's former President, Anwar Sadat, summed up the intent of the Peace Prize,

“in this spirit Alfred Nobel created the prize which bears his name, aimed at encouraging mankind to follow the path of peace, development, progress and prosperity.”

Kenya's Maathai's major contribution has been to sustainable development. Through the Green Belt movement she helped found, Maathai has been helped coordinate and direct the planting of 30 million trees over the last thirty years.

Dr. Maathai, in her Nobel lecture, reminded everyone that: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has challenged the world to broaden the understanding of peace: there can be no peace without equitable development; and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space. This shift is an idea whose time has come.”

Former Vice-President Al Gore won the Peace Prize in 2007.

Dr. Ralph Bunche, whose father was a barber and grandmother had once been enslaved, graduated from UCLA with honors and earned a PhD D. from Harvard. He became the first African-American to win the Nobel Prize in 1950. As United Nations chief negotiator, he brokered a peace agreement and armistice between armed, warring fractions of Arab states and the new nation of Israel.

Dr. Bunche noted in his Nobel Lecture, entitled, “Some Reflections on Peace in Our Time:”

In this most anxious period of human history, the subject of peace, above every other, commands the solemn attention of all men of reason and goodwill. Moreover, on this particular occasion, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Nobel Foundation, it is eminently fitting to speak of peace. . .

Then, in phases that eerily seem to reflect our own times, Dr. Bunche, with penetrating accuracy and clarity, observed:

“In these critical times - times which test to the utmost the good sense, the forbearance, and the morality of every peace-loving people - it is not easy to speak of peace with either conviction or reassurance. True it is that statesmen the world over, exalting lofty concepts and noble ideals, pay homage to peace and freedom in a perpetual torrent of eloquent phrases. But the statesmen also speak darkly of the lurking threat of war; and the preparations for war ever intensify, while strife flares or threatens in many localities. '

“The words used by statesmen in our day no longer have a common meaning. (wr/emphasis.) Perhaps they never had. Freedom, democracy, human rights, international morality, peace itself, mean different things to different men. Words, in a constant flow of propaganda - itself an instrument of war - are employed to confuse, mislead, and debase the common man. Democracy is prostituted to dignify enslavement; freedom and equality are held good for some men but withheld from others by and in allegedly "democratic" societies; in "free" societies, so-called, individual human rights are severely denied; aggressive adventures are launched under the guise of "liberation". Truth and morality are subverted by propaganda, on the cynical assumption that truth is whatever propaganda can induce people to believe. Truth and morality, therefore, become gravely weakened as defences against injustice and war. With what great insight did Voltaire, hating war enormously, declare: "War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not colour his crime with the pretext of justice."”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist preacher and civil rights leader, was the second African-American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. At 35, he remains the Prize's youngest winner.

Dr. King's selection triggered a relentless barrage of fierce criticism by American political leaders, opinion makers and from other quarters, especially from citizens who felt strangely disturbed, displaced, or shaken by Dr. King's persistent drive for equality and opportunity. Dr. King's use of non-violent confrontation and direct action against segregation laws severely limiting the rights and choices of African-Americans was seen by many as a deliberate effort to incite of violence, as an example of“outside agitation” and external interference, and as an plotted effort by communists to overthrow America (NC Sen. Jesse Helms pronounced Dr. King to be a Communist from the well of the Senate floor). Many though it was mockery of peace. They held true peace lay in the old status quo rooted in discrimination, two tier rights, and non-white groups being bereft of power. Dr. King's award was widely thought to be a travesty and a sham, and was met with disgust by many.

In his La Prix Nobel lecture, Dr. King brought his considerable powers of analysis to bear. Like Dr. Bunche's, his observations remain relevant:
Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.

“We live in a day, says the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, "when civilization is shifting its basic outlook: a major turning point in history where the presuppositions on which society is structured are being analyzed, sharply challenged, and profoundly changed.”

And again, Dr. King speaks from the past, in this 1964 address, in a language that mirrors the present so presciently, that it causes shivers:
Another indication that progress is being made was found in the recent presidential election in the United States. The American people revealed great maturity by overwhelmingly rejecting a presidential candidate who had become identified with extremism, racism, and retrogression. The voters of our nation rendered a telling blow to the radical right. They defeated those elements in our society which seek to pit white against Negro and lead the nation down a dangerous Fascist path.

Let me not leave you with a false impression. The problem is far from solved. We still have a long, long way to go before the dream of freedom is a reality for the Negro in the United States. To put it figuratively in biblical language, we have left the dusty soils of Egypt and crossed a Red Sea whose waters had for years been hardened by a long and piercing winter of massive resistance. But before we reach the majestic shores of the Promised Land, there is a frustrating and bewildering wilderness ahead.”

Dr. King could well be describing the public reaction to the newest African-American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize--the 44th President, Barack Hussein Obama.

Dr. King goes on:
I do not wish to minimize the complexity of the problems that need to be faced in achieving disarmament and peace. But I think it is a fact that we shall not have the will, the courage, and the insight to deal with such matters unless in this field we are prepared to undergo a mental and spiritual reevaluation - a change of focus which will enable us to see that the things which seem most real and powerful are indeed now unreal and have come under the sentence of death. We need to make a supreme effort to generate the readiness, indeed the eagerness, to enter into the new world.”

In 1994, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader of the PLO, received the Nobel Prize for Peace.

In Charleston, I'm friends and a writing mentor to Alison Sher, a young writer and recent college graduate who nearly caused a crisis in US and Bhutan relations and almost got herself kicked out of the country for blogging during a study trip to Bhutan (her study advisers told her that Bhutanese officials requested that she should shut down her blog because it violated the Bhutan Happiness code; that she really little experience and no idea what it was really like to be Bhutanese, that being in the country was a great opportunity, and that her private feelings were best expressed in a journal—she was told this while crying hysterically, in a not-to-be-believed Alison meltdown)—in fact, she's in the coffee house now, working on her review of the music at a Charleston organic jazz cafe, emceed by a Yoruba Priest, named Dr. O, who greeted the crowds on the mike with a pronounced, “Ashaye!”

Alison's grand-aunt, Gertrude B. Elion won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1988. Mrs. Elion, a chemist, was the child of European immigrants, attended college free at New York City's Hunter College during the Depression, and as an experiential learner, her contributions and knowledge advances during the course of her career led to her sharing the Nobel in 1988. Ms. Elion, who only earned a Master's degree and never married, died in 1999.

Barack Obama has been called the “face of evil” by Americans commenting on the internet who feel his short tenure in office makes the prize undeserved. The resounding assessment of Obama's award is expressed rhetorically: “What has he done?”

As with all the Nobel Laureates, in all of the fields, especially, Peace, history shows the answer depends on your point of view. Certainly, Obama as President, has not planted 30 million trees, founded a humanitarian triage group, written best sellers with enduring substance--or even ended the two tier, inequitable system for dealing with intra-gender sexual orientation in the US Uniformed Military Services.

Yet, by any measure, no Head of State, modern or otherwise, has directed more attention toward world peace as a multi-national, community process--by the traditional diplomatic and government tools of meetings, appearances, and words. Obama's dint of speeches, high level meetings, diplomatic engagement are unparalleled or rivaled from antiquity to the present.

His behavior has matched his words, much to the chagrin and angst of some, who consider his positions to soft and his behavior as kowtowing to barbarous bullies who are world leaders. For others, Barack has engaged in weighed political restraint in the face of provocation from several international and national fronts (Venezuela, Iraq, Al Queda, North Korea, among them). It most be agreed he has freed hostages, killed pirates, and changed the focus of the war, striking terrorist leaders from Africa to Afghanistan. While there are no signed agreements (it is simply to soon), the announced willingness of Russia and other countries to negotiate security and economic agreements are a measure the emphasis on World Peace Barack Obama has committed to in just 38 weeks as American President.

To this end, Obama spoke to citizens and parliaments in London, Strasbourg (France), Prague, Ankara, and Baghdad in April alone. Secretary of State Clinton who right now is traveling to London, Dublin, Belfast, and Moscow, has visited 34 countries and longed 134, 748 miles!, from India and China to Honduras and Mexico to lay out the new policy initiative of “Smart Power.” Secretary Clinton said about the Barack's Prize, “I think from the Secretary's standpoint, not only is it well-deserved, the outreach that the President has made in the first now ten months in office, but it's an affirmation of the strategy of engagement, of the need to work collaboratively and multilaterally to solve the challenges of the world."

What has happened during Barack's 38 weeks in office? Are there results to point to?

After his visit to London, world leaders agreed to keep their individual stimulus policies in place and to strengthen regulation.
After Prague, Barack and Russian President agreed in July to reduce nuclear stockpiles by a third.
Little progress has been realized yet in the Middle East, but talks continue.
In an important breakthrough, Iran has agreed to an inspection of a nuclear enrichment facility and indicated it is willingly transfer its uranium to Russia for peaceful purposes.

The Obama Presidency may fall on domestic issues and on the mantras of consensus doom and gloom which seem to be gathering wider acceptance, but it is clear that his trips to Asia Minor (Turkey), the Middle East (Egypt), the African Continent, his involvement in international meetings with other Heads of State has made a significant difference in the way in which the prospects of peace are viewed around the world, in the language and attitudes of Statecraft, in the expanded conversations about topics previously off the table—African corruption and sectional conflicts, the systemic rape and slavery of children and women, the advancing nuclear threat from Iraq, the ties of peace to global prosperity. Obama is shaping and driving a new era of government relations, within and between countries. The prize is a measure of his influence especially outside of the United States.

Meanwhile at home, Republicans have mocked Obama's selection as a fund-raising tool.

Perhaps Micheal Steele, the African-American chair of the Republican Party, provided the double example of the new struggles a-raising from new victories and of the words without common meaning that Martin Luther King and Ralph Bunche foreshadowed. Steele's comment: "Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control," This was written in an e-mail that invited contributions of up to $1,000. It closed: "Truly patriotic Americans like you and our Republican Party are the only thing standing in their way."

And, in the strange world of bedfellows, Steele and the many of the Republicans now agree and share the view of the dictator and anti-American dilettante, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a strident and disrespectful vocal U.S. Critic. Chavez, according with Steele, other Republicans, and popular American pundits, says he doesn't think Obama deserved the prize.

But Republican Congressional leaders John Boehner in the House (OH) and Mitch McConnell (KY) in the Senate have been silent about Barack's Prize, but Boehner has oscillated back and forth as to whether Obama is a socialist, taking yes and no positions in front of different audiences at different times. Otherwise, on the Prize, no statements from their offices.

Barack's Republican opponent in last fall's election has gone against the prevailing trend. With the traditional patriotism and loyalty of a graduate of the Naval Academy and a long time Senator of national stature, John McClain (AZ) has gone against the grain. "Americans are always pleased when their president is recognized by something on this order," McClain said.

Among the comments found on the internet, others say Barack is the face of evil. Others say Barack believes America is evil. Still others say he is unready to face evil.

Keeping our eyes on the Prize, the original Nobel statement specifies the prize should “be awarded to the person who has accomplished “the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the promotion of peace congresses.”

The Peace Prize is awarded in a different fashion than the other Nobel Prizes. Academic and professional organizations such the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decide who wins the other prizes. The Peace Prize is determined by a five person committee selected from the Norwegian legislature, or Storing.

For Obama's award, the committee members were Thorbjorn Jagland, president of the Storting (chairman) and former Labor Party prime minister and foreign minister of Norway; Kaci Kullmann Five, a former member of the Storting and president of the Conservative Party; Sissel Marie Ronbeck, a former Social Democratic member of the Storting; Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, a former member of the Storting and current senior adviser to the Progress Party; and Agot Valle, a current member of the Storting and spokeswoman on foreign affairs for the Socialist Left Party.

One writer noted: “The peace prize committee is therefore a committee of politicians, some present members of parliament, some former members of parliament. Three come from the left (Jagland, Ronbeck and Valle). Two come from the right (Kullman and Ytterhorn). It is reasonable to say that the peace prize committee faithfully reproduces the full spectrum of Norwegian politics.”

America, by its reaction to Barack's selection, has a different spectrum of political views and a different crititeria of assessment. Part of that assessment is to leave unanswered the question of “what has he done?”

But in Europe the question is debated and the answers discussed. One writer notes: In recent years, the awards have gone to political dissidents the committee approved of, such as the Dalai Lama and Lech Walesa, or people supporting causes it agreed with, such as Al Gore. Others were peacemakers in the Theodore Roosevelt mode, such as Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger for working toward peace in Vietnam.

Therefore, the award to Obama was neither more or less odd than some of the previous awards.

The debate about Barack's Prize agains brings to mind the maxim mentioned by Dr. King in his Nobel lecture: But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. But either way, it's of our own making.

And in a country that, still believes that “yes, we can,” despite causal mantras of doom and several announced cries for its “failure,” Barack's selection is noteworthy on the basis cited by the Mississippian, William Faulkner, in his 1950 speech at the Nobel dinner. “It is a privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.”

All pictures, fair use.
From the top: Nobel winners Shirin Ebadi, Wagari Maathai, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Bunche, Gertrude Elion, William Faulkner.
Walter Rhett writes Southern Perlo, a national cultural/history blog reviewing politics and social issues in a Southern story telling style, with key Southern examples.
Kudu Coffee in Charleston, SC, supports Southern Perlo with great coffee. Walt's new magazine book, "Carolina Gold," is finished; Walt now has the printer's proofs. Follow Walt/Southern Perlo on twitter.com/walterrhett. Please stir the Perlo; comment below.

Death Row

walterrhett — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:09:57 GMT

Capital Crimes and Punishment
Last month (September), the State of Ohio failed to execute an innate who spent 25 years on death row for the murder and rape of a 14 year old girl. The state's failure was not due to any legal action, new evidence, DNA, appeal, or court ordered stay. The execution failed when technicians at the state's Lucasville prison were unable to insert an intravenous line into the condemned man to administer the lethal injection.

The techs tried 18 times. Needles were inserted in both arms and a leg. In fact, a team of 12 people tried for more than 2 hours to find a vein to push the 3 drug lethal cocktail through his veins. To no avail. Finally, they gave up.

Soon after, the State rescheduled the execution. This prompted the US District Court to intervene and issue a temporary stay. Then the Ohio Governor put all executions on hold until a review and alternative plans could be put in place.

63 years ago, in 1946, the electric current failed to kill a teenage inmate strapped to an electric chair named “Gruesome Gertie” in Louisiana. A drunk executioner failed to wire the chair properly, and after a long minute, the convulsing teenager screamed “I'm not dying!”

In 1946, the US Supreme Court ruled Louisiana was entitled to a second shot.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that other scheduled executions could go forward, but the state's Governor suspended any further executions.

The New York Times (which has over 155 links to the story), Newsweek, Agence France Presse, and the China Daily are among the global/national press organizations that covered or editorialized about Ohio's repeated unsuccessful attempts to execute the death sentence 25 years after the crime.

Does the State Have the Right to Kill?
But to Perlo's mind, the massive coverage represents a second, equally important failure. The stories and editorials fail to present an important and fundamental question: How does the State claim the right to kill?

      The first recorded instance of Occidental (Western) death sentences appears in the Hammurabi Code, established in the 18th century BC by a Babylonian King. The Code proscribed the death penalty for 25 different crimes. Death penalties for crimes were also part of the 14th century BC Hittite Code, the 7th Century BC Draconian Code (Athens), in which death was the only punishment for all crimes, and 5th Century BC Roman Law. Executions were carried out by crucifixion, drowning, beating, burning, and impalement.
      In the 10th Century AD, hanging was widely used in Britain. In the 11th Century, William the Conqueror largely stopped the death penalty.
      But in the Sixteenth Century, Henry VIII executed as many as 72,000 people. Common execution methods were boiling, burning, hanging, beheading, and drawing and quartering. Under Henry VIII's reign, capital offenses included cutting down a tree or marrying a Jew.
      North Carolina once punished by hanging the crime of taking a free Negro out of state for the purpose of being sold into slavery. Charleston has one recorded incident of a hanging for “Negro stealing.” Charleston also recorded the first death by hanging of an American woman (a serial killer). The country hung 505 women before 1900 (under counted by hangings of enslaved women). Charleston, for several decades, burned alive enslaved cooks who were thought to be guilty of arson—a travesty protested even in the local newspaper's editorials.
      On the global front, China reported 1770 executions in 2005. In the US, in 2008, 37 executions were carried out and 3220 persons waited on death row. The oldest, 92; the youngest, 19.
     Death by the state, in any era, in large numbers or small, seems grisly and macabre—and senseless and inept. Death for cutting a tree? Drunken executioners? 18 needle sticks? Despite the safeguards of review and law, governing officials have seemed eager to apply the death penalty for specified crimes. They are also often inept or indifferent in carrying it out. And executions, touted as a social good, have a hidden human cost.

Eyewitness to a Family
     I sat once once with a family on the night their nephew/cousin was being executed by the State of South Carolina. The family gathered in the hours before midnight, embracing each other, sharing their grief wordlessly. In the hour before the 12:01am execution, the family began to pray. Standing together in the middle of a small living room, they sang and prayed in round, lifting up in breaking, sorrow-filled voices each of the affirmations and supplications they solemnly offered to God; on behalf of the condemned, and of behalf of the victims and their families.
      No media were present, nor had any media contacted the family. No interviews were later requested after the execution. The 90 seconds of televised coverage the next day consisted of still film of the prison's exterior, a short reminder of the horrific nature and details of the crime, and an brief report about the victims' family by the TV anchor.
     Yet the condemned, tried and found guilty, executed one minute into the new day, belonged to a family, who stood in the force of the State's mediation of justice and suffered his end. The prayers of their voices at the hour of execution; the sincere, simple inclusive expressions of mercy for the victims and their families, their petitions for peace and healing and forgiveness, stood in counterpoint, in my mind, to the spare routine the state conducted by its authority, the taking of a life and the brief, televised note that marked the state's successful diligence.
     As those prayers were offered, I was the only outsider present among the 20 or so people of all ages, from children to elders. I heard no bitterness or recrimination. Only grief rained upward. Their prayers were pleas for support and strength, prayers for forgiveness, for mercy, for changed hearts, for an end to the hurt and pain felt by others who had been harmed and knew irreplaceable loss, for comfort and solace for all touched by every aspect of the tragedy.
     The execution worked with cold dispatch. Shortly after 12, the call came from Columbia that the execution had been carried out. The body would be released, taken to a funeral home, and returned to Charleston for a funeral and burial service.

     What ideas allow the State to sentence men and women to death? The basic premise is that individuals, if found by others, to actually have carried certain designated actions, have forfeited, under the concept of justice, their “right” to live and may be condemned to die by the state. This holds that death is a valid action by the State. But can we really justify executions by the presupposed good these deaths offer the victims families and society?
      Both sides of the debate, cite positions and counter arguments, offer statistics and historic examples. But it comes down to a simple feeling about the value of life. The contradictions of this feeling are evident in the fact that conservatives, who want government out of human enterprises, generally support the death penalty and eagerly relish the state carrying out death sentences. Liberals, who usually support government as a prime actor in society and the economy, generally want the State to end death sentences as a state function. They seek to change laws that allow the State to mandate capital punishment.
      The contradictions of ideology highlight the difference in the feeling each side has about the death penalty. Feeling determines how each side interprets, justifies, and legitimizes its views.

An Unshakeable Feeling

      These feelings create their own controversy. At Ohio State, my alma mater, the College of Social Work employs a full professor who once sat on Georgia's death row for year, awaiting execution. His sentence (not his conviction) was overturned on appeal. He was then sentenced to life imprisonment and spent 8 years in the GA penal system before being paroled. While at OSU, the professor has sued the College of Social Work and its former Dean for discrimination and sent crude, defaming emails. With a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, the prof bitterly blames the system for his low professional evaluations and his term in prison, and seems locked in a combative, confrontational box. The comments that follow the story show how complex feelings run on the death sentence--and on those who have come under its spectre. (Story link: http://bit.ly/2tEqV2).
      The present support for the death sentence in some ways seems a part of the cynicism that shadows American public life. Kill them (add any name here: of the murderers whose crimes are more frequent and harder to fathom; of kidnappers and child murderers, serial killers, mass murders; of family killers, gang members seeking “props” and street justice, juveniles with broken value systems that seek the outlaw status of being a killer who has taken a life; of the members of a youth mob whose senseless violence recently killed a honor student in Chicago). Kill them. But tell me, what is the difference between their gross inhumane executions without judge or jury--their murder of innocent victims--and the stamp of state approval that undergrids the State's own slower, peer-reviewed death march?
     They deserve it, many say, citing history, the Bible, the gross inhumanity of their crimes. I shudder when I think of the increasing litany of lives lost not just to violence but by mind-numbing methods. But please read carefully.
     Where many of my readers might think of my position as that of a “bleeding heart,” I honestly see a paradox. I see a deadly cycle in which the system and the criminals mirror each other, and both sides simply seem to spiral upward, more and more out of control. I believe, in our anger, rage, self-righteous, in our pain and helplessness, we forget the commands of the Psalms: “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.”Let us “not fall into the pit we have dug,” or be snared “by the net we have hidden.” Plain spoken warnings from God resound and admonish us that in anger, we are not to take up any fight by our own will or mistake patience for passiveness.
     I know this paradox from substituting in middle schools. The more I cracked down on misdeeds, the more they multiplied. The more I controlled, the more I lost control. By the time I became a special ed sub, I had mastered the paradox: my class won awards for the first time in school history.
     My point is the death penalty has no easy answer—expect both research and anecdote clearly indicate, without equivocation, that the death penalty is not a deterrent to the commission of capital crimes, and may, in a perverse logical way, may be used as a justification by some who do. The State does it. Why can't I?

The Crime and the Time

     I hear my readers snorting at the argument above. I hear the mantra: kill 'em. Gas 'em. Hang 'em. Stick them a hundred times if necessary. I hear and understand. But I hope at lease someone will understand when I say: It doesn't feel right. The action of supporting the death seems to mock me; it's a feeling I cannot shake.
     Lastly the penalty mocks itself by the mistakes and wrong convictions swept into its fold. This week, an announcement cited the 137th and 138th case of wrongful conviction in capital punishment cases in the US system!138 times, we nearly sent the wrong persons, innocent persons to death. Our safeguards failed. Our adversarial process failed. Our juries failed. 138 times. And counting.
     Still: the cry: “kill 'em.” I hear the cry. I can cite the all reasons and feel the pain and rage, the suffering and emptiness caused by those who walked and laughed among us, who were killed, “wetted,” with vicious ease. I don't want us to be soft or exploited by those who kill and rape and maim our friends, honor students, or family. But even with knowing and seeing, the State's ability to kill just doesn't feel right. Killing killers and rapists doesn't seem to serve justice. The State's history of death sentences is filled with caprice. The death penalty lacks social benefits. And mounting numbers indicate the State is often wrong.

All pictures, fair use.

Walter Rhett writes Southern Perlo. A national cultural/history blog with a traditional, Southern story telling style and key Southern examples, Southern Perlo often reviews politics and social issues.
Kudu Coffee in Charleston, SC, supports Southern Perlo with great coffee. Walt's new magazine book, "Carolina Gold," is finished; Walt is waiting on the printer's proofs. Follow Walt on twitter.com/walterrhett. Please stir the Perlo; comment below.

Pants on fire!

walterrhett — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:56:20 GMT

Think carefully for a minute: those who call others liars are usually deceivers themselves.
Do you think I am talking about the recent flap with SCCongress member, Joe Wilson? My fault, I forgot to say who or what was the object or cause of my opening aphorism--and that's my point: no matter who or what I say now, the damage is done. You probably thought I meant Joe Wilson, and nothing I write will un-associate that connection, or change that conclusion.

Lawyers and middle school students know this well. Outbursts in the courtroom and classroom are admonished by teachers and judges, but the words, once said, stay; the belligent, bellicouse remark destroys the discipline and order needed for proper debate or for a judgment asssessing the issues at stake. It switches the discourse to the ad hominem. It's a brutal, joker-like challenge to power. And to common sense.

Many think Joe Wilson was right, but the issue of true or dare really begs the point. Rude behavior and disruptive outbursts in the hallowed halls of Congress by experienced elected officials are no different than flag burning. It is disrespect, pure and simple. It tramples on America's most valued traditions. It tears democracy apart. It does not enhance free speech. Instead, it uses that right of freedom to strike tyranny. It's a mockery.

And where did Joe Wilson's sudden found passion come from? What propelled this "spontaneous" outburst? From here, it looks like Joe Wilson was a staged event. He has had plenty of opportunities to explain his positions on health care, to cite his differences with the President's conclusions, even to put forth his own ideas for reform. C-SPAN offers an unfiltered platform to House members each evening when the House is in session. Talks shows look for new faces. Why was this the first time we have heard of Joe Wilson's passion in this verbal ambush on the Commander-in-Chief? The sum expression of his televisioned position seems to rest on two words, whose notoriety and million dollars in contributions have a marginal association with health care.

In fact, what is Wilson's plan as a representative from a state that out of fifty, ranks first in infant morality, 3rd in life expectancy, has the nation's highest unemployment rate (how will families pay for private plans?), and ranks high in heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, AIDS, obesity, and tobacco related morality? What's his plan to improve the health of citizens in a state, which, despite conservative representation that proclaims the vaulted virtues of free enterprise, government is the state's second largest employer?

There is another old adage: when you don't have a case, try your opponent's.

So here's Joe Wilson's case. If Joe Wilson really does think, as an elected member of Congress, that his peers have written and plan to enact reform legislation that will create death panels and institutionalize murder by a review of professionally appointed peers--if his staff supports this view and his party's leadership is solidly behind this interpretation, then he needs to carefully, plainly state, point-by-point the latent dangers others don't see. If Wilson sees this outcome on his own, against the views and judgments of his own party and staff, than he needs to be reviewed by a different panel, a panel of voters. And ousted from office, for ludicrousness.

If Joe Wilson does not see the idea of death panels in the details of HR 3200, than his outburst is even more egregious. So which is it? Does Joe Wilson see death panels coming to Columbia, to review the lives of his elderly or sick constituents to determine a schedule for their deaths? And if they miss the appointment, will we send local police, national guard, or a newly created force to round them up? Like death row inmates convicted of a capital crime, will the sweet, hard working elderly, pillars of the church and their family, the heart and core of their communities, be eligible for last minute stays, new reviews? And which doctors will face malpractice for pulling the panel-ordered plug? And what happens if we take grandma on a long trip? Will we be fleeing fugitives? Will there be a grandma underground? Anyone can see the absurdity of these notions! It's enough to make me scream.

And if ol' Joe doesn't see “panels” so clearly in the fine print, a task now decided in absentia by insurance providers through their approval and “permission” for your doctor's treatment protocols (see http://bit.ly/sLo3b), than ol' Joe was following Lee Atwater's lead when Atwater said during a governor's race, of a Democratic candidate who had been treating for depression by electric shook, “we don't need a governor who's been hooked up to jumper cables.”

Maybe if we hook up ol' Joe, he'll come to his senses. If not, just leave the juice running.

"I know he's in there, somewhere"

Walter Rhett writes and publishes Southern Perlo, from Kudu Coffee in downtown Charleston, SC. His new book, "Carolina Gold," will be out soon.

A Memory of the Kennedy Journey

walterrhett — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:44:36 GMT

The one time I was in the room with Edward Kennedy was almost 26 years ago, for an afternoon announcement of the Senate's passage of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday bill. Senator Kennedy, and others, including Coretta Scott King, stood to the right of the podium, as Bob Dole, the Republican senator from Kansas, the Senate's majority leader, and the King bill's floor manger spoke.

Earlier, in the Senate chamber during the floor debate, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina tried to block a vote by making a continuous speech from the floor, permitted under Senate rules. Senator Helms used the now-too-common devices of attack politics and outlandish, exaggerated character smears to bring specious charges against Dr. King. In one of the great ironies of Senate speech making, Helms contended that King's very name “remained” a “deeply troubling symbol of a divided society."

At one point, Helms described Dr. King's civil rights strategies as “action-oriented Marxism.” Dr. King, Senator Helms contended, had widely known associations with well known Marxists, handing out FBI surveillance report to support his views. Later asked if Dr. King was a Marxist, Senator Helms replied, “I don't think there is any question about that.”

Another tact Senator Helms took was to claim the costs of a King holiday would be prohibitively high, perhaps running into the billions. (The CBO estimate ran closer to 18 million.) Finally, Helms argued the bill had been “steamrollered” through the Senate without a committee hearing. Helms concluded that a national holiday for Dr. King was “not compatible with the concepts of this country.”

Later, for his floor remarks, Senator Helms received thousands of letters of support.

His colleagues on the floor were not so supportive. Senator Storm Thurmond of South Carolina, then Chair of the Judiciary Committee, and other leaders of the Senate, boldly filed a rare petition for closure to cut off the debate, ending Senator Helms' filibuster. With debate ended, the bill was brought to vote.

In an irony of linked paradoxes, the tactics Helms employed against the bill Kennedy so highly favored shadows today's politics, especially the debate around another bill Kennedy highly regarded, national health care reform.

On the Senate floor that October day in 1983 the vibrant, fire-breathing orator, “the lion of the Senate," Kennedy was determined to bring forth light from the shadows Helms tried to cast.

Senator Arlen Spector, then a Republican, also spoke against Helms' remarks and challenged his character portrait of Dr. King. But Senator Kennedy with the depth of the nation's moral force booming through his Boston Irish family brogue, left no doubt about his feeling towards Helms' attacks on Dr. King, or his own unshakeable passion for the right actions that propelled the bill's passage. Indeed, even its opponents declared the King bill opned a new chapter in our national life.

On October, 19, 1983, the Senate passed the King Holiday bill by a vote of 78 to 22 (18 Republicans and 4 Democrats against, 37 Republicans and 41 Democrats for). And after Senators Bob Dole and Strom Thurmond met with President Ronald Reagan at the White House about the bill, Reagan signed it in a Rose Garden ceremony with over 200 people present, giving the first signing pen to Mrs. Coretta Scott King.

Senator Kennedy's light loomed over these and other legislative events. Even as some events took place without the work of his hand, the strength of his influence was felt. His leadership propelled a course in an institution that had once sat Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, and Massachusetts' John Adams and Daniel Webster, and SC's John C. Calhoun. The Kennedy course was writ large in government actions for public benefit, both symbolic and real, and the results, like Head Start, are now a taken-for-granted part of the national fabric.

I don't remember whether the announcement was in a room in the Russell or Dirksen building, but I do remember Senator Kennedy's sheer exuberance filled the room when it was his turn to speak, the big booming cadences of his voice celebrating a mission achieved, the tone of his voice capturing the moment rather commenting on it. His gracious recognition of Bob Dole stands out, in recall, and his sly dig at Regan, who he “hoped” would sign the bill--a sly remainder of the President's earlier opposition. (Regan, in fact, had signaled he would not veto the bill if the Senate passed it.)

While Senator Kennedy had appetites, his ego was about others. While some may only remember the litany of his personal failings, it is hard not to realize how the force of his personality stood in the national well, cloaking Bob Dole as Senator Dole rejected the politics of Jesse Helms.

Speaking forcefully against Helm's position, at one point Dole remarked, “I suggest they hurry back to their pocket calculators and estimate the cost of 300 years of slavery, followed by a century or more of economic, political and social exclusion and discrimination.”

Kennedy's life teaches us the value of the journey of life. Along the way, life encounters and associations, life issues and dogged devotion, life service is its important lessons. But today, we view the person separate from the journey. Then we pick apart their isolated steps, especially the mis-steps. But as we do this, we lose the lessons organic to life, the markers that shape us as a nation, that are embedded in our national character.

In our short sighted obessiveness, we also lose the character of mercy. Mercy is the oil of human life, it lubricates its gears. Mercy allows for re-starts after stumbles. Mercy tempers our outlook, believing that more than second chances, life holds special assignments. Mercy is important in the final assessment of life overall, its invisible hand made known by the strength of its temper.

“An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind,” said Dr. King.

Edward Moore Kennedy
1932 - 2009

Walter Rhett has written over a 100 posts for Southern Perlo from Kudu Coffee in Charleston. Follow him at twitter.com/walterrhett

The Invisible Health Care System

walterrhett — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:43:31 GMT

Health Care Reform is confusing and scary. Will the proposed changes make costs go up or come down? How will the quality of service be effected? Will treatment improve or get worse? And who will make the decisions that determine how cases and patients are handled? An unknown bureaucrat in Washington or one of the ten federal regions, or an unknown bureaucrat at the end of an 800 number who works for a private insurer and turns down a request for treatment as being outside of standard protocol?

And who will pay for the changes? Can the nation afford to cover the 44 million uninsured? What loopholes are unforeseen?

Perlo doesn't have a crystal ball, juju beads, or oracle bones, but it clicked through google and bing and discovered an already massive, invisible system of government health care that no one is talking about and that your tax dollars pay for.

The federal government is already deeply, deeply involved in health care in a myriad of ways, from the labels on packages to manufacturing standards to expanding markets to building roads and buying ambulances to operating clinics and subsiding nutrition to funding training to reimbursing service providers for minor treatment and major operations.

A good way to assess future performance is to look at past results. There is a huge amount of data and performance reports available that can guide the national conversation about health care priorities, costs—and potential savings, and can help identify needs and a sensible path to new policies.

As Booker T. Washington, the Virginia-born founder of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, said in his 1896 Atlanta Exposition speech, “cast down your buckets where you are.” To gain a fuller picture of the dollars the federal government is currently spending, examine the annual budgets of only a few programs and departments from the government's invisible empire of health services.

There are 1,961 mentions of “health” in 181 federal budget documents for 2009.

Among these “mentions,” the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) charged with keeping the nation's food and drug supply safe, requested $2.4 billion.
The National Institutes of Health were appropriated a combined $30.3 billion. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention requested discretionary authority budget of $6.35 billion. The CDCP monitors and tracks infectious diseases, chronic diseases, environmental and occupational health illness, and state and federal bio-terrorism preparations.
The Health Resources and Services Administration which funds clinics and health centers, rural health care, funds training and scholarships, some organ transplant services, among other services, asked $6.8 billion.
In 2009, for legislated mandates, Indian Health Services was expected to receive $4.08 billion.
In the 2008 budget, the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program, which provides nutrition assistance to women with infants and services 45 percent of all US born infants, was budgeted at $5.5 billion.
So far, in 2009, the US government has purchased $3 billion of flu vaccine components—which may prevent an epidemic of H1N1, currently the biggest threat to cause a global pandemic.
The newly passed Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), for children of families caught in the income gap between private insurance and medicaid, is requesting $6.9 billion to spend this year.

Examine the invisible government health care expenses by several themes: treatment, costs for specific illness, drug prices, public payer, public health care providers, breath and scope of federal health services in all departments.

One out of eight federal dollars—nearly $80 billion—is spent on services and treatment for Americans with diabetes. In fact, one study, (http://bit.ly/nE00G), reports 18 out of the 21 federal departments spend money on diabetes. Annual diabetes expenses exceed the entire annual budget of the Department of Education. While preventable or manageable through diet and exercise, the government spent only $4 billion on prevention.
Overall spending is a theme with staggering implications. Without any reform, for 2009, the federal government plans to spend $2.24 trillion on health care with 1.84 trillion of that total funded by deficit spending.(http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/).
$602 billion in 2004, 44% of all monies spent covered emergency room treatments. Ttill, more than half of all visits went unpaid.
American drug prices are the highest in the world, and account for 13 percent of all costs, or $202.24 billion in 2007.
By class, cardio-vascular drug purchases reached 31.5 billion, central nervous system agents accounted for 23.7 billion, hormones, 24.5 billion, and psycho-therapeutic drugs for 17.9 billion.
Current health care annual rates of spending increase is a whooping 8.6 percent.
The US as a whole spends $4.33 billion on health care in corrections.
The US has the highest infant morality rates of any developed country.
Medical debt is the number reason cited in the US for personal bankruptcies.
Non-profit hospitals represent 70 percent of US hospital capacity.
Currently, no nationwide system federally owned health facilities are open to the public (e.g., the Veterans Administration system only accepts veterans).
Hospital care accounts for 31 percent of all current health care costs.
In 1996, one percent of those receiving public treatment funds accounted for 27 percent of total costs.
Government health care programs currently cover 28 percent of Americans, 83 million people.
The US operates the largest national public health unit in the world, the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, one of America’s seven uniformed services.
Every department of the federal government is involved in funding health care as a public activity, including Agriculture, Defense, Education, HUD, Commerce, Interior, the Department of Justice an the others. The departments offer initiatives, trade mission, program goals, funding, outreach, treatment services, state grants, consumer protection against malpractice and fraud, transport, research, safety certification, guidelines and standards, and planning, both long term and contingency.

At first reaction, the numbers from every corner are staggering. Health care, clearly, has created a “giant sucking sound,” that tax dollars are flying into, inside and outside of treatment care. Reform is necessary, if only to stop the rapidly increasing flow of dollars.

The Director of the Congressional Budget Office wrote these powerful words on his blog, about his recent testimony before Congress:

"Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. . . Unless revenues increase just as rapidly, the rise in spending will produce growing budget deficits. Large budget deficits would reduce national saving, leading to more borrowing from abroad and less domestic investment, which in turn would depress economic growth in the United States.

Measured relative to GDP, almost all of the projected growth in federal spending other than interest payments on the debt stems from the three largest entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. For decades, spending on Medicare and Medicaid has been growing faster than the economy. CBO projects that if current laws do not change, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid combined will grow from roughly 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent by 2035. By 2080, the government would be spending almost as much, as a share of the economy, on just its two major health care programs as it has spent on all of its programs and services in recent years.

In CBO’s estimates, the increase in spending for Medicare and Medicaid will account for 80 percent of spending increases for the three entitlement programs between now and 2035 and 90 percent of spending growth between now and 2080.”

Clearly, the first goal of reform must be to cut costs, reduce expenses, save money. Do any of the current plans meet this goal?

Secondly, waste, duplications, inefficiencies, and hidden costs abound throughout the systems and much of the real costs are off the books and are deeply embedded in each federal department. Critical and close oversight of these widely disbursed costs must be achieved. Through coordination, cooperation, and consolidation, it appears that real, significant savings in administration, services, and support can be achieved. The expenses connected to diabetes hidden in the system are a screaming poster child for theneed for teamwork. Grouping all health care expenses on a spread sheet that cuts across cabinet lines must be a high priority.

Thirdly, costs must be matched to measurable targets. How do only one percent of all users of the system account for 27 percent of the costs? Strategies for chronic users must be developed, better profiles created, alternatives explored. Name the top three creative ideas in the current reform plans. Without new ideas, how can there be reform?

Fourthly, drug costs must be severely curtailed.

Fifth, the cost of routine procedures must be reduced. Child birth is an example of a procedures whose costs have skyrocketed. Why?

Sixth, the government does efficiently provide medicaid, medicare, veteran health care, public immunization, disease mapping, research, and large grants to communities and individuals.

Seventh, so does the private sector. But in both cases, costs are raising to rapidly.

Lastly, future fears are being used to shield the maladies, malaprops, and out of control spending of the present. The US territories, Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, for example absorb a large percent of health care funding. How exactly will reform affect the territories? And why are the current bankruptcies, unfathomable bills, and budget-breaking proscription costs not a part of the public debate?

Oh, watch carefully the special interests that suggest the government will enact forms of euthanasia for the elderly, or develop a plan with cracks so wide that legions will fall through, or increase private costs more rapidly. Having chased answers for treatment and services from the smallest detail to major conditions (a few years ago, my father suffered pulmonary edema over a weekend while in the hospital and it took five days for the family to get an assessment from the primary physician—while the consulting cardiac physician refused to speak at all to a family member despite repeated requests), I believe the answer to improved care lies in better values. The culture of American medicine must be reformed, along with its cost and payment structures, and the culture of its stake holders, the unions, medical/hospital/pharma/insurance associations who tremble and fear change, and resist it even worse than the American public.

All photos, fair use.

Thanks for reading. Walter Rhett writes Southern Perlo from Kudu Coffee, in downtown Charleston, SC. In town? Share a cup w/ Walt.

Follow Walt at twitter.com/walterrhett, as he takes special note of the news, folly, and business of living at all levels around the globe.

In peace and respect, Southern Perlo marks the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, an American citizen-legislator.

Blogging Around: Facts & Laughs from 6 Perlo Cities

walterrhett — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:26:34 GMT

A neat thing about blogging is the chance to share the great ideas that are circulating across the land. Here are 6 great blogs from cities where Perlo posts! Enjoy this exclusive Perlo digest. (Add to the Perlo, put your favorite link in the comments.)

#1: Discord77's blog post, “Top 5 useless baby products,” streamed across the top banner at the San Francisco Gate (sfgate.com) website's homepage. It was a “Don't Miss” pick. A quick read of the post and it's easy to see why. The post and the experiences shared in its comments reveal an Erma Bombeck sensibility for the humor embedded in the daily routines of family life and a George Carlin deconstructing wit applied to the values and the larger context of appeals for today's “must have” baby products. Funny, incisive, written in straightforward mommy-style, Discord77 really is an universal voice for the courage and commercial “tough love” required in child rearing, and in American life in general. Link: http://bit.ly/UFnTI.

#2: In Nashville, Abdulameer's page keeps a watchful eye on “The Creeping Homegrown (Muslim) Threat.” He cites facts and incidents separated by time and memory to show why the country needs to pay closer attention to internal security. Link: http://bit.ly/4QoxX.

#3: If you thought Kansas was “corny,” in July and August wait until you savor the flavor of Kansas homegrown tomatoes at the tasting sponsored by the Lawrence, KS farmer's market. Missed the market or can't get there? Pick up a neat recipe for home-made salsa. Link: http://bit.ly/2fHPdh.

#4: And speaking of security, it seems no quiet corner, or joys of the island life in America, is safe from the intrusion of tagging. Savannah's seacoast has been hit with graffiti. Link: http://bit.ly/15o6Rz.

#5: Trying to sell a home in the midst of the nationwide depressed market? James5464, a Springfield, MO realtor points out “6 Reasons Why Some Houses Sell and Why Others Don't.” Each point is expressed as a single sentence, but drives the nail home. Link: http://bit.ly/2fHPdh.

Jack McCray's featured column tells you when and why to clap--in the middle of a jazz performance. His 20 piece big band, the Charleston Jazz Orchestra performs a all-latin concert in Charleston, September 4th. Link: http://bit.ly/oZ6iK.

#7: And from Jackson, MS, a powerful and personal post by a nurse and mother of 3 from Greenwood,that shares and tells a little of what life is like for the families and spouses of those who are deployed to harm's way. Everybody, please read this: http://bit.ly/P36zU

All photos, fair use.

Walter Rhett posts Southern Perlo from Kudu Coffee in Charleston, SC.
Southern Living and China Daily News follow Walt at: twitter.com/walterrhett
Walt and Perlo support Water Missions International, providing safe water systems for over a million people worldwide.

Confederate gold

walterrhett — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:42:12 GMT

For those who love history, dream of adventure, riches, and fame; for those really believe they'll hit the jackpot on the lottery scratch-off, for those still look up at night to see the stars and passing clouds. and for those who love to touch the past, here's a challenge to give meaning to your visions and put money in your pocket.: Whatever happened to the Confederate gold?

If you worry about the fiscal state of the country or the money in your own pocket, the gold spoils of the civil war offer hundreds of chances to expand your net worth.

Thought the Confederacy was poor and in a state of penury by the war's end? The central government still had great wealth even as the war put the administration on the run. The last Confederate Cabinet meeting presided over by Jefferson Davis was held on May 2, 1865, in Abbeville, SC, at the Burt-Stark House.

By the time Lee surrendered, five wagons of gold and silver—coins, bricks, and bars, the remains of the Confederate treasury's reserve--were loaded May 24, 1865 in Richmond, at the train depot. Captain Parker of the Navy and an escort of armed troops, guarded the gold on the ride from Richmond, Virginia, to Anderson, South Carolina. There the gold was reloaded to wagons for shipment to Savannah or Charleston.

Confederate president Jefferson Davis met the caravan at Washington, GA. Later, scouts observed Union troops near Augusta, and the caravan returned to Washington (which is now in Lincoln County).

Unknown raiders attacked the wagon train near the Dionysius Chennault Plantation (the home of an elderly Methodist minister)--only a 100 yards from the house. During the attack, the gold disappeared. Most researchers and contemporary observers believe it was hidden, but the location of this cache of riches remains a mystery.

The financial agent for the Confederacy was the English financial firm of Fraser, Trenholm & Company in Liverpool. One account has Jefferson Davis, at the meeting before the attack, authorizing two Confederate Navy officials, James A. Semple and Edward Tidball, to deliver $86,000 in gold to the firm in England.

After taking possession of the gold, the two immediately split up. Tidball headed north, returned to Virginia, and his subsequent activities offer compelling evidence that kept his share of the gold.

Semple's record is less clear. He managed to reach Nassau, returned to the States, struck a relationship with the Julia Gardiner Tyler, the widow of President James Tyler, but seemed to deplete his share after two years on the run.

Other scenarios for stash sites include wrecked ships—the gold was to be shipped out of either Savannah or Charleston--family farms, tombs and grave sites, and submerged islands, and river beds.

The most reliable account of any of the Confederate fortunate involves 39 kegs of silver coins (Mexican silver dollars, receipts for cotton sales) buried in a Danville, VA cemetery. Even with strong evidence of its presence, the city, which owns the cemetery land, steadfastly refuses to permit any survey, digging, or test drilling. The estimated current value for the silver is a million dollars.

Many gold stories settle on Georgia.

In the autumn of 1862, the mint shipped $40,000 worth of gold and silver bars bars from New Orleans to Augusta. Around the same time, after the New Orleans fell to the Union, Confederate officials seized $2.3 million in gold and $216,000 in silver specie from a New Orleans bank that stored the gold and silver in Columbus, GA

By the war's end, Union general E. L. Molineux had gained possession of $275,000 in gold and silver in Macon alone. Molineux had seized $188,000 in gold assets from a single Savannah Bank.

Yet an another $200,000 in gold coins hidden in Macon were never found.

Towns in GA, SC, and NC are frequently mentioned in folklore and first person accounts, by researchers and treasure hunters as hiding place for gold and silver caches from local banks. Much of this gold has not been found.

When the Confederate reserve was lost, Charleston's George Trenholm, the model for the movie's Rhett Butler, was the Confederate Treasurer at the time.

Walter Rhett writes Southern Perlo from Kudu Coffee, in Charleston, SC. Stir the perlo; leave a comment.

C-Span and Southern Living follow twitter.com/walterrhett; you can too; the best US and world news updates on twitter!

Walter Rhett's free e-book, "From the Front Porches of Charleston: The Election of Barack Obama,” offers rich historic insights about Barack's election. It's free, with over 100 photo pages. Download at: lulu.com/content/5282127. (Preview at: scribd.com)

Walter Rhett and Southern Perlo support Water Missions International, providing safe water systems to a million people worldwide.

Jim DeMint's Waterloo

walterrhett — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:55:37 GMT

Jim DeMint is mad, but not without method. That combination makes him dangerous.

His madness is not being anti-Democratic or fiercely partisan; it is the utter lack of moral compass, compassion, and vision for the people of the nation or the state he represents. “It will break him.” His now famous quote about the President's call for health care reform is only the tip of how misplaced his values and vision is.

It's scary that DeMint is willing to sacrifice 47 million Americans without health care, millions of others who face rising premiums, and even more millions for whom treatment is controlled by a distant tele-administrator who determines what treatment you can receive and what treatment will be paid for. Who cares, expect DeMint, if health care breaks Barack? Is there no compassion or moral urgency by DeMint to lower prescription costs, improve prevention programs, and snatch leadership away from the Democrats by actually developing legislation that will bring affordable health care to the people who vote? Or is that too much to expect from a man who voted against equal pay for women and, earlier this year, voted against extending health care to uninsured children.

In a 2005, SC, DeMint's state, ranked third in infant morality (MS was #1), had 600,000 people uninsured; ranked 15th in the number of smokers, 4th in cases of Chlamydia infections, 18th in AIDS cases, 8th in obesity, 8th in diabetes, 6th in hypertension, in a state that only ranks 26th in population with 4.4 million residents (see website, Trust for America's health). Yet De Mint anti-government, partisan philosophy, conservative ideology finds traction a state in which government is the state's second biggest employer. Personal income is $28,200 a year, family health premiums average 12,600 a year, and the state's highest income tax rate is 7 percent.

The state's poor state of health, high taxes, low income, and astronomical premiums do not reflect the success of DeMint's politics.

But who cares about those who form your phalanx?

DeMint's oath, “to faithfully discharge his duties,” and defend the constitution against domestic enemies can sees to find any target except the Democratic Party. Like a brawling drunk, he lowers his head and constantly returns to the arena of partisan politics to defeat Barack Obama and the Democrats. Health care is really DeMint's Waterloo.

Obsessed with partisanship, he has no plan to improve the state's obvious abysmal quality of life, or reduce its taxes or raise its income. Like Latin America dictators, the lack of results and progress is blamed on someone else, politically constructed enemies of the state, and blame is cast as a gauntlet at their feet. He has not rolled up his sleeves like Strom Thurmond to influence legislation that helps his constituents. He is without influence among his fellow senators. His amendment to audit the Federal Reserve was blocked; he missed 400 votes in the Senate. But Jim DeMint has raised $533,000 for his Senate campaign and has 2.6 million cash on hand.

He represents a state with 12 counties (out of 46) that have had a fifth of their population in poverty for more than 30 years! South Carolina ranks 47th in life expectancy, and one region of the state has the nation's highest rate of heart attacks. DeMint's only solution to this resounding state's health care crisis is to attack Barack call for reform. “It's not personal,” DeMint said on NBC's Today Show. “We've got to stop his politics.” That's right, don't worry about health care. Politics is a healing portion for those whose psyches rage with its fires. Nero fiddled, too. But remember, DeMint has a method. Check the sudden increase in his campaign contributions.

If you don't have a good defense, attack. But when you do, you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.

It's a place where Jim DeMint has sought recovery and recognition his entire political career.

Two foreign policy models

walterrhett — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:53:16 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, a Des Moines reader left this comment after a post about the rise of the movement for democracy in Iran after the national election: “Well nobody [Obama] spoke out and they still got their butts kicked around and then some. Are you defending or giving credit to present day administration?”

Great question! It touches a sensitive nerve and goes to the heart of a complex the issue--how to produce the best results inside/outside, longterm/short term for Iran's citizens who wanted to expand democracy, express their ideals, and have honest elections.

The conventional wisdom--derived from experience and similar situations, and diplomatic history--says by not speaking out--the US and Britain-- will minimize the Iranian's government use of the US government as a scapegoat and strawman to intensify and increase the use of force against civilians. The Iranian government is one of many that yells “American fueled conspiracy” whether there is internal dissent. This pseudo-nationalism acts to distract attention from the violence and oppression the government is committing against its on citizens. This blame-shifting often leads fence sitters to support the government, since opposition is seen as a national security threat. Already, The Iranian ambassador to Mexico is attempting to make a persuasive case that the CIA was behind the videoed murder of the Iranian woman whose death was viewed in its horror worldwide, by listing "facts" and "circumstances" that "support" the conclusion of American provocation.

Hostage negotiators, police detectives, and foreign policy experts agree that the counter-intuitive course (the first impulse is want to go loud and barge-in full force) generally works best in the short and long run. Hostages are told, for example, not to resist. Negotiators wait until the other side sees the futility of their position, and avoid out-of-control escalation.

Having said that, I will share my view: American silence serves to isolate the regime, removing a rationale used to increase the repression and doesn't muddy the waters about the brutality being witnessed. That violence has further polarized the country within. Internally, the violence has politicized and turned many Irans to the Reform cause, and has done so worldwide.

Another part of my view: it is not necessary for the US to always be the "policeman" of other regimes. China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa (a trading partner), Germany, and Turkey (a neighbor), to name several countries, have all spoken out forcefully against the Iranian government's brutal oppression of its citizens. The collective voice of these nations is louder, more powerful, and more engaging than the voice of the US alone. By allowing other nations to take strong stands, we help structure democracy among/between nations. Unfortunately, American news and world views rarely include the actions and statements of other countries in the community of nations.

I know this sounds like "double-talk," or excuse making. It's not. An important part of diplomacy is the paradoxes embedded in the way nation's respond to each other. As Americans, we still value the "John Wayne model," ride in, do what's right, save the day, applaud a job well done, and swap stories at the lodge.

The new model, "the Kung-fu model," says go along quietly to avoid escalation, strike only when necessary, and woe be to those who mistake silence for weakness. The new model also leads to the strengthening of other nations, who are called to stand up to attacks and plumb their inner strength.

Your question directly addresses the differences in approach between the two models, new and old. I don't believe we are wimps for "walking softly." I think the world, which is now much more engaged in "flexing" than we see from US media, still knows we have the "big stick."

Afghanistan, by the way, is still operating under the old model: fly in, kick at all critical parts, take no prisoners. We have added a patina of development help and local security, since this is really a retail war, for the hearts and souls of theregion's citizens, as the new American commander has pointed out.

For Iran, given its thorny history of US direct intervention, policy-wise, I think the new model is the right course. Many inside of Iran agree, despite the fact that short term, the forces of democracy are in retreat. But like Mao on the Long March, or Castro in Cuba, Or Ho in Viet Nam, these retreats in the face of the installed government's violent oppression, usually boomerang and result in their fall.

Thanks for your view, and for reading.

Official US Army photos, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter . Publication use granted under the creative commons license.

First photo: An Afghan soldier looks on as U.S. Soldiers and Afghan border police
officers speak to village elders in the Khas Kunar district of Kunar province, Afghanistan, July 1, 2009. The U.S. Soldiers are assigned to the 10th Mountain Division's Company A, 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment.
Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Matthew C. Moeller, 5th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment

Second photo: Spc. Gareth Warner drops a 120mm mortar round into the tube while Spc. Ricky Olivo keeps the gun on target during a fire mission on Combat Outpost Zurok in Paktika province, Afghanistan, July 13. The Soldiers are deployed with the 3rd battalion, 509th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. (Photo by U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Andrew Smith, 55th Signal Company.)

Saturday's upcoming post: Army names new Drill Sergeant Commandant.

Thanks for reading!, Hope you found food for thought.

Walter Rhett writes Southern Perlo from Kudu Coffee, in downtown Charleston, SC. Southern Perlo, in print and photos, connects the American experience and builds a global heritage. Stir the perlo,leave a comment. Now follow Walter on twitter; google,twitter, search: walterrhett, click to connect!
Walter and Southern Perlo support Water Missions International, providing safe water systems to more than a million people worldwide..

Walter Rhett's free e-book, "From the Front Porches of Charleston: The Election of Barack Obama," has rich historic insights about Barack's election. It's free, with over 100 photo pages. Download at: lulu.com/content/5282127. (Or review at: scribd.com)

Check out the record: Hillary is in charge and amused by the gossip

walterrhett — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:07:45 GMT

Tina Brown, the tired and flamed-out gossip columnist, New Yorker editor who was once thrown out of 3 English boarding schools, branched out last week into foreign territory. Publisher of The Daily Beast, a website that combines soft journalism and celebrity gossip, Brown flanked the mainstream and spotlighted the “brilliant checkmate” between President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a post headlined, “Obama's Other Wife.”

According to Brown, Hillary is losing street cred because she's left out of the spotlight of Barack's photo ops. Barack was in Russia at the dacha; Hillary was in DC meeting with the military deposed Honduran president. Brown cites several other details, including in-house fights between Joe Biden and Barack, and Hillary's absence during the Middle East trip to demonstrate that Hillary is on a “tight lease.” Several commenting across the net also see Hillary's role as an example of “suppression.”

I see crimson--at the abysmal misrepresentation of Hillary and Barack respective roles and the impugned motives and reasons behind a variety of Tina Brown-invented-and-interpreted “moves”--NONE of which focus on the enormity of American foreign policy, the White House strategy of moving on several fronts at once, or using the basic journalist practice of offering real examples to support a flimsy but titillating conclusion that actually got air time for Brown on CNN.

Brown's conclusion is not only wrong, it's out of place. It's gossip; masquerading as news. It makes American foreign policy an extension of a personal feud. It turns a dangerous world into an overlay of campaign politics.

If Hillary should take off the “burka,” Brown should put on a muzzle. But websites are filled with all type of foreign policy scenarios, leading to US-led wars, foreign attacks, shifting economic interests, and other, inevitable dark results. Brown's prior fame fed her notice, not her insight. Her flights of fancy are really not linked to State Department policy.

Its certainly okay to assess American foreign policy efforts, but play by the rules of the game, and know when you are off-limits and out of bounds. Whenever, Hillary or Barack is smarter, more experienced, or wary is really not the point. The point is the principles for relationships being put into place, the changing relationships between America and the world, the work and missions carefully structured and carefully reached.

A fairly constant criticism is that Barack has not yet been able to bring change to America's international relations. Those of offer this criticism assume policy change happens instantly. They think: you meet, you go through. So far, those with this view see no change.

They miss the obvious. For one, during the Russian summit, Russia announced that American military transports, ferrying matériel, armaments, and troops, could land on their soil and use Russian military bases as transport sites for shipments to Afghanistan. Russia also announced mutual agreement to further reduce the arsenal of nuclear warheads.

American support for the exiled Honduran president won major kudos form our American neighbors, who remember all too well when an American President supported a coupe to overthrow an elected Latin American president. More and more, Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez's positions have been neutralized and his standing has dropped among the countries of the hemisphere.

And Barack's multi-front approach has not exiled Hillary into an policy gulag, but instead, has put her front and center in world capitals—easily verified by her travel list since February:

A 7 day Asian trip in February.
A week long trip to Europe and the Middle East in March.
A 3 day visit to Mexico, March.
A day trip to the Hague for a conference (March).

From April to July, Hillary's trips included:
A 3 day Caribbean tour to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago in April.
3 days in the Middle East.
3 Days in Central America.
2 days in Cairo.
A day trip to Canada.
A week in India and Thailand.
Hillary's very painful broken arm led to her canceling June travel to Greece and Turkey.
(See the interactive map of Hillary's travels at State's site: http://www.state.gov/secretary/trvl/map/?trip_id=13secretaries . All of Hillary's travel and Washinton meetings have been high level talks with foreign secretaries and foreign ministers. The State Department website provides summaries and communiques.)

And for Hillary initiatives here at home, and a board look at and revealing insights about the State Department in general, review the transcript of a recent town hall meeting of State's employees, led by Hillary (http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/july/125949.htm).

Tina Brown's theme of the politically scorned woman analogy has no business in the news mainstream. Fun, as entertainment and political fantasy, it actually does a disservice to Hillary, the strongest of the 3 Madame Secretaries, by portraying a smart, capable woman of depth and substance as being the sum of a few minor squabbles.

All photos from the Official White House Photostream, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse.
Used under the creative commons.
In order: Hillary and Barack meeting at the White House, 1/09
Hillary, Barack, Valerie Jarrett, and David Axelrod in Cairo, 6/09
Hillary and Barack in the Oval Office, 4/09
Hillary attending the NATO meeting (2);
Hillary's hotel for her current India meeting, 7/09
Hillary and Barack meeting on the White House lawn, 4/09.

Thanks for reading! Did you find food for thought?

Walter Rhett writes Southern Perlo from Kudu Coffee, 4 Vanderhorst St. in downtown Charleston, SC. Perlo is a rice dish with local bounty, widely enjoyed. Southern Perlo's blog of stories/insights/and open views appears on news sites in local communities. Help stir the perlo,leave a comment.
In Charleston, enjoy coffee (or sweet tea) with Walter Rhett.
Walter and Southern Perlo support Charleston's non-profit, Water Missions International, now providing safe water to 1 million people in 40 countries.

Because of earthquake risks, can we trust engineering for geothermal energy?

walterrhett — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:57:26 GMT

According to a New York Times article, California is under attack from natural forces rising up from below. Perpetual optimism, the chance for big bucks, and discreetly omitted data is fueling a federally funded, multi-million contract to assigned to a private start-up to drill deep holes more than 2 miles into the earth's crust, pump down high pressure water to shatter rock and create a network of fractured veins, then pump in more water, to be naturally heated by the high temperatures of the surrounding bedrock and extracted as high pressure steam to generate electricity.

The Only Problem: In 2006, a company in Basel, Switzerland tried the same method--called enhanced geothermic systems (EGS)--and induced, in a year's time, more than 3,500 earthquakes. Several were above 3.0.

An official a few miles from the Basel drilling site was stunned when he realized the shaking ground beneath his office was directly caused by his company's drilling.

This data was omitted from an MIT report surveying geothermal potential and current technology (the report was already in print, but no addendum was added or issued), and missing from the permit applications and grant requests of the start-up that's been given the go-ahead to drill. In at least one application, the start-up claimed to be “uncertain” about the cause of the Swiss tremors.

In a interview, the founder of the start-up, an expert in geothermal systems, claims the risks can be offset by drilling in areas with minimal fault lines. She did not address the relationship between drilling depth and earthquake triggers (the deeper the drilling the more likely the trigger). Moreover, the founder claims that technological tweaking the method will reduce the implied risks associated with the largely untested model.

photo: Jennifer Boyer.(fair use)

Nor in other interviews, does she offer a caveat widely supported by the data: the deeper the drilling the greater the propensity for engineered earthquakes.

Her company plans to drill down 2 miles in an area already experiencing tremors as the result of more traditional geothermal projects. In fact, over 3,000 small tremors have been directly linked and documented to drilling done for the current California projects.

A lead official in California directly responsible for permitting geothermal projects admitted when he asked that he was unaware the Basel project triggered more than 3,500 quakes.

Geothermal energy has huge attractions in an environment seeking green power. It is renewable and emission free. It is widely available if EGS can be developed efficiently and safely.

Several articles available on the web only cite capital risks: EGS is one of the most capital intensive green energy technologies, but has low operating costs. These studies and several interviews focus on the captial risks of production and the potential for cost efficiencies by reducing the cost curve as the technology advances.

These articles when they assess risk omit any mention of the structural risks of earthquakes. They point to EGS' small foot print and around the clock performance.

The real question is whether man-made systems can duplicate nature, without the dangers of minor or major earthquakes, triggered and lasting for years caused by shifts of the deliberately fractured rock bed.

“Pore pressure,” fracture creep, excessive stress beyond support levels, low fluid content, low rock permeability, high content of undesirable gases, and tectonically active areas increase risk factors.

But why is the risk of seismic activity not a part of the discussion?

A Requiem and Prayer for the Future: Southern Lessons for American Living

walterrhett — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:32:59 GMT

There are, really, two Americas. The separation is not by wealth or race or religious belief, or by region, sex, or age; it is not by political party, or by liberal or conservative ideologies, or those for or against change. Increasingly, it is by the remarks of living that are a daily requiem on the future. A weary world, speeding by, comments on its turning points, and without a careful eye, it is easy to overlook our serious differences.

In the second America, there are people who think Paris Jackson was coached. These words are as dead as the father she grieved; yet they are spoken by the living. Yet it is not the truth, forgery, or prevarication of these words that matter. Nor is it important the brazen surprise, outrage, or unctuous acceptance that registers on first hearing. It is an inner, unspoken meaning that demands our urgency.

Like the re-used graves at Illinois' Burr Oak Cemetery, dead words conceal a silent, more potent message. Hidden within the outward shock and disputes is a fundamental difference about the way words and actions weigh and mean.

The second America's main belief is that we are engulfed by our common fall; that our actions, before and after, are evidence that our condition cannot be changed. Even as it is criminal, lewd, and wicked; reckless, stupid, and absurd. For the second America, the review of post-mortem details are a requiem that tells of how progress is reversed. That all around us will be ruins.

A requiem is supposed to celebrate our common journey, recount its steps and its scars, secured by a common hope. Yet, increasingly, dead words mark the future, John Updike wrote, "with a shrug and tearless eye." These dead words bind by subtefuge the requiem promise of new seed to an old chain of sins. Slyly, a shift occurs: the condition of captive is celebrated; not the heroic or often tragedic struggle against its malady. Its faults crush, surround, and reduce us. We are mired in our own escape. The grief is not for us or the scars and steps of our journey; its boastful wail is for the utter hopelessness at the heart of our condition. As one poet put it, "Mountains fall before this grief."

Listen closely: Beneath the news and public events is a deadly power buzz; a dialogue surging through American life that casts its sting with the purpose to stun feeling and logic.

Two Americas: Life is sour for some. Two Americas: Nothing has value or meaning or importance--unless it can be kicked, deflated, and slapped--ripped of memory, stripped of meaning, life floating on its belly. This second America counts the negative as the superior, the put down as the insight, the pointed finger as the helping hand, the scream of bitterness as the rallying cry.

This second America hustles and flows in comment spaces and on web sites from sun rise to land's end. It partitions American life. It twists and strangles the manners that hold together our common trust.

This second America calls the President's children (and by reference all of our children) derogatory labels under the color of free speech, suggesting these dead words have no sting or limits. The dead words of the second America highlight the special interests of its own mind.

Its desire, increasingly, is that the first America should fail, has failed--that "the mountains fall." Spectularly. That sincereity is proved to be a sham. The second America has lost touch with our hope.

Its cherubs? The children I hear cursing on the bus. The young girls who laugh at vile insults to each other in plain terms of explicit sex. Callous and causal, it forces the rest of us shift seats, to stand apart. We who celebrate our good fortune, thankful for our blessings, isolate ourselves from the plague that is there. Glad that we are beyond the dregs, we are busy holding up our end, and inching further away.

Yet this second America cannot be escaped; it is a part of our direct experience of living and brings forth the wisdom of our southern philosophy, our generosity of spirit.

This second America rouses a search for the old southern codes. And here is the old approach: to be southern is find a path to faith when the way is blocked. To be southern is to hide your heart in living. To be southern is to find a way to love often against ridiculous odds and in outrageous circumstances. To be southern is to ease the pain by sharing the joy.

To be Southern is to know fully the battle royal of good and evil, evident in the blues lyrics of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters:

(rj)I got stones in my passway and my road seems dark at night
I have pains in my heart, they have taken my appetite

(mw)Oh, I can get in a game, and don't have a dime,
All I have to do is rub my root, i win every time

Not some suspicious conjure, our "root" is the tested wisdom by which we seed our experience and grow our future. It nurtures us past shouted fears. It rises from hope.

Our requiem for the future praises the source of that hope. be it known that among us was one also derided, ridiculed, and mocked; slaughtered by blind attitudes and nails. And from Him rose living words of power and wisdom.

Yet we have become strangers to our own, and to their vain things. Those who would destroy us think they are mighty. But what we did not steal, we shall restore. And this way of lovingkindness shall be an offering and proud possession to those who inherit it. Even if we be prisoners, we will not be despised.

Our requiem should never be a judgement that shuts mercy out of our ears.

Y Y Y Y

Notes: from Psalms 20: "May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble, the name of the God of Jacob defend you; send you help from his holy place and strengthen you out of Zion."

And a collect (prayer): O gracious and ever living Father, who united heaven and earth to give each increase, also placed the land and sea next to each other to reveal how their differing natures may be joined for prosperity and holy purpose; O God put our hand in your hand, that our fears, doubts, inattention, weaknesses, and temptations may be cleansed by the grace and gifts of your loving-kindness and sacrifice, in order that we might in the proper season, be fortified by your bread upon the waters, might surely forget our troubles, and hear thy voice above all voices and know thy name above all names, and proclaim your love and righteousness by the waters that nourish the life of the world, as you, with Christ, your son, and the Holy Spirit, dwelling in us, make the waters and life more abundant by your mercy and love. Amen.

(Paraphases of verses from Psalm 69 and other Bible sources appear in the text.)

Milwaukee!

walterrhett — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:50:06 GMT

Milwaukee!

Happy Independence Day!

from Walter Rhett and Southern Perloin Charleston, SC

July 4, 2009

Honoring Confederate Veterans

walterrhett — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:51:50 GMT

Lonnie Randolph, state president of South Carolina's NAACP chapters, is just flat wrong when he touted that paying tribute to Confederate soldiers is the same as honoring Hitler. The comparison made great fodder for headlines, and the South's oldest daily, Charleston's Post and Courier, stripped it across the top of page one. The loud and inflammatory comparison greeted the paper's early morning readers. Its absurdly false but highly charged premise keeps alive a debate that it's time to lay to rest.

Mr. Randolph denounced the American President for sending a wreath to an Arlington, VA memorial last Monday, to honor the sacrifice of Confederate soldiers. Earlier, the President received a May 18thletter signed by 60 leading college professors from across the nation--North and South, black and white--asking him “to break the chain of racism” and not honor the Arlington Confederate memorial with any “token of esteem.” [ Link to the full text of the letter and 90 comments: http://hnn.us/articles/85884.html ]

President Obama did send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate memorial. But for the first time, a President also sent a wreath the Civil War memorial for African-American soldiers, at U Street and Vermont Avenue in Washington, DC's Shaw neighborhood. Within walking distance of the African-American memorial is a DC high school named for Francis Cardoza who was educated in Glasgow, Scotland and was the son of Charleston marriage between a black mother and a Jewish father. After the 1861 war, Cardoza founded Charleston's Avery Institute, the leading African-American educational institution in Charleston.

After the 1861 war, Cardoza's brother, Thomas, won election as Mississippi's Education Commissioner and brought universal education to Mississippians, black and white.

Those of us in the South who directly benefited from the twin American pillars of freedom and education—including me, the first African-American male graduate of my integrated Southern high school in 1968 (four African-American women were also in the class)--remember with deep thanksgiving the precious gift of liberty wrought out of the devastation of the 1861 war. We who received that education agree, without equivocation, that slavery was wrong. We celebrate its end. But slavery, with all its evils and cruelty, wasn't mass, deliberate, institutionalized, systemic, race-based genocide.

As a public writer, I am entrusted with the stewardship of that long educational tradition. I am a member of a group who were once kept separate from education by force and law. After freedom, education was an important prize in African communities, and Charleston enrolled over 2,500 students in classes within 2 weeks of its surrender—the largest school enrollment during wartime anywhere in history!

With clarity and without bitterness, I can say that Robert E. Lee, SC's Wade Hampton (the South's largest slave owner when the war began and as a Lt. General, the state's highest ranking Confederate officer), was not the moral equivalent of Hitler.

Closer by specific analogy might Nathan Bedford Forrest, the former slave trader and illiterate Confederate General who directed the massacre of black and white Union troops at Fort Pillow, near Henning, Tennesse, in April, 1864, and who, after the war, was probably a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, one of the most violent race-based organizations in the nation's history.

A lesser known incident of genocide did occur at Ebenezer Creek, 12 miles up river from Savannah. In December, 1864, between 3,000 to 5,000 black women, children, and men were killed on the creek banks by Confederate Calvary led by Gen. Joseph Wheeler, after the Union army removed the platoon bridge spanning the creek, making it impossible for the refuge train to cross. Shot, whacked, trampled and drowned, their bodies floated out of the creek for years after. When it rains, Ebenezer Creek echoes the plaintive cries of the victims, locals say.

USCT troops (fair use)

What Mr. Randolph says reminds me of an earlier protest effort this year by PETA who donned Klan robes outside New York's Westminster dog show to protest puppy mills and in-breeding for dog shows. In both cases, PETA and Mr. Randolph's, the analogy to racial violence and genocide, overwhelms the message.

Despite talk of states right and freedom, as an 1865 Charleston editorial stated unequivocally, the Confederacy defended and fought to preserve slavery, a point I made on television and in news interviews during Charleston's activities surrounding the 2004 burial of the crew remains of the Mobile-built submarine, the CSS Hunley (named for its builder). Slavery adds a bitter taste to this legacy. The defense of this institution of force by default is an unteniable proposition that still inspires modern rage.

Mr. Randolph looks back and feels this rage.

But in Mr. Randolph's equation, he made the common mistake found when history is used as a measure to condemn or justify acts of the present. Mr. Randolph contemporized history. He applied the standards of the present to acts of the past. He is looking back through the lens of the moral high ground that makes the past, by the new standards, as outrageous as the idea that South Carolina's native Americans were cannibals when the colonial era began, or as chilling as cutting out the hearts of publescent women by the Aztecs, who also ate sacramental bread as the body of the gods and who duly practiced confession.

Beyond the fallacy of misplaced concreteness caused by temporizing history, in Mr. Randolph's state, a leading African-American legislator, state senator Robert Ford, a gubernatorial candidate for 2010 who I last had lunch with in Charleston a few weeks ago, authored and introduced legislation to make Confederate Memorial Day an official state holiday.

Taking the opposite tack to Mr. Randolph, Senator Ford believes that such a holiday will significantly reduce racial tension in the state, through mutual discussion.

I think fair minded people look beyond the words, to the heart of the issues, and see old hurts that can't be solved by wreaths, or withholding wreaths, or by bills for holidays.

Nor can soltice or progress be found in comparisons to Hitler.

“Fair-minded words,” the powerful phrase Obama used in his Notre Dame address, is the best hope for a new national standard when discussing race, abortion, war, bailouts, health care, Cuba, terrorists, green policy, the stimulus, earmarks—and history.

“Fair-minded words” can often find the hidden common ground.

I found this hidden ground reading two personal accounts by witnesses to the 1861 war; the online diary of Meta Grimball of Charleston, who had two sons in the war and Susan King Taylor's book, “Reminiscences of Life with the 33d US Colored Troops,” which describes Harriet Tubman's war service in South Carolina, at Hilton Head nd at Charleston.

Althrough on opposite sides, both women want the same thing. They want the war to end; they pray for peace. They want friends and family and soldiers safe. They want community restored.

At St. Michael's Church in Charleston, Meta Grimball son's name appears on the memorial for the 1861 war. In her dairy, I have read her words of grief, and I knew the man who was his namesake.

Her son, killed so young, grieved by a mother who counts a former slave and servant as her only guiding Christian witness. This son is not grotesquely like Hitler. Not according to acts of Meta Grimball's former slave who brought the family gifts of food and small coins after the war, when she was free. Not according to Harriet Tubman who breathed freedom and pushed it to the edge of death. Harriet Tubman roundly condemned slavery, but never dehumanized or made demaogues of those who dehumanized her and put a $40, 000 bounty on her head.

“Fair-minded words” can often be unpleasant, but South Africa found the power of unpleasant truth when its Truth Commission received the testimony and witness of thousands of citizens who had committed inhuman acts of atrocity, even murder, during the anti-apatheid struggle. The public confessions, rather than inflaming passions, actually had the opposite effect. The truth--ugly, mean, and painful--give recognition to a common ground, a recognition that the suffering and evil, now done, led the way to a higher humanity. Rather than kept alive the cruel blows inflicted on a people, the confessed memories became a shrine of history that tells in its memories why its days should never again be visited.

What South Africa truth commissions, Harriet Tubman, and Meta Grimball share is a fierce passion for mercy.

At the depth of their struggle is mercy, and its unwavering propensity to heal. For them, progress is tied not to protest, but to faith. Whether fast or slow, the pace of change is inextricably tied to the quality of mercy. Forgiveness cleanses bitterness without a naïve acceptance. Mercy finds the courage for the open heart to stand in the full storm. It was mercy that led to the powerful prayer of intercession in 1by a John's Island (SC) woman who told God in 1934, “Give them better.”

The wreath sent by Barack, in the firestorm of protest and flash points of outrage, marks the quality of mercy. It honors all, confederate and slave, because it forgives.

This, too, is consistent with history. Slaves praised and celebrated their jubilee without reaping revenge. Their dignity lead to the establishment of Avery, and statewide, free education in Mississippi, and elected officials at the state and national levels throughout the South, including two Lt. Governors in South Carolina and several members of US Congress, including Charleston's Emanuel AME Church's pastor, Richard H. Cain, in 1868. Emanuel is the nation's most important religious shrine to freedom, having built and finished a 3,000 seat church only a year after Charleston's surrender.

At “Mother” Emanuel AME, the jubilee praised the God of their deliverance and gave thanks for strength along the jouney.

For all the hubris, honoring Confederate soliders on Memorial Day is a modern tradition, began by Woodrow Wilson.

Truth be told, soliders on both sides fought bravely. The confederate defense of slavery as an institution was wrong and tragic. By mercy, we can remember the faults and promise not to repeat the errors of the era's dark vision; we can honor the lessons of virtue, and grieve those whose saracifice taught our nation the lessons of freedom for all.

After the war, the jubilee community greeted each other, saying “merci'trust,” and “merci'forgive.” “Trust in the mercies of God. His mercy is our forgiveness and deliverance.”

And after the war, Wade Hampton won election as South Carolina's governor with considerable African-African votes.

The speeches of Robert Smalls, Martin R. Delany, Robert Elliot and other black public officials, the diaries of South Carolina's white families record little concern for the acts and honors accorded to Confederate soliders during the era after the war.

In fact, Charleston actually established the first Memorial Day celebration. In 1865, the African-American jubilee community organized a parade and speeches to remember the Union soliders who had been buried in mass graves.

As to the current debate over including Confederate soliders in the holiday memorials, the newest Democratic Senator, Arlen Spector, made a comment on another matter that tells why the turns of history mandate a careful, inclusive look at all experience, whether good or bad: “somebody with experience has something to add.”

The only photo of the 33rd USCT SC V, the first African-American
US Army troops. circa 1864 (fair educational use)

Thanks for reading!, hope you found food for thought.

Walter Rhett writes and posts Southern Perlo from Kudu Coffee, 4 Vanderhorst St. downtown, in Charleston, SC. Perlo is named for a rice dish spiced with local bounty, enjoyed by all.
By its witness, Southern Perlo, in print and photos, connects the American experience and builds a global heritage. Please, stir the perlo,leave a comment. In Charleston, enjoy coffee (or tea, etc.) with Walter, the griot (oral and print histoirian) of a southern blog of stories/insights/and open views now posted on news and public affairs sites in local communities in all 50 states.

Walter and Southern Perlo support Charleston's non-profit, Water Missions International, now providing safe water to more than a million people in 40 countries.

Just a link, but the laugh of the year

walterrhett — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:18:57 GMT

Please, for the laugh of the year , click this news link from Des Moines. The picture and comments add to the humor. Do it!

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090625/NEWS/90625008/1001&community

Inside Iran: The Principles of a New Movement

walterrhett — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:51:16 GMT

A movement knitted from political principles that hold the political process as sovereign connects an international flock of people in countries scattered widely around the world. This flock has declared bold and earnest objections to the policies and actions of their governments. Yet while pushing to challenge old hierachies, these citizen groups seek to bring national political decisions and policy making closer to local communities. They re-direct the political process.

The American media mainstream, by large, has missed the small and large meanings of this new, disparate, but rapidly expanding global movement. By viewing citizen's actions as protest, and logging them by country, the media obscures the commitment to new process.

This emphasis on new process unites distinct international citizen fronts.

Rather than directly confronting power, these fronts work toward their goals by linking principles to action at the community level and calling upon other communities around the globe to respond in their own kind. The fronts thwart the state's authority as illegitmate without the direct and express consent of the governed.

The movement's common focus is on destiny, creating security and prosperity that triumphs and exposes hidden or duplicitous political agendas.

Current fronts in two countries offer insights into the destiny movement.

Peru

Peru declared a state of emergency in June as large, nationwide demonstrations opposed two recent Presidential decrees. These decrees opened up Peru's Amazon region to resource development by private multi-national corporations outside of Peru, without approved plans, review, input, regulation, environmental safeguards, or oversight by the communities who have populated the Amazon region for centuries.

Peru's president is Alan Garcia, a former Marxist who, at age 35, was Peru's youngest president when elected for a single term in 1985. Back then, he defaulted Peru on private Wall Street loans and lead Peru to massive 4 digit hyperinflation--as high as 7,500 percent!

Elected again in 2006, Garcia issued the controversial decrees earlier this year under the aegis of a free trade agreement with the US.

A former busker (street musician, while in school in Paris) Garcia oversaw an inflation so high that what was once the price of a car brought only a pack of matches. After his first term, he left Peru, accused of mismanagement and embezzling millions.

Now, Garcia is reborn as an unabashed free-marketer. With his earlier zeal re-cloaked, he has thrown open Peru's natural resources to outside interests. By doing so, he says he hopes to tackle Peru's intransigent poverty and to use the Amazon region's resources to benefit all of Peru.

His decrees neatly suspended legislated land use laws and authorized his adminstration to grant concession directly to corporations. The decrees, along with his view the region's indigenous people (Garcia has called them a “bunch of confused savages” and “pawns” of an elite who want to block Peruvian development), has resulted in Peru's worst political violence in more than a decade.

photo: WN / Janice Sabnal, used under fair educational use

Over 25 citizens have been killed by government police and military forces, and the toll is rising.

Peru's Prime Minister, Yehude Simon, has pledged to resign immediately after the country's parliament repeals the two decrees that permit the development of 67 million hectarces of Amazon cloudforest, the centerpiece of Peru's natural resources.

Mr. Simon will be the second minister to resign. The first was Carmen Vildoso, minister of women and social development.

Indigenous people in small communities scattered throughout the region are coordinating their actions and sharing intelligence about government resistance and suppression. Along with local actions, these leaders of the people without portfolio successfully executed a nationwide general strike.

A confrontation in a city in the region, Tarapoto, between a community that historically resisted Inca domination and a heavily armed police force is being called Peru's Tiananmen Square.

But in Tarapoto, the government argues through its Washington ambassador, it was the police who were “irrefutably” tortured and killed. Their bodies have been shown on state TV, as evidence of an “international conspiracy” to stifle Peru's growth.

Alberto Pizango, the leader of the largest organization representing Peru's indigenous communities is now in Nicaragua's embassy in Lima, under a grant of asylum, to avoid arrest on charges of “sedition, conspiracy, and rebellion.”

The New York Times quotes a student member of the Awajun indigenous community as saying, “the government is trying to clean the blood off its hands by hiding the truth.” The government claims, “some are trying to exaggerate the losses of life for their own gain.”

The approximately 300,000 people that live in the Amazon region's jungles and cloundforests are 1 percent of Peru's population. The region covers two thirds of Peru's land mass, and has large reserves of natural gas and oil, in addition to timber and minerals. The region has drawn keen interest from international mining and energy companies.

Peru is the world's top producer of silver, number 2 in copper and zinc, and ranks sixth in gold output.

A Garcia official has declared the indigenous lands of the Amazon region “untouchable,” but in 25 years of requesting land titles, one community, the Inti, have received registered titles to only 2 square kilometers.

The movement's rallying cry is simple: “the jungle isn't for sale.”

Support for the indigenous communities is widespread among citizens in other regions, members of all classes, and even the workers of the miner's federation, who stand to gain more jobs.

The American organization, Amazon Watch, is among several groups rising money for medical relief and legal defense in Peru.

Iran

The most widely publicized uprising of citizens seeking to challenge state power and redirect their destiny is being played out in Iran. The announced results of the Iranian national election set off a movement that relies heavily on the internet to broadcast its message and to document government repression of their actions.

Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and facebook are web portals that have become major windows of information, images, and discussion about the Iranian people's resistance to the processing of the national election results. The extensive use of these global, satilite-transmitted web forms are the base of the world's first high-tech directed coup.

Electronic spin, by all forces, is a major weapon, along with bodies, literally, in the street. At least seven citizens have been killed, and the Iranian government has strongly protested the British government's broadcast of video showing an Iranian shot and killed during a demonstration in Teheran. The European Union called the deaths of civilians “deplorable.” In the US, President Obama's response was more measured, saying “the world is watching” the events in Iran.

Iran's state TV reported that the “main agents” leading the push for honest elections, and a review and inquiry of last week's Presidential vote have been arrested. Other reports say as many as 24 people have been killed by state security forces.

All international press are restricted from covering events and rallies in the field.

The Iranian government has also shut down web acess to social networking portals. However, many Iranians are actively engaged in digital smuggling and are actively breaking the government's net.

The Royal Guard, a miltia controlled by government leaders, seems to be using widespread violence to supress citizen outcry.

An Italian journalist recorded by cameraphone, police on motorcyles riding directly in to assembled crowds. Gangs are also attacking and beating opponents who are labeled as traitors.

Yet the millions of citizens are supporting the integrity of the principles that define democratic process. The principles are for many more important than the actual election outcome.

To this end, many citizens have wondered how the ballot results of a national election could be announced only two hours after the polls closed. Many wonder how an election expected to be closely contested ended up as a landslide.

One commentator drew an analogy to Obama's election, saying it was as if Obama had lost the votes of all of the African-American neighborhoods.

One student said, “all we want is to stop the killing and for the government to tell the truth about the numbers.”

Over one million gathered across the nation to mourn and honor the dead.

Marchers carried placards that read "We have not had people killed to compromise and accept a doctored ballot box" and "Silent, keep calm.”

The Destiny Movement's American Parallels

The destiny movement, guided by the strength of human will, might well have taken its organizing political axiom from a 1871 speech made before the US Congress. The English-born, Navy sailor and Eton-trained lawyer, African-American Robert Brown Elliott, South Carolina's representative from its 3rd district, said: “It is a sound maxim of law that where a power is given the necessary means for its execution are implied.”

He was speaking in support of a federal bill for protection and relief from Klan violence and to thwart the Klan's takeover of political control of South Carolina (and other states) by force.

Elliot offered this maxim in a climate in which the Charleston paper (01/31/1871) declared, in an editoral (with subsituted changes, easily applied to Peru's indigenous populations or reform-minded Iranians) that:

"We understand and accept the solid black vote cast against the nominees of the Reform party as a declaration of war by the negro race against the white race, by ignorance against intelligence, by poverty against actual or potential wealth. This issue we have striven to avoid, but the negroes will have nothing else. They will not allow us to work with them. We must, if necessary, work against them. Conciliation, argument, persuasion, all have been worse than useless. The white people stand alone. And they must organize themselves, and arm themselves, not as 'a white man's party,' but because the past and present prove that decency, purity, and political freedom, as well as the preservation of society, are identical with the interests of the white people of the State."

The destiny movement is focused on in whose hands lie the means of execution and whose voice determines the reality of actions and political purpose. The destiny movement is enlarging the duties of citizens, embracing the integrity and importance of process, and challenging the idea of the citizen as a passive observer.

And, if one listens carefully, the destiny movement also remembers even those it opposed.

In history, too, this pecuilar remembrance has a parallel. A trimphant French general noted on the occasion of Napoleon's fall: “nothing is wanting but the presence of the brave men (and women) who died to prevent it.”

Photons and Protons: The Good and Evil of Atoms

walterrhett — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:26:39 GMT

With North Korea exploding atoms underground and Iran developing military grade plutonium, it's worth a reminder that only eight countries possess or have tested nuclear weapons. The list: the United States, Russia, France, England, China (all before 1964), and more recently, India, Pakistan, North Korea. It is widely thought that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, but the country's nuclear status is unverified. South Africa previously built a nuclear arsenal but has dismantled it stores. Several other countries in Europe and the former Soviet bloc have also dismantled their nuclear weapons.

As some dismantle and shelve nuclear weapon programs (Brazil, Argentina), others build. Iran and Syria, despite denials, are thought to be building the capacity for nuclear weapons.

For all their destructive capacities, the use of atoms and sub-atomic particles also have a tremendous capacity for productive use. Breakthroughs in chip design have recently used sub-atomic particles.

In fact, a recent British report tells of a experiment that successfully directed particles of light, photons, along guideways etched on a silicon chip.

This is astounding news, and to be cheered.

The source of knowledge for this breakthrough is quantum theory, a scientific theory that models mathematically the atomic and sub-atomic world of matter.

In quantum theory, light is made up of single participles called photons. Quantum theory says the world in which photons reside and move has very different and more complex rules than the larger physical world we know.

In fact, this world has its own rules.

Quantum physics uncovers and mathematically maps the rules that describe the world at the atomic and sub-atomic levels. One of the major quirks of quantum physics is the movement and behavior of sub-atomic particles are unpredictable. In the math used to describe this sub-atomic world, light particles act like waves, like material with a fluid, continuous, shape changing energy. Yet, at other times, these very same particles act like discreet units: definite, separate, non-continuous; non-shape changing.

Quantum theory began back in 1838. But in today's time, this old, hard-to-understand theory has exciting potential for the hottest, newest, and wildest advances of speed, power, and precision in computing.

And in the equivalent of a quantum big-bang, a group of scientists from England, at the University of Bristol, have actually carried out experiments guiding and controlling photons across an integrated chip.

First, chips were built using photonic quantum circuits. The photon followed very small electrode tracks/circuits called waveguides. The “gates” of the waveguide are controlled by heat. Heat determines whether a photon continues forward or turns. An electrode produced the minuscule amounts of heat to direct the photons.

More importantly, the photons could be directed from a natural order of quantum organization called the “entangled state.” Think of a strawberry picker who sends berries to specific locations, all at once. The entangled state is like a huge, unorganized strawberry field. The power of this massive movement is only available at the quantum level.

This opens up a huge frontier of possibilities. Speed, complexity, precision, applications will expand in in all directions and be able to reach unthinkable limits.

How fast would quantum computers be? One expert says, “Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems that would take a classical computer longer than the age of the universe.”

From designing new drugs for specific diseases to precise global positioning to encrypting information, quantum computing will radically change our world, especially if nuclear weapons are curtailed and eliminated, as over 100 countries, including the US and Russia, now support.

(Photo used under fair educational use.)

"If it flies, it dies:" Tour the USS Truxton, the Navy's newest ship

walterrhett — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:32:58 GMT

The USS Truxtun steamed into the port of Charleston near the end of April, and when the ship opened its gangplank for public tours, I couldn't resist stepping aboard. The Truxtun is the US Navy's newest ship. Built in a Pascagoula, Mississippi shipyard building naval ships since 1938, the USS Truxtun is an AEGIS guided missile destroyer, the 25th of its generation built for the Navy by defense contractor Northrop-Grumman. When I saw the ship, it had not yet been commissioned.

The 521-foot Truxtun is the newest of a class of ships that are the largest and most powerful destroyers in the world. During its 2008 builder's trails, U.S. Navy Capt. Beth Dexter, The Navy's Supervisor of Shipbuilding, Gulf Coast, praised the Truxtun's performance: "She needs some polish -- but make no mistake -- I'd have no hesitation in taking this one to the fight!"

The Truxtun's motto? It's taken from words spoken by its namesake, Thomas Truxtun, who went to sea at 12 and commanded his own ship at 20, and later commanded the Navy's USS Constellation, a 3-mast, 38-gun frigate built in 1797 at Baltimore's Fells Point, Harris Creek Shipyard, from a controversial design by Quaker master ship builder, Joshua Humphreys. That ship, under Thomas Truxtun's command, was the first naval ship put to sea and became the first US Navy ship to defeat an enemy ship when, in 1799, the fastest warship in the French fleet was forced to strike colors, outmaneuvered and outfought by the Constellation's attack of hull shots and racking broadsides. Truxtun's quote: “Attack. Pursue. Vanquish.”

Today, the current guided missile destroyer Truxtun uses the AEGIS computer-commanded combat system and the SPY-1 radar to power and operate the most powerful force deterrent in the fleet.

The AEGIS combat system, at its heart, is a computer controlled combat and data system. It can simultaneously launch strikes against missiles or other targets in the air, and on land and sea, either surface or underwater.

The Truxtun can withstand and still operate successfully after taking a direct missile, but such a hit is unlikely with defensive measures that include construction angles for sleath design, radar absorbing construction materials, electronic counter measures, anti-submarine measures, and physical anti-aircraft chaff.

In fact, the AEGIS combat system is so advanced it pioneered a new approach to Navy ship building. The Truxtun's steel hull, mechanical, and electrical systems are designed and built to support its combat systems and mission. Its computer programs and back-ups, the ship's records of repair parts, maintenance, personnel, and tactical plans are linked and integrated to constantly determine the ship's multi-mission capacity, readiness and best options.

AEGIS is the most capable missile launch system the Navy has ever put to sea. In any weather, including full cyclones, AEGIS can attack multiple targets underwater, and from wave top to directly overhead, at all speeds from subsonic to supersonic. The ship hangars two attack helicopters, including one specifically designed for anti-submarine missions.

The eyes of the AEGIS system is the AN/SPY-1, a phased-array radar that can detect, identify, and track over 100 targets at the same time, until each is killed.

Phased construction of AEGIS destroyers allows for new technology or improvements in any aspect of operation to be built in immediately, in the shipyard. The Truxtun, however, ran into a myriad of obstacles that hindered and delayed its construction. Hurricane Katrina shut down the Pascagoula ship yard and made it impossible to receive supplies and parts for construction. The ship caught fire while under construction, and all of the fire-damaged areas had to be ripped out, repaired, and rebuilt. A union strike also held up work.

The AEGIS system and the class of destroyers it supports inherits the tradition of anti-missile defense developed by the Polaris submarines, originally based in Charleston. A Polaris submarine could stay at sea for up to 3 years, and its 16 missiles had a strike range of 2,500 miles.

Today, the USS Truxtun has 16 vertical missile launchers that fire 3 different types of missiles, including “smart” tomahawks. Its arsenal includes more than 50 Tomahawks. But its major weapon is the Standard missile (SM-3), a solid fuel anti-ballistic 3,000 pound missile armed with kinetic warheads that have the capacity to knock down satellites or enemy ballistic missiles at 300 miles, the distance from Charleston to Atlanta, Georgia. A kinetic warhead carries no explosives or nuclear charges. It destroys its target by the blunt force of its high speed impact, similar to a rock shattering a windshield, or a battering ram splintering a door.

The ship carries the Sea Sparrow, a missile used for ship self-defense and a cache of Harpoons, surface-to-surface missiles. The ship also has a large arsenal of other specialized missiles and guns, including anti-submarine missiles.

As mighty as the AEGIS combat system is and as powerful as its battery of missiles and weapons, the ship's mission is made even better its personnel. The USS Truxtun has a crew of 265, 23 of which are officers. Fifty members of the crew are women, including the executive officer, the second in command, who I met in Mellow Mushroom, a popular pizza parlor in downtown Charleston. Pascagoula also has a Mellow Mushroom; the EX-O recognized the name when she decided to break for a few from the ship. Born in upper New York state, the Navy has been her only career job since graduating from college. She first served in communications, and by successfully completing a long series of Navy schools, and gaining outstanding performance evaluations, she now stands second in command on the Truxtun's maiden cruise.

Many members of the crew, men and women, were on board during the civilian tours. Relaxed, alert, respectful, cooperative, close knit, ready to work, including bringing boxes of tee shirts to the souvenir tables where hats, fleece, tee shirts, and other Truxtun items were for sale.

The transformation of the Navy into a service that reflects the American ideal of equal opportunity based on merit and performance open to all genders and nationalities in the highest service of nation is a model for armed forces around the world. Morale has improved, and the esprit de corp is a tangible asset; the differences have added to a common respect.

The Arleigh Burke class of destroyers, to which the Truxtun belongs, was in danger of being replaced by a new class with improved capacity for land attacks and a radical increase and redesign of the missile storage and launch systems. The new system, however, proved too expensive to build, with costs rising 50 percent over initial plans. Little improvement in defense against long range missiles weighed in torpedoing the new class.

The AEGIS combat system is being used in the naval ships of Japan (4), Norway (5), Spain (5), and Korea (2). China has developed a similar system that appears to have size and launch advantages. The US, the world leader by far, has 64 destroyers and 22 cruisers employing AEGIS.

Thanks for reading! I hope you found food for thought.

Walter Rhett posts Southern Perlo from Kudu Coffee in Charleston, SC. A Perlo is rice enriched with local bounty, carefully crafted, enjoyed by all.
By its witness, Southern Perlo, in print and photos, connects the American experience and builds a global heritage. Please, stir the perlo, add your spice; leave a comment below.

Southern Perlo supports Water Missions International, providing safe water to more than a million people in 40 countries, at firstgiving.com.

All photos and images used under fair educational use. From top: USS Truxtun, USS Constellation, AN/SPY-1 Radar, Pascagoula's Ingall's Shipyard, Standard SM-3 launching, Naval Officier saluting, The USS Truxtun insignia.

Bike Sharing Swiftly Spans the Globe

walterrhett — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:01:56 GMT

Green living rolls out ideas and puts philosophy into practice. And often green practice is not so much about results as it is about developing a meaningful process—using methods and means to conserve resources, live healthier, and expand personal contacts and options within a community, especially through collaborative efforts.

A really neat green practice that is swiftly traveling around the world is bike sharing.

Easy, fun, efficient, versatile, bike share allows communters, workers, and families in urban areas to make quick trips on public bikes, usually picked up and dropped off at stations or kiosks. Began in Europe, the practice is the fastest growing component of intermodal transportation systems, and is wildly popular in cities from China to France.

Limited resources have propelled the practice informally in low income, urban neighborhoods in America where youth exchanging and sharing bicycles with friends is commonplace. These youth ride away, sharing a bicycle provided by its own/caretaker, without realizing they are acting on green principles, practicing sustainable transportation, smart growth, and creating livable streets.

Paris is the world city that has currently grabbed the lead in a planned, sponsored program of bike sharing. Over 20,000 bikes are available for free use at 1,451 stations by the people of Paris, who can find a station every 300 meters. Each of Paris' program bikes travels an average of 16,000 miles a year!

Paris launched its program in 2007.

Paris uses a smart system that reads the magnetic stripes on electronic cards to allocate and track its massive bike fleet. Bike users are registered and issued cards. Riders check bikes in and out by electronic card. The system enables master tracking of each bike's location, and also bills the rider/user if he or she exceeds the half hour free time for each new use.

The system Paris put in place has flaws common to most bike share programs: vandalism; reckless, rude, and unsafe riding; theft, despite the tracking; injuries and accidents; financial and legal liabilities.

The benefits, however, far outweigh the issues.

Deliberate, organized bike sharing began in 1964, in Amsterdam. Initially developed as a free plan and radical alternative to using fossil fuels for transportation, the unregulated system used white bikes which were quickly stolen or stripped for parts.

In 1995, Copenhagen began operating a system that put into service bikes built for heavy urban use and also incorporated small advertising plates.

England's Portsmouth “University introduced striped magnetic cards into the system to regulate check out and return and as a deterrent to theft, and used bikes whose parts were not interchangeable with other bicycles.

Lyon in France developed the current model for state of the art bike share programs when it launched “Velo'v” in 2005. In June 2008 alone, Lyon's bike share program racked up more than 1.4 million kilometers--more than 2 million miles!

On April 15, 1009, Montreal geared up its service with 2,400 3-speed bikes with comfortable seats available at solar powered docking stations. A 24 hour pass costs $5. Its operated and funded by Montreal's parking authority.

Toronto has asked Montreal to provide a demonstration.

Bike sharing is spreading rapidly. Stockholm, Sweden; Valencia, Spain; Milan, Italy; and London also have bike share programs. London mayor is a strong advocate of urban cycling and bike share. The city plans to open its program with 6,000 bikes. The London plan calls for 40,000 bike trips a day!

Many cities have the bicycles painted in a mono color to make them easily identifible and to bolster civil spirit. Yellow, blue, green, red, and white bikes are popular.

Bicycles specially designed for bike share programs cost around $900 each. A fleet of a 100 bicycles can be purchased for the price of a municipal bus. Once stations are located and built, operating costs dramatically drop. Bicycles burn calories, not fossil fuels--no gas required! Insurance costs, maintainence and repair costs also are greatly reduced.

Successful programs have sufficient scale to make the opportunity to use the bike almost irresistible. Stations need to be located within 200 to 400 meters of each other (an eighth to a quarter mile apart), to facilate use. Bicycles must also be available on demand. Both San Francisco and Washington, DC opened systems too small whose use declined. Bikes were not available, stations were too far apart, so potential riders didn't see the systems are reliable or convenient.

When properly designed, the use of systems can be spectular and demand can explore faster than the break away speed of a sprinting peloton.

For example, Hangzhou, China (above and below), located in northwestern China in the Yangtze River delta, is mounting a public service system that currently has 10,000 bicycles, and 350 docking stations. From September to December, the Hangzhou service geared out over 2 million rentals! The city plans to have 50,000 bikes available. Marco Polo once called Hangzhou, the city of heaven.

Washington, DC was the first American city to create a program, but the program opened with only a 100 bikes. Tulsa, Oklahoma; Philadelphia. PA, and Chapel Hill, NC also have initiated or planned bike share programs.

Bike-sharing is definitely gaining a toe-hold on American college campuses. Ohio's Ripon College brought 200 bikes, helmets, and locks to establish its program. Chicago's St. Xavier University uses students' magnetic stripe IDs for access and billing, similar to Lyon's. The University of Washington is developing a bike share program that will use bikes with battery assist for hills.

Other American colleges planning or rolling out programs include Rhode Island School of Design, Yale (CT), Hampshire College (MA), Ausburg College (MN), Dickinson College. Temple and Drexel University (PA), Ohio Wesleyan College, Ohio University, Pomona College (CA), University of Hawaii, San Francisco City College, Emory University (GA), and Birmingham-Southern College (AL).

Internationally, Singapore, Shanghai, Beiing, Bangkor, Helinski, Vienna, Luxemborg, Düsseldorf, Germany; Pamplona, Spain; and even Rome, whose narrow, coblestoned streets seem unsuited for biking, are planning programs. Other American cities planning programs include Honolulu, Salt Lake City, and Boston.

The benefits? Reduced carbon footprint, less traffic congestion, ease of travel, improved health, reduced expenses for public travel, greater community interaction, expanded travel sevices for all urban dwellers, flexibility and convenience result from bike sharing.

Bike sharing oftens leads to increased resources for pedestrian open spaces and urban walkways. New York City is developing pedestrian plazas and greenway spaces throughout Manhattan.

(all photos, educational fair use)

Thanks for reading! Southern Perlo is posted by Walter Rhett from Kudu Coffee in Charleston, SC. Perlo is a traditional rice dish, celebrating local bounty; connecting in print the American experience, building a global heritage. Please, stir the perlo, leave a comment below.

Southern Perlo supports Water Missions Internation, giving safe water to more than a million people in 40 countries, at firstgiving.com.

Bike Photos, from the top: London, Selville, Lyon, Korea, Philadelphia, and Denver.

The Defense Department monitors new flu strain

walterrhett — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:28:52 GMT

As the number of flu cases increase and the locations for the infection expand, the uniformed services must defend against the virus weakening its ranks.

How exactly does the military prepare for a flu outbreak? What risk is the potential deadly new strain of flu to the men and women who serve in our armed forces? Can operations planned for overseas be disrupted?

A Pentagon spokeswoman noted recently that the military has stockpiled over 7 million courses (doses) of flu vaccine. Each service branch has guidelines and contigency plans if a flu epidemic breaks out among the troops or the command leadership. The military also has plans and conducts exercises to aid the civilian population if an epidemic requires a state of emergency.

The Defense Department runs a Worldwide Influenza Survillence progam, began in 1976, through an Air Force laboratory in San Antonio, Texas to identify and monitor infected cases and to track the spread of any detected infection and issue alerts about emerging strains among all branches of service. The lab's database is updated every 8 hours.

The Defense Department is also reinforcing information on preventing infection and its spread. As is true for civilians, military personnel lessen their infected rates by covering their mouths whenever individuals cough or sneeze, turning away from others. Handwashing is also emphasized as a preventive measure. Lastly, the military urges individuals to maintain “social distance” if flu cases have been reported. Avoid groups and limit social activities.

At present, no cases of the new flu strain have been reported among active military personnel, but two youth, both members of military families came down with the new strain in a Texas town. Both youth have now fully recovered.