Why Do Personal Electronic Devices Hate America?

This past week, there was a report that the National Trasportation Safety Board has taken the dramatic step of recommending that every U.S. state ban the use of personal electronic devices while driving. Here are the details:

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) called Tuesday, Dec. 13, for a nationwide ban on nearly all use of personal electronic devices — including cellphones and smartphones — by drivers.

The board’s recommendation came in a review of a highway accident that occurred last year in Gray Summit, Mo., that killed two people and injured 38 others. A review determined the accident likely was caused by a distracted driver who sent several text messages in the moments before the pileup.

The NTSB’s recommended that all 50 states and the District of Columbia ban drivers’ “nonemergency use of portable electronic devices” except for uses that support the task of driving, such as GPS navigation. The board is also calling for the ban of drivers’ use of hands-free calling technology.

Just for the record, I am in total agreement with this idea, even though the corporate interests that profit from the manufacture and distribution of cell phones will no doubt lobby heavily against the effort citing its "curtailment" a people's "freedom" to risk their stupid lives while chattering on and on about nothing. Because it really is Jerry Seinfeld's America, and the rest of us are just living in it.

Nevertheless, this story might have been of only passing interest to me but for this passage:

“According to [the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration], more than 3,000 people lost their lives last year in distraction-related accidents", said NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman in a statement Tuesday. "It is time for all of us to stand up for safety by turning off electronic devices when driving."

A press release announcing NTSB’s recommendations cited a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study of commercial drivers that found “a safety-critical event is 163 times more likely if a driver is texting, emailing or accessing the Internet.”

Wait an minute...where have I seen that "more than 3,000" figure before? Oh that's right, that's the number of Americans who were killed on 9/11, the event which in the subsequent decade has caused us to lose our collective sanity, shred the Constitution, spend trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars, kill thousands of our own soldiers and hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals, engage in torture and rendition, open an offshore concentration camp and pretty much turn our backs on our long tradition of civil liberties just to make sure such a horrific event never happens again. Yet every year out on or highways and byways, just as many people are killed, and many thousands more are no doubt maimed, because of how collectively self-absorbed and distracted we are. All without a peep of protest.

There is a very simple reason why those of us who oppose the destruction of the personal liberties of American citizens in the name of fighting terrorism feel the way we do. The fanatical efforts to prevent the next potential major terrorist attack have caused far more damage to the fabric of our society than even another successful attack could ever cause.

There is a risk in life's every activity. Clearly, right now in America you are at far more risk of death and serious injury from being struck by a distracted driver than you are from an attack by a Muslim jihadist. But everyone makes a rational decision whenever they leave their house that the nevertheless infinitesimal risk that they will become a fatal auto accident victim is outweighed by their need to go to work, go to school, go grocery shopping, or whatever else they need to do to survive. It's a point that cannot be reemphasized often enough: by crippling our economy and enacting draconian curtailments of the freedom of our citizens, we are doing far more to destroy ourselves than Osama Bin Laden ever could have hoped to achieve.

Happy 9/11 Anniversary, First Responders--Here's Your Pink Slip

I'm doing my absolute best to ignore all of the superficial patriotism being brought out during today's 9/11 tenth anniversary remembrances. Nevertheless, I managed to stumble across a recent news story that seems perversely ironic in light of all the fetishistic worship of first responders during these ceremonies. Not that the police and fireman who responded on that day didn't do so in an heroic manner. I'm not questioning that at all. But just like with the soldiers who subsequently saluted upon being told they were going to Iraq and Afghanistan and then went and did their duty, our collective words of praise for their service ring hollow when compared to our actions.

For proof, look no further than an article that appeared on Friday on the website of a local Florida television station:

To make up for a $4 million budget deficit, Cape Coral City Council members are considering laying off members of the fire and police departments.

Previous reports have estimated up to 11 police officers and 21 firefighters could be laid off.

At least one Cape Coral Council member says layoffs are imminent, but the number of layoffs evolves every day.

Donna Weaver says hearing a siren is a reassuring sound. But soon there may be fewer sirens.

Fire station 4, just blocks from her house, could be one of three hit by budget cuts.

"To know there would be less responders is a big concern," said Weaver.

Memo to Donna Weaver: if you are really that concerned about there being fewer first responders, then you should DEMAND an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a significant draw down in the American military presence overseas. For it's now becoming dramatically obvious that by "fighting them over there" we are making ourselves far less safe over here.

The Statistical Tenth Anniversary of 9/11

I don’t have all that much to say about today’s 10th anniversary of 9/11. I was about three miles from the Pentagon on that awful morning; almost close enough to have witnessed the plane crashing into its side. A friend of my wife was working there at the time, but she made it out okay. I remember saying to my wife at home that evening that the world would never be the same. I was right, of course, but in so many ways that I would never have expected.

Rather than rant and rail and the sheer and utter collective and bipartisan stupidity of our government since that day, I thought I would let the statistics (hat tip to Antiwar.com) do the talking instead:

U.S. Military Deaths in Afghanistan = 1752

U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq = 4474

Other Military Deaths in Afghanistan = 947

Other Military Deaths in Iraq = 318

Total U.S. Military Wounded in Iraq = 33,139

Total Civilian Deaths in Iraq = over 100,000

Total Cost of War in Iraq = over $794,000,000,000

Total Cost of War in Afghanistan = over $452,000,000,000

Total Combined Cost of Wars = over $1,246,000,000,000

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Where Were You When the Walls Went UP?

I used to consider myself extremely fortunate to have graduated from college the very year that the Berlin Wall fell--a very exciting time to be a young American just embarking on your working career. The Cold War was over and the future seemed so bright that we had to wear shades, but no longer to shield us from the glare of a possible nuclear holocaust. Where were you when The Wall came down? That was a question many of us asked each other back then in our enthusiasm for the future.

Two years later the Soviet Union collapsed for good and by the following autumn I had relocated from Chicago to Washington, DC. It was an exciting to be living in the nation’s capital. Bill Clinton was elected President less than two months after I got here, and even if you weren’t terribly political you could tell there was a sea change in the air as a stuffy generation of older politicos gave way a young and vibrant new generation. We were going to change the world back then, using the so-called “Peace Dividend” to help America finally live up to its values and principles.

So what the hell happened?

The shortcomings of Bill Clinton as a “leader” are well documented and need not be recounted here. The first Baby Boomer president turned out to be just as superficial and narcissistic as the stereotype that bedevils his generation in general. He was followed, of course, by an even worse Boomer in Junior Bush; the two of them representing the ying and yang of college age 1960s youth—counterculture on the one hand and establishment on the other.

Between them they managed to oversee the completion of the project to wreck American representative democracy that gained steam with the election of Ronald Reagan back in 1980. The central component of this effort was our nation’s transition from republic to empire, and nowhere has this transformation been more physically evident than in the Imperial Capital.

Amazing as it seems now, when I first moved to DC an American citizen wanting to visit one of their representatives or even the office of a government official could walk right into a federal building without having to pass through security barriers or enduring an airport-security style screening. Security in the nation’s capital as we know it today didn’t really start to ratchet up until after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, when Clinton took the first big step by ordering that Pennsylvania Avenue be closed in front of the White House:


Of course the security measures then REALLY took off after 9/11. Partly because of fear of the next terrorist attack, but mostly because Beltway bandit contractors and their paid army of lobbyists recognized just how much money there was to be made from the latest political buzzword. No elected official or senior government bureaucrat was ever going to take a chance at being accused of being “soft” on security measures. Certainly not if he or she wanted to keep their job.

And so the security barriers went up--from the Capitol to the Washington Monument--and with them was born Fortress DC, an unwelcoming place in which the people’s so called “representatives” and bureaucratic officials hide from the public behind walls that become a little more forbidding with each passing year. Today you can’t even ride on the Washington Metro subway system without the specter of your bag potentially being searched, and just to make sure the masses go along with it prerecorded messages from the likes of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano blare over the Metro’s public address system extolling riders to be vigilant and if they “see something, say something.”


True story: one day a few years ago the building that I work in was locked down for a couple of hours after some overly hysterical employee reported finding white powder on the floor of the women's restroom. The hazmat team from the local fire department responded and determined that the potential "deadly" threat was (surprise! surprise!) talcum powder.

Lost in all of the hysteria is that there has not been a successful terrorist attack on the American homeland in nearly ten years. This is not to say vigilance isn't important, but it must be weighed against the waste of many billions of dollars and the loss of our basic freedoms.

All of this has somehow become “normal” and accepted by a docile public. The national security state radiates outward from the Capital Beltway through the nation’s airports and sports venues and even more recently to its small town Walmarts. Paranoia strikes deep, and it has indeed struck our own body politic so deeply that we fail to even recognize it as paranoia anymore.

No supposedly democratic society can survive with the malignant cancer of an out-of-control national security state metastasizing within its bowels. It's a supreme irony that the fall more than 20 years ago of the most iconic symbol of state security repression the world has ever seen should have been almost immediately followed by the rise of a repressive national security state within the very open society that had led the fight to tear that wall down.

Benjamin Franklin had it right when he said that those who would trade a little liberty for a little safety deserve neither. He also said that the founding fathers had given us a republic, if we could keep it. Unfortunately, it has become very evident that we cannot. Osama bin Laden did not take our freedoms away; we managed to do that to ourselves.

The Ramzi Yousef Case Shows How Adrift America is from Its "Values"

Return with me for a moment my friends to the distant past year of 1993. A young and vibrant Democratic president was in the White House, the nation's economy was just recovering from its massive Reaganomics-induced hangover, and a Middle Eastern terrorist by the name of Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Center. Yousef failed. Not from a lack of trying, but because he used an insufficient amount of explosives. A little more oomph, and one twin tower would have toppled into the other and 2/26 would have been the iconic date of infamy rather than 9/11.

No matter how you measure it, Yousef was a bad guy. In addition to the WTC bombing, Rambo Ramzi bombed and crippled a Philippine airliner, tried to bomb the Israeli embassy in Thailand and also blew up a religious shrine in Iran. Clearly, this dude got around.

By 1995 he was hiding in a very familiar place, Pakistan. So surely, the U.S. Military went in there guns a-blazing and took his Jihadi ass out, right? Wrong, natch. It was a different and arguably much better world back then.

What happened to dear Ramzi was some good ol' fashioned law enforcement work. The State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, working arm-in-arm with Pakistani intelligence, found the rabid jackel at an Islamabad guest house where Yousef was hiding out. Instead of killing him in cold blood, they raided the place and arrested his ass, quickly spiriting him out of the country.

So certainly he was then sent to Guantanamo for some good old fashioned waterboarding by our CIA boys, right? Wrong again, knave. The terrorist kingpin was (gasp!) sent back to NEW YORK (horrors!) where he (egads!) STOOD TRIAL and was (eek!) CONVICTED of terrorism. He received a 240-year prison sentence for the WTC plot and is today wasting the rest of his miserable ass life away in Supermax. He even claimed to have converted to Christianity a few years ago.

So what do we learn from this little history lesson? That there was a time in the not too distant past when America reacted to a crime every bit as heinous as 9/11 (but for the fact that it failed) not by starting two unnecessary wars, creating its own little gulag, condoning torture and rendition, building up a massive national security state and shredding its own constitution, but rather by respecting the rule of law and using diplomacy and smart law enforcement tactics to bring a diabolical fiend to justice.

If you want to measure just how far America has fallen in recent years from whatever ideals and principles it once claimed to stand for, I submit that you need look no further than the case of The People of the United States vs. Ramzi Yousef.