SECURITY
Stray thoughts on the subject of assured our national and individual security:
--So waterboarding (simulated drowning) started with the Spanish Inquisition, according to a report this morning from Vermont Public Radio. It made me think of the refrain of a folksong by Martin Simpson: “What you sow is what you reap;/ You will be known by the company you keep.”
Then there came to mind one of my mother’s favorite poems, about someone who finds a drunk asleep in a gutter next to a pig, and says, “’You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses.’/ And the pig got up and slowly walked away.”
There is every possibility that in the future, we will have to fight a war in which we do not have the advantage of overwhelming firepower, and the number of prisoners of war goes far beyond anything imaginable in Iraq. What, then, will be their fate? And if they are tortured, will the American public then back away from a war that SHOULD be fought? “Oh, what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practice to deceive.”
--My cell phone company tells me that any cell phone is able to dial 911, including my first phone, which is now in the glove box of my wife’s car. But how do we know that’s true? We shouldn’t be dialing 911 unless there’s a real emergency….There should be an non-emergency 911-related line, like the non-emergency phone numbers maintained by many police departments, that people could call to make sure their phones’ batteries are working, circuits are stable, area is connected to the grid, etc., and maybe to provide information that might be related to criminal activity but they aren’t sure (but the police might be if such calls became part of a pattern). And there should be more emphasis on using old cell phones to provide people who can’t afford cell phone service contracts with emergency access, rather than just organizing recycling drives.
--Why not tell Turkey, “We do believe what happened to the Armenian people was genocidal, but so was the destruction of many natives of the New World. In return for making this statement about an occurrence that came before the formation of your country, we are abolishing Columbus Day, because the historical record shows that he began that pattern of enslavement and extinction. And we are declaring our complicity in the 30 million deaths during China’s Taipeng Rebellion, which ended in 1864 when foreign troops under Britain’s Charles Gordon and America’s F. T. Ward joined forces with the Hunan governmental army."
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