Nov 23, 2012
Woody Guthrie at 100: Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, Will Kaufman Honor the "Dust Bowl Troubadour"
Commemorations are being held across the country this year to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the country’s greatest songwriters, Woody Guthrie. Born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, Guthrie wrote hundreds of folk songs, including, "This Land Is Your Land," "Pastures of Plenty," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "Do Re Mi" and "The Ranger’s Command." While Guthrie is best remembered as a musician, he also had a deeply political side. At the height of McCarthyism, Guthrie spoke out for labor and civil rights and against fascism. In this one-hour special, you will hear interviews and music from folk singer Pete Seeger, the British musician Billy Bragg, and the historian Will Kaufman, author of the new book, "Woody Guthrie, American Radical."
"Woody’s original songs, the songs that he wrote back in the 1930s ... with these images of people losing their houses to the banks, of gamblers on the stock markets making millions, when ordinary working people can’t afford to make ends meet, and of people dying for want of proper free healthcare, you know, this song could have been written anytime in the last five years, really, in the United States of America," says Bragg, who has long been inspired by Guthrie.
Guthrie’s most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” was written in 1940 in response to Kate Smith’s "God Bless America.” "Woody saw ['God Bless America'] as a strident, jingoistic, complacent, tub-thumping anthem to American greatness,” Kaufman says. “And now, he had just come from the Dust Bowl. He’d just come from the barbed-wire gates of California’s Eden there. He’d seen the Hoovervilles. He’d seen the bread lines. He’d seen labor activists getting their heads busted. And so, he’s thinking, what — God bless — what America, you know, is Kate Smith singing of?” In 2009, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performed “This Land Is Your Land” for the inauguration of President Obama. [includes rush transcript]
Nov 17, 2012
Dust Bowl Revisited | Grist
By Earth Policy Institute
Grist guest contributor
By Janet Larsen
On October 18, 2012, the Associated Press reported that “a massive dust storm swirling reddish-brown clouds over northern Oklahoma triggered a multi-vehicle accident along a major interstate…forcing police to shut down the heavily traveled roadway amid near blackout conditions.” Farmers in the region had recently plowed fields to plant winter wheat. The bare soil—desiccated by the relentless drought that smothered nearly two-thirds of the continental United States during the summer and still persists over the Great Plains—was easily lifted by the passing strong winds, darkening skies from southern Nebraska, through Kansas, and into Oklahoma.
Observers could not help but harken back to the 1930s Dust Bowl that ultimately covered 100 million acres in western Kansas, the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, northeastern New Mexico, and southeastern Colorado. Yet when asked if that was the direction the region was headed, Oklahoma’s Secretary of Agriculture Jim Reese was unequivocal: “That will never happen again.”
In the early decades of the twentieth century, earnest settlers of the semi-arid Plains, along with opportunistic “suitcase farmers” out to make a quick dollar, plowed under millions of acres of native prairie grass. Assured that “rain follows the plow,” and lured by government incentives, railroad promises, and hopes of carving out a place for their families, these farmers embraced the newly available tractors, powerful plows, and mechanized harvesters to turn over the sod that had long sustained Native American tribes and millions of bison.
The plowing began during years of rain, and early harvests were good. High wheat prices, buoyed by demand and government guarantees during the First World War, encouraged ever more land to be turned over. But then the Great Depression hit. The price of wheat collapsed and fields were abandoned. When the drought arrived in the early 1930s, the soils blew, their fertility stolen by the relentless wind. Stripped of its living carpet, freed from the intricate matrix of perennial prairie grass roots, the earth took flight.
Clouds as tall as mountains and black as night rolled over the land. Regular dust storms pummeled the homesteaders; the big ones drew notice when they clouded the sun in New York City and Washington, DC, even sullying ships hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. Dunes formed and spread, burying railroad tracks, fences, and cars. “Dust pneumonia” claimed lives, often those of children. People fled the land in droves.
In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan describes the topsoil loss, how a “rich cover that had taken several thousand years to develop was disappearing day by day.” The sodbusters had quickly illuminated the dangerous hubris in the 1909 Bureau of Soils proclamation: “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.” The rechristened Great Plains looked like it would revert back to its original name: the Great American Desert.
When a series of dust storms reached far-flung Washington, DC, in the spring of 1935, a reluctant Congress was finally convinced to allocate resources to help stabilize the soil. With government subsidies and direction from the newly created Soil Conservation Service, practices were introduced to help hold down the earth. Grasses were replanted; shelter belts of trees were planted to slow the persistent winds; contour farming or terracing was used to farm in line with the natural shape of the land; strip cropping was used to leave some protective cover on the soil; and crop rotations and fallow periods allowed the land to rest.
While some of the Dust Bowl land never recovered, the settled communities becoming ghost towns, many of the once-affected areas have become major food producers. By 1933 wheat production in Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado was slashed by nearly three-quarters from its 1931 high of 411 million bushels, taking until 1947 to reach that level again. In 2012, the wheat output of these four states exceeds 700 million bushels, a third of the U.S. wheat harvest.
After World War II, well-drilling and pumping technologies allowed farmers to tap into the Ogallala aquifer, a vast reservoir of water beneath the Plains, stretching from southern South Dakota through the Texas Panhandle. Irrigation expanded, with center-pivot sprinklers creating the green circles overlain on brown squares that are familiar to anyone who has flown over the central United States.
In recent decades irrigation has allowed the traditional Corn Belt to move westward onto drier lands. Kansas, for instance, sometimes called “the Wheat State,” harvesting one-sixth of the U.S. crop, now produces as much corn as it does wheat. The wheat is primarily rainfed, but more than half the corn is irrigated.
As extraction of the underground water has increased, however, water tables have fallen. The depletion is particularly concerning in the Central and Southern Plains where there is virtually no replenishment of the aquifer from rainfall, foreshadowing an end to the use of this finite resource. In the former Dust Bowl states, irrigation had its boom, but in many areas it is beyond its peak. With wells going dry, some farmers have returned to the more-common rainfed wheat farming, which typically yields far less than with irrigation; others have gotten out of wheat all together.
In Kansas the average drop in the water table is 23 feet (7 meters), but some farmers have seen drops of 150 feet or more have been reported. The fall in water tables is even greater in the Texas Panhandle. Statewide, Texas’ irrigated area is down more than 20 percent from its high nearly 40 years ago. Only recently, after the water table fell fast during the back-to-back droughts, have limits been placed on withdrawals from individual wells there to slow the depletion.According to scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and the U.S. Geological Survey, if current rates of extraction continue, irrigation over a third of the southern High Plains will be untenable within 30 years.
Beyond the farm, climatologists are making it clear that the recent droughts are exactly the sort of event predicted to come more frequently as the planet heats up. So rainfed crops are in trouble, too. Models agree that with the global warming in store absent dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, much of the western United States—from Kansas to California—could enter into a long-term state of dryness, what physicist Joseph Romm has termed “dust-bowlification.”
With soil conservation measures in place, when drought revisited the Plains in the 1950s, the mid-1970s, the early 2000s, and again in 2011-2012—when Texas and Oklahoma baked in their hottest summers on record—a full-blown Dust Bowl did not develop. But will the ground hold forever? The United States is by far the world’s leading grain exporter; thus the fate of the nation’s “breadbasket” matters for food prices, and food security, around the globe.
While our understanding of and respect for the soil is greater now than it was at the turn of the last century, erosion still exceeds new soil formation on most acres. The combination of higher temperatures, prolonged drought, and irrigation limitations turns the prospects for continued large-scale crop production on the Plains grim. In case going through the worst recession since the Great Depression was not enough to remind Americans of hard times in the country’s past, climate change and the pressures of population and consumption growth pushing farmers to produce ever more food on limited land will make it harder to avoid a repeat of history.
Grist guest contributor
By Janet Larsen
On October 18, 2012, the Associated Press reported that “a massive dust storm swirling reddish-brown clouds over northern Oklahoma triggered a multi-vehicle accident along a major interstate…forcing police to shut down the heavily traveled roadway amid near blackout conditions.” Farmers in the region had recently plowed fields to plant winter wheat. The bare soil—desiccated by the relentless drought that smothered nearly two-thirds of the continental United States during the summer and still persists over the Great Plains—was easily lifted by the passing strong winds, darkening skies from southern Nebraska, through Kansas, and into Oklahoma.
Observers could not help but harken back to the 1930s Dust Bowl that ultimately covered 100 million acres in western Kansas, the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, northeastern New Mexico, and southeastern Colorado. Yet when asked if that was the direction the region was headed, Oklahoma’s Secretary of Agriculture Jim Reese was unequivocal: “That will never happen again.”
In the early decades of the twentieth century, earnest settlers of the semi-arid Plains, along with opportunistic “suitcase farmers” out to make a quick dollar, plowed under millions of acres of native prairie grass. Assured that “rain follows the plow,” and lured by government incentives, railroad promises, and hopes of carving out a place for their families, these farmers embraced the newly available tractors, powerful plows, and mechanized harvesters to turn over the sod that had long sustained Native American tribes and millions of bison.
The plowing began during years of rain, and early harvests were good. High wheat prices, buoyed by demand and government guarantees during the First World War, encouraged ever more land to be turned over. But then the Great Depression hit. The price of wheat collapsed and fields were abandoned. When the drought arrived in the early 1930s, the soils blew, their fertility stolen by the relentless wind. Stripped of its living carpet, freed from the intricate matrix of perennial prairie grass roots, the earth took flight.
Clouds as tall as mountains and black as night rolled over the land. Regular dust storms pummeled the homesteaders; the big ones drew notice when they clouded the sun in New York City and Washington, DC, even sullying ships hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. Dunes formed and spread, burying railroad tracks, fences, and cars. “Dust pneumonia” claimed lives, often those of children. People fled the land in droves.
In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan describes the topsoil loss, how a “rich cover that had taken several thousand years to develop was disappearing day by day.” The sodbusters had quickly illuminated the dangerous hubris in the 1909 Bureau of Soils proclamation: “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.” The rechristened Great Plains looked like it would revert back to its original name: the Great American Desert.
When a series of dust storms reached far-flung Washington, DC, in the spring of 1935, a reluctant Congress was finally convinced to allocate resources to help stabilize the soil. With government subsidies and direction from the newly created Soil Conservation Service, practices were introduced to help hold down the earth. Grasses were replanted; shelter belts of trees were planted to slow the persistent winds; contour farming or terracing was used to farm in line with the natural shape of the land; strip cropping was used to leave some protective cover on the soil; and crop rotations and fallow periods allowed the land to rest.
While some of the Dust Bowl land never recovered, the settled communities becoming ghost towns, many of the once-affected areas have become major food producers. By 1933 wheat production in Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado was slashed by nearly three-quarters from its 1931 high of 411 million bushels, taking until 1947 to reach that level again. In 2012, the wheat output of these four states exceeds 700 million bushels, a third of the U.S. wheat harvest.
After World War II, well-drilling and pumping technologies allowed farmers to tap into the Ogallala aquifer, a vast reservoir of water beneath the Plains, stretching from southern South Dakota through the Texas Panhandle. Irrigation expanded, with center-pivot sprinklers creating the green circles overlain on brown squares that are familiar to anyone who has flown over the central United States.
In recent decades irrigation has allowed the traditional Corn Belt to move westward onto drier lands. Kansas, for instance, sometimes called “the Wheat State,” harvesting one-sixth of the U.S. crop, now produces as much corn as it does wheat. The wheat is primarily rainfed, but more than half the corn is irrigated.
As extraction of the underground water has increased, however, water tables have fallen. The depletion is particularly concerning in the Central and Southern Plains where there is virtually no replenishment of the aquifer from rainfall, foreshadowing an end to the use of this finite resource. In the former Dust Bowl states, irrigation had its boom, but in many areas it is beyond its peak. With wells going dry, some farmers have returned to the more-common rainfed wheat farming, which typically yields far less than with irrigation; others have gotten out of wheat all together.
In Kansas the average drop in the water table is 23 feet (7 meters), but some farmers have seen drops of 150 feet or more have been reported. The fall in water tables is even greater in the Texas Panhandle. Statewide, Texas’ irrigated area is down more than 20 percent from its high nearly 40 years ago. Only recently, after the water table fell fast during the back-to-back droughts, have limits been placed on withdrawals from individual wells there to slow the depletion.According to scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and the U.S. Geological Survey, if current rates of extraction continue, irrigation over a third of the southern High Plains will be untenable within 30 years.
Beyond the farm, climatologists are making it clear that the recent droughts are exactly the sort of event predicted to come more frequently as the planet heats up. So rainfed crops are in trouble, too. Models agree that with the global warming in store absent dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, much of the western United States—from Kansas to California—could enter into a long-term state of dryness, what physicist Joseph Romm has termed “dust-bowlification.”
With soil conservation measures in place, when drought revisited the Plains in the 1950s, the mid-1970s, the early 2000s, and again in 2011-2012—when Texas and Oklahoma baked in their hottest summers on record—a full-blown Dust Bowl did not develop. But will the ground hold forever? The United States is by far the world’s leading grain exporter; thus the fate of the nation’s “breadbasket” matters for food prices, and food security, around the globe.
While our understanding of and respect for the soil is greater now than it was at the turn of the last century, erosion still exceeds new soil formation on most acres. The combination of higher temperatures, prolonged drought, and irrigation limitations turns the prospects for continued large-scale crop production on the Plains grim. In case going through the worst recession since the Great Depression was not enough to remind Americans of hard times in the country’s past, climate change and the pressures of population and consumption growth pushing farmers to produce ever more food on limited land will make it harder to avoid a repeat of history.
Nov 15, 2012
Ken Burns: Before Sandy, There Was the Dust Bowl | Mother Jones
By James West
Thu Nov. 15, 2012
The filmmaker talks about the worst man-made ecological disaster in US history, and what it teaches us about future climate catastrophes.
As the East Coast licks its wounds from superstorm Sandy, many in New York and New Jersey are still without power, wondering how on Earth it got this bad. Ken Burns, the great innovator of the American documentary, thinks this the perfect time to seek some wisdom from generations past.
His new film, The Dust Bowl, tells the story of the the worst man-made ecological disaster in US history. For it, Burns and and his team tracked down the last remaining survivors of the catastrophic dust storms of the 1930s and matched their intimate stories (most were children at the time) with lush archival footage.
When I caught up with Burns in New York City, he drew comparisons between what happened then and what is happening now—and how we can prevent future Dust Bowls and Sandys.
The Dust Bowl airs November 18th and 19 on PBS.
Thu Nov. 15, 2012
The filmmaker talks about the worst man-made ecological disaster in US history, and what it teaches us about future climate catastrophes.
As the East Coast licks its wounds from superstorm Sandy, many in New York and New Jersey are still without power, wondering how on Earth it got this bad. Ken Burns, the great innovator of the American documentary, thinks this the perfect time to seek some wisdom from generations past.
His new film, The Dust Bowl, tells the story of the the worst man-made ecological disaster in US history. For it, Burns and and his team tracked down the last remaining survivors of the catastrophic dust storms of the 1930s and matched their intimate stories (most were children at the time) with lush archival footage.
When I caught up with Burns in New York City, he drew comparisons between what happened then and what is happening now—and how we can prevent future Dust Bowls and Sandys.
The Dust Bowl airs November 18th and 19 on PBS.
Nov 14, 2012
Glenn Greenwald: While Petraeus Had Affair With Biographer, Corporate Media Had Affair With Petraeus
Guardian columnist and blogger Glenn Greenwald
Link: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/14/glenn_greenwald_while_petraeus_had_affair
Petraeus Affair Lesson: The Army Is Better at Planning Soirees Than Wars | Mother Jones
By Adam Weinstein
Tue Nov. 13, 2012
Tue Nov. 13, 2012
Flickr/hectorir
Among the many strange details emerging from the story of retired Gen. David Petraeus' affair with his biographer, there's this: US Central Command seems to have prepared more thoroughly for its military parties than for the war in Iraq.
News of Petraeus' marital peccadilloes came to light after Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite and friend of Petraeus, complained to her FBI friend about receiving harassing emails... which turned out to originate from Petraeus' paramour, Paula Broadwell. Kelley, too, is alleged to have sent "hundreds" of flirtatious emails to another general, Marine Gen. John Allen, who's currently overseeing the war in Afghanistan.
Kelley's involvement in the affair has shed light on the military's robust social calendaring at MacDill Air Force Base, Central Command's Tampa headquarters. Tampa has long been known for its gritty night scene—its main drag of strip clubs is literally up the street from MacDill's gates, a straight shot north on Dale Mabry Highway—and Kelley was noted for hosting military VIPs during the city's pirate-themed springtime Gasparilla Festival. She also was a VIP invitee to the service's biggest party of the year, the annual Army Ball, in 2011. It was a party with an exacting military plan that might raise a few eyebrows.
Every Army officer is well-acquainted with the five-paragraph "operations order," the basic memorandum format in which military maneuvers are written up—from major war campaigns to small intelligence-gathering trips. But it might shock some war veterans to learn that CENTCOM's Army Ball that year was organized to the smallest detail in a whopping 17-page official op order with 13 appendices. Marked "UNCLASSIFIED," the memo details how CENTCOM worked with the Pentagon's Special Operations Command "to allow area Army personnel and friends to celebrate the 236th birthday of the United States Army and to promote beneficial public relations in the greater Tampa Community."
Under Section III, "Execution," the Army Ball's executive committee chairman—Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel—noted that "[t]here will be five phases of the operation." These included Phase IV, "Execution," and Phase V, "Recovery," in which the party's organizing team "salvages what resources are practical and usable for future balls, performs an After Action Review, and transitions the resources available to the 2012 Army Ball Committee."
Here's the thing: That's more planning and direction than CENTCOM put into postconflict reconstruction in Iraq. When planning for the war against Saddam Hussein in 2003, then-CENTCOM commander (and recent Romney adviser) Gen. Tommy Franks put together a slideshow presentation for President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others, that summarized their Iraq strategy. On every slide detailing every option for how to start the war, info on how the war would end—called "Phase IV, Post-Hostilities" in military parlance—was marked by a single word: "UNKNOWN."
Here's what that looks like:
Is it really possible that one of the Army's major combatant commands put more thought into its annual soiree than how to manage post-war Iraq? Of course, there were plenty of military personnel working on the Iraq question, even if their work never filtered up to the operation's slide-writing deciders. But as l'affaire Petraeus demonstrates, every good party needs a planner.
Among the many strange details emerging from the story of retired Gen. David Petraeus' affair with his biographer, there's this: US Central Command seems to have prepared more thoroughly for its military parties than for the war in Iraq.
News of Petraeus' marital peccadilloes came to light after Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite and friend of Petraeus, complained to her FBI friend about receiving harassing emails... which turned out to originate from Petraeus' paramour, Paula Broadwell. Kelley, too, is alleged to have sent "hundreds" of flirtatious emails to another general, Marine Gen. John Allen, who's currently overseeing the war in Afghanistan.
Kelley's involvement in the affair has shed light on the military's robust social calendaring at MacDill Air Force Base, Central Command's Tampa headquarters. Tampa has long been known for its gritty night scene—its main drag of strip clubs is literally up the street from MacDill's gates, a straight shot north on Dale Mabry Highway—and Kelley was noted for hosting military VIPs during the city's pirate-themed springtime Gasparilla Festival. She also was a VIP invitee to the service's biggest party of the year, the annual Army Ball, in 2011. It was a party with an exacting military plan that might raise a few eyebrows.
Every Army officer is well-acquainted with the five-paragraph "operations order," the basic memorandum format in which military maneuvers are written up—from major war campaigns to small intelligence-gathering trips. But it might shock some war veterans to learn that CENTCOM's Army Ball that year was organized to the smallest detail in a whopping 17-page official op order with 13 appendices. Marked "UNCLASSIFIED," the memo details how CENTCOM worked with the Pentagon's Special Operations Command "to allow area Army personnel and friends to celebrate the 236th birthday of the United States Army and to promote beneficial public relations in the greater Tampa Community."
Under Section III, "Execution," the Army Ball's executive committee chairman—Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel—noted that "[t]here will be five phases of the operation." These included Phase IV, "Execution," and Phase V, "Recovery," in which the party's organizing team "salvages what resources are practical and usable for future balls, performs an After Action Review, and transitions the resources available to the 2012 Army Ball Committee."
Here's the thing: That's more planning and direction than CENTCOM put into postconflict reconstruction in Iraq. When planning for the war against Saddam Hussein in 2003, then-CENTCOM commander (and recent Romney adviser) Gen. Tommy Franks put together a slideshow presentation for President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others, that summarized their Iraq strategy. On every slide detailing every option for how to start the war, info on how the war would end—called "Phase IV, Post-Hostilities" in military parlance—was marked by a single word: "UNKNOWN."
Here's what that looks like:
Is it really possible that one of the Army's major combatant commands put more thought into its annual soiree than how to manage post-war Iraq? Of course, there were plenty of military personnel working on the Iraq question, even if their work never filtered up to the operation's slide-writing deciders. But as l'affaire Petraeus demonstrates, every good party needs a planner.
Nov 13, 2012
David Petraeus: A US war hero?
A scandalous affair has brought down a man referred to by many as one of the greatest generals in US history. But how successful have David Petraeus' strategies really been in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Until a few years ago, few people had heard of Petraeus. But in Washington DC, he has been long revered.
"If you ask the families of the 2,000 US service people who were killed in Afghanistan, it was bound to be a fool's errand. Or if you ask the people who were killed in Iraq unnecessarily, if you talk to the people who were tortured in Iraqi prisons with Petraeus looking the other way, you would get quite a different answer."
- Ray McGovern, an ex-CIA officer
He has been compared to the likes of Dwight Eisenhower, the man who led the allied forces to victory in World War II.
His counter-inserguency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hailed as great sucesses.
And as he accepted his assignment as head of US central command in 2008, his boss at the time, Defence Secretary Robert Gates referred to him as "the pre-eminent soldier-scholar-statesman of his generation".
But his critics say, the legacy of his career is not that stellar and deserves far more scrutiny than the US media and politicians are willing to give it.
Earlier this year, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis released a whistleblower report on conditions in Afghanistan.
He said that Petraeus consistently gave glowing and inaccurate accounts of US military progress and that Petraeus built a so-called "cult of personality" around himself.
"A message had been learned by the leading politicians of our country, by the vast majority of our uniformed service members, and the population at large [that] David Petraeus is a real war hero - maybe even on the same plane as Patton, MacArthur, and Eisenhower .... But the most important lesson everyone learned [was to] never, ever question General Petraeus or you'll be made to look a fool!"
"There is a great irony in Petraeus' role in Iraq because the fact is that he never believed in that war in the first place. He told a friend of mine in 2005 that it was too late to try counter-insurgency in Iraq, that the damage had already been done ..."
- Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist
In his report, Davis was scathing in his assessment of US military commanders:
"Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognisable.
"This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan."
So, is David Petraeus really the American war hero he has been portrayed as?
To discuss this, Inside Story Americas, with host Kimberly Halkett is joined by guests: Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist and historian; Larry Korb, the former assistant Secretary of Defence; and Ray McGovern, a retired CIA officer.
Related links:
Petraeus out of step with US top brass - Asia Times Online 2007 article - General Fallon derided Petraeus as a "sycophant" and told him to his face that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit.”
Until a few years ago, few people had heard of Petraeus. But in Washington DC, he has been long revered.
"If you ask the families of the 2,000 US service people who were killed in Afghanistan, it was bound to be a fool's errand. Or if you ask the people who were killed in Iraq unnecessarily, if you talk to the people who were tortured in Iraqi prisons with Petraeus looking the other way, you would get quite a different answer."
- Ray McGovern, an ex-CIA officer
He has been compared to the likes of Dwight Eisenhower, the man who led the allied forces to victory in World War II.
His counter-inserguency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hailed as great sucesses.
And as he accepted his assignment as head of US central command in 2008, his boss at the time, Defence Secretary Robert Gates referred to him as "the pre-eminent soldier-scholar-statesman of his generation".
But his critics say, the legacy of his career is not that stellar and deserves far more scrutiny than the US media and politicians are willing to give it.
Earlier this year, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis released a whistleblower report on conditions in Afghanistan.
He said that Petraeus consistently gave glowing and inaccurate accounts of US military progress and that Petraeus built a so-called "cult of personality" around himself.
"A message had been learned by the leading politicians of our country, by the vast majority of our uniformed service members, and the population at large [that] David Petraeus is a real war hero - maybe even on the same plane as Patton, MacArthur, and Eisenhower .... But the most important lesson everyone learned [was to] never, ever question General Petraeus or you'll be made to look a fool!"
"There is a great irony in Petraeus' role in Iraq because the fact is that he never believed in that war in the first place. He told a friend of mine in 2005 that it was too late to try counter-insurgency in Iraq, that the damage had already been done ..."
- Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist
In his report, Davis was scathing in his assessment of US military commanders:
"Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognisable.
"This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan."
So, is David Petraeus really the American war hero he has been portrayed as?
To discuss this, Inside Story Americas, with host Kimberly Halkett is joined by guests: Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist and historian; Larry Korb, the former assistant Secretary of Defence; and Ray McGovern, a retired CIA officer.
Related links:
Petraeus out of step with US top brass - Asia Times Online 2007 article - General Fallon derided Petraeus as a "sycophant" and told him to his face that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit.”
Never did like this guy... Monte & Eileen
Nov 9, 2012
Climate science is Nate Silver and U.S. politics is Karl Rove | Grist
Throughout this long, crazy campaign, there’s been a tension simmering between empiricists like Nate Silver andSam Wang, who cited poll data showing Obama with a small but durable lead, and pundits who trusted their “guts” and the “narrative,” both of which indicated that Romney had all the momentum after the first debate.
In the face of model projections like Silver’s, Jonah Goldberg said that “the soul … is not so easily number-crunched.” David Brooks warnedthat “experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior.” Joe Scarborough said “anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue.” Peggy Noonan said that “the vibrations are right” for a Romney win. All sorts of conservative pundits were convinced the Romney campaign just feltlike a winner.
You know how that turned out. Jon Stewart put it way better than I could:
Empiricism won. It didn’t win because it’s a truer faith or a superior ideology. It won because it works. It is the best way humans have figured out to set aside their prejudices, their perceptual limitations, their cognitive shortcomings, and get a clear view of what’s to come.
As it happens, there’s another issue in American politics where empiricists are forecasting the future and being ignored. Here’s what the Nate Silvers of climate science are up to:
Looking back at 10 years of atmospheric humidity data from NASA satellites, [John Fasullo and Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research] examined two dozen of the world’s most sophisticated climate simulations. They found the simulations that most closely matched actual humidity measurements were also the ones that predicted the most extreme global warming.
In other words, by using real data, the scientists picked simulation winners and losers.
“The models at the higher end of temperature predictions uniformly did a better job,” Fasullo said. The simulations that fared worse — the ones predicting smaller temperature rises — “should be outright discounted,” he added.
The Washington Post spells out what that means:
That means the world could be in for a devastating increase of about eight degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, resulting in drastically higher seas, disappearing coastlines and more severe droughts, floods and other destructive weather.
Such an increase would substantially overshoot what the world’s leaders have identified as the threshold for triggering catastrophic consequences. In 2009, heads of state agreed to try to limit warming to 3.6 degrees, and many countries want a tighter limit.
This is in keeping with a recent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers [PDF], which showed that, to hold warming to that 3.6 degree target (2 degree Celsius), global average carbon intensity would have to decline by 5.1 percent a year, on average, between now and 2050. That rate of decarbonization has never been achieved, ever, for as long as we have records. It is, the report notes dryly, “highly unrealistic.” Even to limit warming to 7.2 degrees (4 degrees Celsius) would require nearly quadrupling the current rate of decarbonization. And at our current rate rate of decarbonization (1.6 percent) we are on track for a temperature rise of 10.8 degrees (6 degrees Celsius) by 2100.
Let’s be clear about this. Scientists consider 3.6 degrees catastrophic. There are serious scientists who doubt that human civilization can endure at all in the face of 7.2 degrees. And we are headed for 10.8.
In short, the Nate Silvers of climate science are forecasting a landslide — that is, humanity under a landslide of drought, floods, disease, and dislocation. They’re telling us that unless we change our campaign strategy, i.e., undertake rapid, large-scale efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change, our chances of surviving and prospering are dim and getting dimmer.
We simply haven’t come to terms with what empirical science is telling us. The mainstream media hasn’t come to terms with it. Most public intellectuals have not come to terms with it. And almost no politicians have come to terms with it. (Republicans deny it, most centrists ignore it, and Dems mouth platitudes about it.)
We all sound like pundits, going with our “guts.” The science feels too scary, too abrasive, too implausible. The hippies out there protesting over climate change feel “unserious.” The notion that energy prices might have to rise or lifestyles change feels “alarmist.” We talk about climate, if we talk about it at all, in terms of these time-worn prejudices and outdated folk theories. We all sound like Peggy Noonan with her vibrations.
It’s our own version of “math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better.” Call it math you do as an American to make yourself feel better.
This election is being hailed in many quarters as a triumph for Nate Silver and forces of empiricism. But on the biggest, most pressing risk facing the country, those involved in U.S. politics might as well be witch doctors. Or worse, Karl Rove.
It’s not a wise approach, because in the climate race, losses are permanent and irreversible. There will be no recount.
Oct 26, 2012
Bob Dylan - With God On Our Side (1964)
Poignant and ironic still today... Several new verses could be written...
"With God On Our Side"
Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And the land that I live in
Has God on its side.
Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.
The Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns on their hands
And God on their side.
The First World War, boys
It came and it went
The reason for fighting
I never did get
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side.
When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And then we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.
I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.
But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.
In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.
So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.
Another version by Neville Brothers:
Oct 24, 2012
Oct 23, 2012
Climate of Doubt | FRONTLINE | PBS
Watch Climate of Doubt on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
Man-made climate change deniers --> You can't fix stupid... Monte and Eileen
Oct 19, 2012
Stan Musial, The Greatest Living St. Louis Cardinal
The former Cards' great took in Game 4 of the NLCS between the Cards and Giants at Busch Stadium on Thursday, 10-19-2012. Musial also rode around the ballpark, receiving a huge applause from the fans -- because, well, he's the man.
Cardinals legend Stan Musial makes a surprise appearance before Game 4 of the National League Championship Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Francisco Giants on Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012, at Busch Stadium. Photo by J. B. Forbes, jforbes@post-dispatch.com
BY DAN O'NEILL
Five things worth mentioning about Game 4 of the National League Championship Series on Thursday at Busch Stadium:
NO. 1: A PERFECT KNIGHT
The Cardinals made it a memorable night, Stan Musial made it a Perfect Knight. Approaching his 92nd birthday, the living legend was introduced before the game as goose bumps ran wild.
Musial was chauffeured around the stands wearing a Cardinals jacket and waving to fans. Classy Giants skipper Bruce Bochy shook hands with No. 6 and players from both dugouts applauded as Musial handed a game ball to manager Mike Matheny.
It was William Shakespeare who wrote, "Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."
And some are just The Man.
Related links:
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/stan-the-man-makes-it-a-perfect-knight/article_0afdaf6e-5234-5312-8e16-e61764c3cd21.html
Five things worth mentioning about Game 4 of the National League Championship Series on Thursday at Busch Stadium:
NO. 1: A PERFECT KNIGHT
The Cardinals made it a memorable night, Stan Musial made it a Perfect Knight. Approaching his 92nd birthday, the living legend was introduced before the game as goose bumps ran wild.
Musial was chauffeured around the stands wearing a Cardinals jacket and waving to fans. Classy Giants skipper Bruce Bochy shook hands with No. 6 and players from both dugouts applauded as Musial handed a game ball to manager Mike Matheny.
It was William Shakespeare who wrote, "Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."
And some are just The Man.
Related links:
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/stan-the-man-makes-it-a-perfect-knight/article_0afdaf6e-5234-5312-8e16-e61764c3cd21.html
Oct 18, 2012
Hines Farm - Very Large American Sycamore
Larger Image
Larger Image
One of our large American Sycamores... 9' Diameter Trunk... Approximately 150' Height...
Oct 9, 2012
Ozzie Zehner - Green Illusions
Published on Oct 8, 2012 by AtGoogleTalks
"Ten years from now, will we think of renewable energy as clean and green? Emerging research on the side effects and limitations of solar cells, wind turbines, biofuels, electric cars and other alternative energy strategies will likely transform conventional wisdom about what's green, and what's not. Which players will be left in the dust? Who will innovate the next green revolution? And how?
The Sunday Times describes Ozzie Zehner an "an academic who is causing shockwaves." He is the author of Green Illusions and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He lectures at universities and public policy organizations."
Thought provoking... Monte
Muskrat for Supper: Exploring the Natural World with Kenny Salwey
Published on Aug 15, 2012 by argusfest
Kenny Salwey is the last of a breed of men whose lifestyle has all but disappeared in this fast-paced, high-tech digital world. For 30 years, this weathered woodsman eked out a living on the Mississippi River running a trapline, hiring out as a river guide, digging and selling roots and herbs, and eating the food he hunted and fished. Today, Salwey is A master storyteller, environmental educator, keynote speaker, nature writer, and advocate for the Upper Mississippi River. Kenny Salwey spoke at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, Colorado on July 21, 2012
Wonderful man, great story teller, talkin' about nature, life, and the great Mississippi River, ... Monte and Eileen
Oct 2, 2012
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