The Razor

Paul Marks, writing in New Scientist, raises an interesting point in his article “Crashing Software Poses Flight Danger,” (New Scientist, Feb 11, 2008).

“Why do software bugs arise and why can’t they be removed? Bugs are sections of code that start doing something different to what the programmer intended, usually when the code has to deal with circumstances the programmer didn’t anticipate. All software is susceptible to bugs, so it must be tested under as many different circumstances as possible. Ideally, the bugs get discovered at this time and are removed before the software is actually used. This is very difficult in complex systems like aircraft because the number of possible scenarios, – such as different combinations of air densities, engine temperatures and specific aerodynamics – is huge.”

The problem occurs when you write software that must be bug-free, for example to be used in the flight control systems of aircraft. In order to reduce weight and improve fuel efficiency aircraft makers have begun using computers to control planes. But bugs that result in the Blue Screen of Death on your Windows PC can be much more serious when they happen on a plane flying 30,000 feet in the air.

Paul Marks writes that the US National Academy of Science has documented several instances of trouble caused by faulty software design. In August 2005 a computer in a Boeing 777 gave contradictory reports of airspeed, varying between an air speed that was too fast for the plane to fly without breaking apart and too slow for it to stay in the air. That same year an Airbus 319 lost computerized flight and navigation displays, autopilot, auto throttle and radio for two minutes. The NAS also reports that “faulty logic in the software” was behind a computer failure that controlled fuel flow in an Airbus 340.

According to Marks, to test for bugs aircraft manufacturers adhere to the “DO-178B standard” which rates software based on the severity of the resulting consequences should it fail. The most rigorous test, “Level A” is for software whose failure would result in a catastrophic event using the “modified condition/decision coverage (MCDC)” method that tests software by placing it as many dangerous situations as possible and seeing how it handles.

Marks notes that Martyn Thomas, a systems engineering consultant in the UK, doesn’t believe that MCDC works. “MCDC testing is not removing any significant numbers of bugs,” he says. “It highlights the fact that testing is a completely hopeless way of showing that software does not contain errors.”

Thomas’s solution is to change the way software is written starting with the languages used. He suggests using computer languages that force the programmer to write unambiguous code such as B-Method and SPARK, instead of more commonly used C and its variants that allow programmers to write vague code that can lead to bugs. These languages and their compilers make it difficult for programmers to write ambiguous code by mathematically verifying the code as it is written. Languages that do this are considered “strongly typed”, defined in Wikipedia as “”a programming language plac(ing) severe restrictions on the intermixing that is permitted to occur, preventing the compiling or running of source code which uses data in what is considered to be an invalid way.”

One of the more commonly used “strongly typed” languages is Ada, of which SPARK is a variant. Ada, named after Lord Byron’s daughter and creator of the world’s first software Augusta Ada Lovelace, is an object oriented language developed in the 1970s by the US Department of Defense to reduce the number of high-level computer languages used, at the time numbering as high as 450. Since its adoption in December 1980 Ada has become a standard in the defense industry, and moved into other outside areas where safety is paramount. For example, Wikipedia notes that the software that controls the Boeing 777 is written in Ada – but makes no mention of the airspeed incident noted in Marks’s article.

So how safe is Ada? According to the article “Ada 2005 Strengthens Ada’s Safety-Critical Muscles” in the November 2005 issue of COTS Journal, Ada (http://www.cotsjournalonline.com/home/article.php?id=100424) was conceived with safety in mind, using strong typing and well defined semantics that has undergone continual international inspection and formal reviews – called “validating an implementation” now an ISO standard, thereby avoiding many of the pitfalls and traps that cause run-time errors in C and its variants.

The COTS Journal article also notes something that I was considering myself: Why should safety-critical software be used only in safety-critical situations?

“…in a society increasingly dependent on sophisticated computer software, there are more and more applications where correctness is essential, even if they are not formally considered safety-critical. For example, the commercial banking structure relies on complex computer controls. Even a minor failure can cause waves that can have huge economic consequences. There are several decades of experience in building safety-critical systems, and the success has been remarkable—no fatalities can be attributed to failure of certified safety-critical software. It is both practical and essential to extend these techniques to improve the reliability of our entire computer infrastructure.”

In 2002 the Knight Trading Group’s a bug in the firm’s own software generated “sell orders” on its own stock, driving the price down in pre-market trading, forcing the NASDAQ to halt trading in the stock. In 2005 the Tokyo Stock Exchange missed its morning trading session due to a software glitch. All this occurred years after the granddaddy of software bugs, Y2K cost firms billions to fix. Bug-free software may not have killed anyone in these situations, but it sure cost firms a lot of money.

So why isn’t Ada being used more often today in corporate environments where C variants including Java – and the bugs that come with it – have become the de facto standard? First the existing code base of C variant applications in use at firms represents a huge investment of hundreds of billions of dollars. While this code may be prone to bugs, it is much cheaper to patch the code than it is to replace it with code that is more robust.
Secondly companies already have an existing infrastructure, including hardware and software tools that are designed to work specifically with C variant languages. Part of this infrastructure would include a huge talent base of C programmers that can be augmented relatively easily by qualified professionals. As an informal test I compared jobs listings on the technical job site “Dice” using Ada and “C” as keywords. While the Ada search using that keyword returned 140 jobs nationwide, the C returned over 18,000 – roughly one in five positions listed.

Finally there is the perception that C code is “good enough,” that much of the programming being done in business today doesn’t require the extra money invested in better code. No one will die if a payroll application crashes during a check run, or a customer’s call is cut off prematurely by a bad line of code in voice recognition software.

However problems occur when the business processes used to justify programs change and the programs themselves do not, for example when a low priority process becomes embedded in a critical one, or the process itself becomes critical. Once software is in place and is working, it’s difficult to justify replacing it until something goes wrong. And when something does, an emergency often results in a quick fix that is cheaper in the short term than a more expensive and time consuming longer term solution.

It would be nice for companies to embrace “strongly typed” programming, but given the above constraints I simply do not see it happening any time soon. What I do see happening at the very least are better design tools appearing that monitor code writing and catch bugs before they are compiled, as well as more automated testing including perhaps full simulations of complex systems on virtual machines. Given today’s technology it is possible to run these simulations using historical data and time compression to see whether a given application works as intended or as designed – with bugs. Many firms already have completely duplicated production environments for testing and disaster recovery. It wouldn’t take much to adapt these environments into full-blown simulations.

Houston mayor Bill White bristles at the labeling of his city as ‘Sanctuary City’ – one that does not enforce federal immigration law at the local level. In 2006 the mayor said, ‘’‘Houston is not a sanctuary city. The biggest concern on something like this is somebody trying to confuse the voters.’ Nevertheless, since 1992 the Houston Police have followed a directive forbidding them from determining the immigration status of those they question or arrest. Even the Congressional Research Service lists the city formally as a ‘sanctuary city’ in its report, ‘CRS Report for Congress, Enforcing Immigration Law: The Role of State and Local Law Enforcement.’

For a young family of three in Houston, it’s an issue of semantics that no longer matters. On August 14, 2007 Juan Felix Salinas, 42, from Nuevo Leon, Mexico, was charged with three counts of intoxication manslaughter in the deaths of Tenisha Williams, 26; her husband, S.J. Williams; and her son, Xavier Brown, 2. According to Houston Police, Salinas was speeding on Interstate 10 before he slammed into the back of the Williams’s vehicle. It burst into flame as bystanders tried unsuccessfully to free the trapped family. Salina’s blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit.

This isn’t the first time Houston has had trouble with its controversial policy. In January 2003 an illegal immigrant driving a trash truck ran over a six year old boy. He got out of the truck, pulled the boy out from under it, and then drove away. He later fled to Mexico where he remains at large. The year before Walter Alexander Sorto, an illegal from El Salvador abducted, raped and murdered two Houston women. Sorto had been picked up by police numerous times for traffic violations, and was on probation for robbery at the time of the murders. In October 2006 illegal immigrant Juan Quintero allegedly shot and killed Houston police officer Rodney Johnson.

While it is true that illegal immigrants are responsible for a lower proportion of murders than the general population, this fact obscures the even greater truth: all of these crimes were completely preventable had federal law been abided to at the local level as is mandated by the US Constitution. Had federal immigration authorities been alerted after Salinas’s first brush with the law, the Williams’s would still be alive. Had Sorto been deported or at the very least barred from probation due to the greater likelihood that his immigration status made him a flight risk, Maria Moreno Rangel and Roxana Aracelie Capulin would still be alive.

The names of the victims of these men belie yet another truth: this is not a racial issue but a legal one. The Williams’s were African-American, as was Officer Rodney Johnson and the three college students executed and a fourth left to die in a Newark schoolyard by Jose Carranza on August 4th. All of Sorto’s victims were Hispanic as was the six year old run over by a garbage truck.

Civic leaders have consciously adopted policies that extend protection to non-citizens in direct conflict with state and federal law. They have done this to curry favor with interest groups and business organizations that rely upon a flow of illegal immigrants for support and as a pool of cheap labor.

According to the Ohio Jobs Justice PAC (OJJPAC) which tracks them, there are currently 125 cities having sanctuary policies from Anchorage Alaska to Miami Florida. It is time that these leaders of these cities are held accountable for these policies. While the federal and state governments should do everything necessary to force these cities to abide by state and federal laws as mandated by the Constitution, it is ultimately left to the citizens of these cities to hold their leaders accountable for their decisions.

After all they are the ones who are paying for these naive and misguided policies with their lives.

Scott Kirwin is a writer living in Delaware.

The murder of three college students in Newark New Jersey Saturday August 4th proves that even in a society that has witnessed horrific acts of violence in its relatively brief history, we haven’t lost the capacity for being shocked. As the perpetrators are rounded up, the alleged ringleader appears to be Jose Carranza, aka Jose La Chira.

Carranza is an illegal immigrant from Peru who has been in trouble with the law in Newark before. He was indicted by grand juries in New Jersey twice this year — in April on aggravated assault and weapons charges; and in July on 31 counts which included aggravated sexual assault of a child under 13 years old and endangering the welfare of a child he had a duty to supervise.

In both incidents, Carranza was granted and posted bail – a rarity according to Alan L. Zegas, a noted New Jersey defense lawyer.

‘The level of risk of flight increases exponentially when a person is not a citizen of this country and has few, if any, roots here,’ Zegas said in an interview with Fox News.

After being granted bail, Carranza is alleged to have threatened the life of the five year old girl he raped as well as her parents. These threats did not result in his bail being revoked, nor was any efforts made into determining his immigration status as he awaited trial. Even now after his arrest in the triple homicide, the authorities involved in the case are playing down this aspect of the case. Thomas McTigue, assistant prosecutor handling the murder cases stated, ‘Our focus hasn’t been his immigration status.’

Perhaps the reason the Newark prosecutors focus was not on his immigration status was the fact Newark is a ‘Sanctuary City’ – where local officials do not enforce immigration laws. Newark New Jersey adopted ‘Sanctuary City’ policies earlier this year – prior to Carranza’s alleged crimes.

What exactly do these ‘Sanctuary City’ policies do? In a March 1, 2007 story by the north New Jersey newspaper, The Record, Paterson Councilman-at-large Rigo Rodriguez said, ‘The residents of this city must be able to go to the supermarket, ride in a car, walk down our streets, without fear that they will be arrested and not be able to go home that night,’ Rodriguez said. ‘Immigration officials need to deal with illegal immigrants at the border. Their failure to control that is why they end up in our cities.

‘Once they’re here, it shouldn’t be our job to deal with their immigration status,’ Rodriguez said. ‘Once they’re here, they’re members of our community and our role is to make them feel safe and comfortable here. They simply shouldn’t be harassed.’

In essence proponents of these policies like Councilman Rodriguez call for granting the same Fourth Amendment rights, ‘to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,’ to illegal immigrants as to citizens. Cities such as Newark New Jersey then become ‘safe zones’ where illegal immigrants can enjoy the benefits of US citizenship without bearing its costs or shouldering its responsibilities.
Was Carranza granted special treatment because the authorities believed he was an illegal immigrant? Was the Newark prosecution or the judge on his prior cases afraid to consider Carranza’s immigration status when granting bail for fear of causing a firestorm of controversy in the large Latino community?

And finally, how did an illegal immigrant from Peru have the money to post $200,000 worth of bond? Even at 10% someone would have had to come up with $20,000 – a sum that an illegal immigrant would be unlikely to have.

Three young American students are dead and another grievously wounded at the hands of a murderer and his motley crew. While ultimate responsibility lies with the killers, there can be no doubt that Newark’s justice system failed those kids that Saturday night in that New Jersey schoolyard.

Scott Kirwin is a freelance writer living in Delaware.

My stepson – a Master Sergeant in the Marine Corps – will be shipping out of Camp Pendleton much sooner than we thought. It’s a secret where ‘out’ is at this point, but I doubt he’s deploying to the Bahamas. As a consistent supporter of the Global War on Terror, his mother and I are rightfully proud and support his mission whatever it is.

He has a wife and children. In my eyes he is full of untapped potential that the Marine Corps has missed. He is a soldier intellectual without knowing it, an avid historian who remembers long-forgotten wars and draws his own, unique conclusions. He would excel in an academic setting, especially one with a strong military bearing like the Navy Academy or West Point.

He was one of the first Marines into Afghanistan in 2001. He served in East Timor as a peacekeeper. He has been to Iraq and holds his own controversial opinions. He has a sense of duty that I admire, and a sense of humor that I envy. He is strong, self-assured, handsome and brave – all the things necessary to make women swoon and men follow him without hesitation into battle. If your son is a Marine, my stepson is the man you want leading him.

When discussing death he is nonchalant, stating simply that he wishes to be buried in Arlington so that his service to our nation isn’t forgotten. He reminds us that he has willfully chosen this path, and that he did not join the Corps for its safety and security. He’s also looking forward to going.

Hearing him talk so casually about his own death frightens his mother and me. However, one of the things that scares me more is a President promising ‘consequences’ to an Iranian regime that supplies munitions to kill American soldiers – and doesn’t deliver on that threat.

According to the New York Times, Iranian-made explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by U.S.-led forces last month. This is nothing new. In August 2005 then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that captured munitions from insurgents came ‘clearly, unambiguously from Iran.’ In March 2006 ABC News reported US military and intelligence sources had caught shipments of EFPs at the Iran-Iraq border.

What has the Bush Administration done? On February 14, 2007 President Bush insisted he was ‘going to do something about’ the Iranian arms flow into Iraq. Soon after he authorized face-to-face negotiations with the Iranians. These negotiations have done nothing to stem the flow of munitions into Iraq from Iran, while at the same time handed the Iranians a propaganda victory by forcing the ‘Great Satan’ to the negotiating table.

Iraq is not Vietnam – contrary to what some believe. However there may be another analogy between the two conflicts that holds. Consider the flow of arms into North Vietnam from the USSR through China during the 1960’s and 1970’s. At the same time the Soviet Union supplied technicians and advisors to North Vietnam, many of whom manned anti-aircraft batteries that shot down American aircraft. How many of those munitions and advisors carved the names of American soldiers into the wall at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC?

What were the consequences for the Chinese and Soviets? Nixon’s visit to Peking in 1972 and ‘detente’ with the Soviets. Republican that I am I never bought the rehabilitation of Nixon and still hold him more responsible for our failure in Vietnam than Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.

Coalition forces have captured members of the Iranian Quds Force in Iraq, something that President Bush acknowledged back in February. The presence of this Iranian Special Ops unit, the use of Iranian munitions, and the recent video captured by US intelligence showing Iraqi insurgents firing Iranian rockets at coalition bases provides overwhelming evidence that the Iranian regime has American blood on its hands.

Will the ‘consequences’ be the same for them as it was the Chinese and Soviets?

It’s one thing to send men like my stepson into battle; it’s another to expose him to danger because our leader lacks the will to take the fight to his true enemy.

And that frightens me more than anything.

Scott Kirwin is a freelance writer living in Wilmington Delaware.

Democratic critics of the war in Iraq have called for the redeployment of troops out of Iraq. Congressman John Murtha has suggested moving American forces back to Okinawa – without consulting the Okinawans who have regularly protested against the presence of American troops on their island. By raising the question of redeployment, Congressman Murtha has unwittingly joined many Conservatives who question America’’s deployments around the world. If American forces are in fact a destabilizing presence in Iraq, as Senator Russell Feingold believes, why are they still in Europe and South Korea?

Senator Carl Levin has stated that American forces are being used by the Iraqis to prevent them from making the hard choices and compromises necessary to make their democracy work. Couldn’‘t a similar argument be used by all of Europe – which spends next to nothing on its own defense while gradually succumbing to Leftist anti-Americanism, Islamic extremism and anti-Semitism?

If Senator Feingold is correct about our presence in Iraq having a destabilizing effect, would he agree that the presence of our forces is behind the rise of anti-Americanism throughout Europe? Vandals have targeted American cemeteries in France, desecrating graves and spray-painting ‘’Take your garbage out of our soil.’’ European politicians regularly downplay their ties to the United States. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is being forced out of his position prematurely in part for being ‘’too close’’ to President Bush. His likely successor, current Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, is attempting to distance himself from Blair’’s pro-American stances in his Parliamentary speeches.

Americans have occupied Germany for over sixty years. The initial occupation was meant to keep Germany from attacking its neighbors – something that it had done every generation on average from 1870 – 1939. However that occupation quickly morphed into a bulwark to protect Western Europe from the Communism that had spread after World War 2 and the fall of Nazi Germany.

According to Dr. Tim Kane at The Heritage Foundation, Germany is second only to Iraq in the number of American military personnel stationed on foreign soil. In 2005 65,000 American soldiers, sailors and airmen were stationed in Germany – with an equal amount shared between Korea and Japan. Given Germany’’s integration into the European Union and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, what is the justification for our continued presence in Germany?

As of 2005 386,000 American troops were deployed abroad, twenty-eight percent less than the yearly Cold War era average of 536,000. However fourteen nations around the world still hosted more than a thousand US military personnel in 2005 according to Dr. Kane’’s figures. If we are going to bring our troops home from Iraq, shouldn’‘t we also bring them home from Kosovo, Iceland, Spain and South Korea? To the loved ones of those deployed it doesn’‘t matter if they are in Austria or Australia, Zimbabwe or Zambia. Their lives are disrupted – their loved ones far away.

Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has called for the resumption of the Draft. While Congressman Rangel’’s intention is to make it more difficult for a president to go to war, he has justified the draft on foreign policy grounds. Appearing on CBS’’s Face the Nation, Rangel said, ‘’If we’‘re going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can’‘t do that without a draft.’’

We could do it without a draft if we placed our troops where they were most needed. We could double our force in Iraq overnight simply by taking them from Korea, Japan and Germany. To combat the Taliban in Afghanistan, we could nearly triple our force to 50,000 from the current 19,500 by redeploying those currently assigned to Turkey, Kosovo, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the UK and Iceland. Several of these nations field governments that are cool to the US presence in their countries to begin with. What strategic interest does our presence serve in these nations while our enemies regroup in Afghanistan?

America only recently became a global power. Prior to 1945 the United States existed in isolation, concerned with expanding and developing its resources between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Only the specter of Communism and the experience of fighting two world wars in the span of a single generation prevented America’’s natural isolationist streak to reassert itself.

The current anti-war stance of the Democrats risks tapping into the latent isolationism of Americans. When it comes to Iraq there is little separating the attitudes of many of the party’’s elite, like former president Jimmy Carter, from Harry Browne, former presidential candidate from the Libertarian Party. Although supposedly ideological opposite to the Democrats, the Libertarians have consistently maintained isolationist policies that are often promoted by the Republican Party to rally its conservative base. In its quest for power, the Democrats have instead taken up the Isolationist mantle, creating a unique political realignment of the American electorate.

By using the Iraq War as an issue to attain political power, the Democratic Party risks fanning isolationist flames it has unwittingly stoked over the past three years. Should the party succeed in ‘’redeploying’’ American forces in Iraq, it may find itself fighting a conflagration of Isolationism that questions American troop deployments worldwide – from Kosovo to Kuwait, Thailand to Turkey.

On Monday October 2, 2006 in pastoral Lancaster County Pennsylvania, a local milk truck driver entered a one room school house and within minutes turned it into a slaughterhouse. Explanations for that horrific event are beginning to appear in the media as people ask the simple question, ‘Why?’ While we yearn for the answer, it is important to recall what we learned from a tragedy of much greater scale that happened five years ago.

In the first days after September 11, 2001 the mass media withheld blame as Americans absorbed the worst attack in the continental United States since the Civil War. The hijackers of the planes had made no demands nor had al-Qaeda’s leadership immediately accepted responsibility for the attack. As late as January 2, 2002 no less an authority as South African President Nelson Mandela questioned whether al-Qaeda was to blame.

As the aftershocks of the event rippled through the national landscape, explanations for the attack that killed thousands of men, women and children slowly blossomed. Some blamed the attack on America’s ‘aggression against Islam,’ forgetting that America had backed the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and entered the Balkan War on the side of the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Others blamed ‘American Imperialism’, ignoring the fact that imperialism requires an empire which, Japan, South Korea and Western Europe would bristle at being considered part of. One commentator even blamed the attack on America’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, an odd statement considering the amount of pollution released into the atmosphere by the destruction of four fuel-laden jets, two skyscrapers, and three thousand human beings.

There are two common threads to these explanations. The first is that they reflect the commentator’s bias or select viewpoint. For example, the global warming explanation for 9-11 was proposed by an environmental activist supporting action against climate change. The attacks became a kind of Rorschach Test in which one saw the motive she or he wanted to see. Such attempts have everything to do with the mindset of the commentator and nothing whatsoever to do with the true motives of the attackers.

The second is that each explanation dehumanizes the perpetrators by turning them into animals, acting only in reaction to an outside stimulus and completely denying them the human quality of ‘free-will’. However, we know that the terrorists had the free-will to call off their mission by walking away, or by contacting authorities. Instead they exercised their free-will by choosing to kill as many people as they possibly could.

We see a similar process at work with the Amish school massacre. In nearby Philadelphia, a city in the midst of a wave of murders, gun control advocates have seized upon the shootings to support their agenda. A recent editorial cartoon showed members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) carrying Amish children on a platter to a sacrificial altar. Another non-Amish Lancaster resident blamed the crime in part on ‘the absurdly easy availability of guns,’ ignoring the fact that guns were part of Lancaster County’s culture for centuries, long before the truck driver set foot into the schoolhouse.

Even the killers themselves provide little insight into their motives. Charles Carl Roberts IV claimed in a suicide note to have been tormented by memories of molesting two of his relatives twenty years ago, events that both deny. He also blamed God for the death of his newborn daughter.

Nothing explains how Roberts connected these incidents with his actions. According to his suicide note and his relatives, he had nothing against the Amish and appears to have selected the venue for his outburst at random – or more likely because he knew he would be more successful in an unsecured Amish schoolhouse than at a well-patrolled inner city school. Still, we are left without answers. How many survivors of abuse do what he has done? How many parents have seen their own children buried before them yet not systematically executed children as revenge against God?

Members of a radical Baptist church see God’s hand in the slaughter, saying that the girls were killed ‘in punishment for Gov. Ed Rendell’s blasphemous sins.’ The governor’s crime? Backing a law that would ban protests at funerals for gays and fallen soldiers which the group views as God’s retribution for American laws protecting homosexuals. The radical group has made a name for itself by protesting at funerals carrying signs that say ‘God Bless IED’s’ and ‘Thank God for Dead Soldiers.’

In a sense these are all attempts by minds to make sense of the nonsensical. By providing motive to an attack, we feel better. We can take comfort in people having been killed for a reason, that the attack was some kind of message which we now must heed.
This reasoning can be extended to any event: a car accident (the teens were driving too fast) a homicide (the victim should never have dated her killer) or tragedy (the astronauts on the shuttle Columbia knew the risks).

This rationalizing is our attempt at gaining control of the situation. However it is a false sense of control. We can put locks on school doors and increase airport security, but we cannot stop all acts of evil intent.

We also must learn that for some acts there simply cannot be any explanations or excuses. There can be no justification for gunning down children just as there is none that can justify slamming airliners into buildings. Excuses should never exempt acts, nor should they ever do so simply to allow us to feel pain. The children of Lancaster County and the 3000 who died on September 11, 2001 deserve more from us than a quick end to our grief.

Published by the Washington Times on October 1, 2006

On March 31, 2005, Terri Schiavo died after her husband Michael Schiavo ordered her deprived her of food and water for 13 days, ending a bitter fight between her family and her husband that had divided America and reached the highest levels of our government.
As writer for the online journal or “blog,” The Razor, in 2003 I joined an effort called “Blogs for Terri” to help her parents Mary and Robert Schindler stop Michael from ending Terri’s life. For nearly two years I championed Terri’s right to life on the Internet, in letters to the editor and calls to politicians and journalists.
As an atheist and amateur scientist, I found myself in the company of the religious who supported the Schindlers for reasons of faith as they tried to save what they believed to be their daughter’s life. My lack of religious convictions, including a belief in an afterlife, did not deter me from what I still believe was an honorable endeavor that, in the end, became yet another grave injustice in the world.
Those of us who supported the Schindlers were stunned at the vehemence of Michael Schiavo’s supporters. Fellow writer and blogger Dean Esmay, who shares my views on this matter and joined “Blogs for Terri,” received abusive comments and e-mails calling him a coward for not disavowing the Schindler family after Terri’s autopsy report was released—a report some believed proved undeniably that Terri was brain-dead. Mr. Esmay writes that Michael Schiavo’s supporters felt vindicated by the report, and also felt it necessary that “Terry’s parents, siblings, and childhood friends needed to be denounced as 100 percent wrong, and Michael Schiavo had to be lauded as 100 percent right, period. To suggest anything to the contrary was simply evil. Or, at best, boneheaded: anti-science, anti-rational, anti-humanist, anti-everything-good.”
As a political commentator, I am used to being pilloried for my stances on controversial issues. However, the vicious attacks leveled at those of us who questioned the medical opinions on the Schiavo case, or Michael Schiavo’s motives, continue to puzzle me.
It is very likely Terri was brain-dead. If so, then what happened to her body would not matter to her. Therefore it didn’t matter if it was buried under ground, cremated (as indeed it was) or fed and cared for in a nursing home.
On the other hand, her parents believed she was not brain-dead but brain-damaged. That is an important distinction, since we as a society do not sanction the murder of “defectives” who fail to meet an arbitrary standard such as “quality of life.” Her family believed Terri’s rehabilitation was possible and that she could someday regain consciousness.
Given the finality of death, and the doubts raised by experts on both sides of the issue, I recognized there was sufficient uncertainty about her condition to warrant keeping her body alive.
The medical establishment, however, firmly sided with Michael Schiavo and his belief that Terri was beyond rehabilitation. So did the majority of Americans, according to public opinion polls taken at the time. The courts agreed, and Michael Schiavo was allowed to mercy-kill his wife.
A year and a half later, the medical establishment is again in the news—this time unable to explain why a commonly prescribed sleep medication, Zolpidem, known in the United States by the brand-name “Ambien,” has successfully awakened patients suffering similar persistent vegetative states as Terri Schiavo, according to a Sept. 12 article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. The Guardian reports a family doctor in South Africa made the discovery when Louis Viljoen had laid in a deep coma for 5 years after being hit by a truck. He had begun involuntarily twitching, causing him to tear at the bed sheets, so a nurse suggested his doctor prescribe the young man a sedative. The doctor prescribed Zolpidem.
Twenty-five minutes later, after his mother had given him the crushed pill mixed in water, Louis opened his eyes and said “Hello, Mummy.” Today, seven years later, Louis Viljoen still takes a daily dose of Zolpidem and is recovering.
Doctors have no idea how the drug works, or why. All they know is that areas that appeared dead on brain scans show activity once the drug is taken. While most of the patients given the drug continue to display signs of brain damage, they are now able to communicate and move, suggesting further rehabilitation is possible.
It is quite likely Terri Schiavo would not have responded to Zolpidem given the 15 years she had been in her persistent vegetative state. However, there is a chance she would have—especially had the drug been administered earlier in her treatment. Unfortunately for Terri and her family, we will never know for sure.
For those of us who fought for Terri, the successful treatment of those in a persistent vegetative state using Zolpidem can only be compared to the discovery of evidence exonerating an executed man.
This revolutionary treatment should give pause to the majority of Americans who sanctioned the mercy-killing of Terri by her husband—aided and abetted by a legal system that refused to give an innocent woman the same thing it gives accused murderers: the benefit of the doubt.

SCOTT KIRWIN
A freelance writer who blogs at The Razor (therazor.org) and lives in Delaware.

The following is a revised version of this post.—-
Research United Nations Security Council Resolutions and you will inevitably discover the work of Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of San Francisco, and Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project. During the run up to the American invasion of Iraq, Zunes published “United Nations Security Council Resolutions Currently Being Violated by Countries Other than Iraq” which attacks the Bush Administration argument that Iraq’s failure to comply with UN resolutions necessitated military action.

The work immediately attacks Israel, beginning with Resolution 252 which calls upon Israel to cede control of Jerusalem, a city it gained complete control over in the Six Day War of 1967. The list ends with the 2002 Resolution 1435 calling for Israel to leave positions around the West Bank town of Ramallah. Its conclusion is that Israel stands in violation of more UN Security Council Resolutions than any other nation, and that the United States – Israel’s primary foreign backer – cannot remove Saddam Hussein from power using sanctions violations as a casus belli.

However evidence supporting his analysis is as hard to find. Zunes fails to mention that Israel has been party to roughly 270 UN Security Council Resolutions to begin with – about 16% of all resolutions made by institution. Nor does he tell the methodology used to determine whether a state is in compliance with a UN Security Council Resolution, merely stating “I did not include those resolutions which simply criticised a particular action by a government. Nor did I include resolutions where the language is ambiguous enough to make assertions of non-compliance debatable.”

Zunes’s bias begins to creep in when he states, “Since the early 1970s, the United States has used its veto power nearly fifty times, more than all other permanent members during that same period combined.” This is a bit disingenuous, given the fact that since its founding, the Soviet Union and its successor state Russia hold the record for most solo vetoes – 119 compared to 58 by the US acting alone. By compressing date ranges one can use statistics to make any point. What point exactly is Zunes is trying to make?

It’s all America’s Fault

In his essay “U.S. Government Must Take a Consistent Stance Against Terrorism,” Zunes compares a terror attack on the Shiite city of Najaf in Iraq to the assassination of a Hesbollah cleric in 1985 masterminded, he alleges, by the United States: “While no existing government is believed to have been behind the An-Najaf bombing, the Beirut bombing was a classic case of state-sponsored terrorism: a plot organized by the intelligence services of a foreign power. That foreign power was the United States.” He then goes on to criticize the American refusal to extradite to Venezuela four alleged bombers of a Cuban plane in 1976. As for the War in Iraq, Zunes states that America propped up Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, and as a result has no moral authority to remove him from power simply because it was in America’s interests to do so.

Like your garden variety conspiracy buff, Zune sees American power behind every troublespot in the world. Somalia? The prolific Stephen Zunes pens “The Long and Hidden History of the U.S in Somalia”. East Timor? “For example, in 1975, after Morocco’s invasion of Western Sahara and Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, the Security Council passed a series of resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal. However, then-US ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan bragged that “the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” East Timor finally won its freedom in 1999.” Global Warming? Our Fateful Choice: Global Leader or Global Cop.

Anything bad that happens in the world – rest assured that there is some nameless group or corporation of American origin behind it. However he refuses to name names or provide specific examples of these groups, relying instead upon meaningless cliches of American “policymakers”, “elites”, “wealthy class”, and “corporations” in the assumption that proof is not needed and that the reader knows instictively who he is talking about. After all, he is a tenured professor at University of San Francisco – the backup school for Bay Area Catholic kids who didn’t have the grades for Berkeley or UCSF and whose parents didn’t want them partying away their education at San Franscisco State.

Where he differs from Chomsky and much of the rest of the anti-Semitic Left is his viewing of the Jews and Israel as puppets of America, “mercenaries of America to fight the wars of what the ruling persons in America consider to be American interests.” In fact, take any one of his papers, swap the terms Israel for America, Jews or Jewish for American, and the piece reads like your run of the mill anti-Semitic diatribe.

Zunes believes that no country has done more to thwart the authority of the United Nations Security Council and its enforcement mechanisms than has the United States. While the UN Security Council had a strong case to insist that Iraq be more fully compliant with its resolutions, Zunes argues that the United States is the last country to claim the right to enforce alleged non-compliance militarily. Not only does the UN Charter and UN Security Council resolution 1441 explicitly recognise that only the Security Council as a whole – and not any single member – has the legal authority to enforce such resolutions militarily, but the United States is the last member of the world body to claim any kind of moral authority to do so.

By Zunes logic, no country can be held accountable to the UN because some have gotten away it. This is akin to a serial killer saying that he should be freed because Scotland Yard never caught Jack the Ripper.

While criticizing the number of American vetoes of UN Security Council Resolutions, Zunes does not address the number of resolutions passed by that body, meaning that the United States stood in agreement with the permanent members of the council other than to criticize Israel directly (and by association, the United States indirectly) for not implementing them completely. Of the 1,427 resolutions passed between 1970 and August 11, 2006, Israel has been party to 195 of them or roughly 14% of them. While that may sound like a lot, as a percentage it is actually less than the 16% of resolutions it was party to prior to 1970.

Zunes’s “logic” leaves one feeling like one has just been rolling around in the intellectual mud with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other great conspiracy fictions. Reading him one is reminded of the conservative intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s who were seduced by the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. In fact, little beyond being born 70 years too late separates him from his intellectual peers of that bygone era.

Worse, his logic dehumanizes those he defends. In Zunes world, the Palestinians, Jews, Hezballah, North Koreans – everyone – are merely automatons, reacting to Americans in predictable ways. All their actions are instigated by Americans; they have no will to act on their own. Only Americans are born with the human quality of free will.

Unfortunately for the world according to Zunes, Americans use this free will to choose greed and avarice. In a sense, by imbueing these qualities to Americans alone, Zunes in effect advocates a type of “super nationalism,” where the only nation that matters is America, and like the warriors of old that ate the hearts of their enemies to gain their bravery, its only by overcoming and destroying America that the rest of the world becomes human. This problem is not Zunes alone; it is inherent to the “politics of victimization” where suffering is the only scale that matters while true power remains in the hands of the victimizer.

Zunes advocates this destruction of the United States by using a common tactic of the Left: Denying the right of the United States to pursue its goals, while allowing other nations to pursue their own goals. Zunes criticizes any American action when it pursues a goal to its benefit, for example by denying the United States the right to pursue a strategic victory over Syria or prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. At the same time, Zunes argues that Iran has the right to nuclear weapons because its in its own interest.

Leftists like Zunes are fundamentally terrified by the hegemony America represents, and seek to bind it with Lilliputian threads. It must be frustrating for Zunes, who is so widely quoted in the Leftist media to see his threads ignored as the United States moves forward and follows its strategic interests. Luckily for Zunes, and the Leftists like Chomsky who are his intellectual peers, the nation sees men like him as evidence that the United States is not the nation they believe it is – for the nation that Chomsky and Zunes claim exists would have executed both men long ago and burned their writings. Instead, both are esconced in Academia where they can safely promulgate their vision of a world terrorized by the United States.

Submitted for publication on 8/23/2006. Unpublished.———————————————————————————Conventional Wisdom or Mob Stupidity?
The news of an arrest in the Jon Benet Ramsey murder investigation came as a surprise to America on August 18, 2006. A case that shocked a nation nearly ten years before, and filled newspapers, magazines and tabloids for years before becoming cold began to heat up in countless cell phone calls, text messages, emails and water cooler conversations.

The alleged killer wasn’t a member Jon Benet’s own family afterall, contrary to conventional wisdom; it was a stranger, John Mark Karr.

This isn’t the first time conventional wisdom has proven wrong. On July 27, 1996 at the Summer Olympics held in Atlanta Georgia, security guard Richard Jewell noticed an unattended green knapsack in Centennial Park during late-night Olympic festivities. He immediately alerted the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and helped clear the area around the knapsack before it exploded – killing a woman and contributing to a cameraman’s fatal heart attack.

At first Jewell was praised as a hero, but within days fell under suspicion after the Atlanta News Journal reported that the FBI considered him a suspect. Soon, in the absence of others Jewell became the prime suspect in the bombing.

He was pilloried in the media. Comedian Jay Leno referred to him as the ‘Una-doofus.’ Two people wounded in the bombing sued him, and the FBI searched his mother’s home, where he lived. The FBI never found any evidence linking him to the crime, and Jewell was eventually exonerated by Attorney General Janet Reno, who apologized for the leak to the press that had lead to his public humiliation.

Although Richard Jewell fought hard to clear his name, his was the only name publicly associated to the crime – until Eric Rudolph was arrested in 2003 and later confessed to the bombing. For seven years Jewell was forced to defend his name, as the public and the media sought to link him to a crime he never committed.

In both cases circumstances fed suspicions. People felt uncomfortable with the glamour photographs taken of Jean Benet as a beauty queen, which many felt objectified a little girl inappropriately. Richard Jewell was a security guard who lived with his mother at the age of 33. Being a security guard isn’t the most highly regarded job in our society, and the fact that Jewell was living with his mother instead of being on his own at his age made him appear odd.

These suspicions arise from a conflict between reality and our sense of propriety. Parents are usually the harshest critics of other parents, and enough children return to live with their parents to spawn a term, ‘boomerang generation’, and a movie, ‘Failure to Launch.’ Yet when no immediate suspects appeared in both cases, the public used these oddities to create suspects from those closest at hand: The Benet family and Richard Jewell.

Even the most ordinary person leading a normal, uneventful life can appear guilty of the most heinous crime under the lens of suspicion generated by extraordinary circumstances. At such a time two human tendencies emerge: the need to uncover answers and the tendency to see patterns in data where none exist.

The murder of a child is a particularly heinous act – one that strikes an emotional chord in people that other crimes do not. Such an act demands immediate answers and the discovery of the killer. It generates an emotional response that clashes with the rule of law, and the slow and systematic accumulation of evidence by the homicide investigators.

This emotional impetus drives us to see patterns in the limited evidence we are privy too, which has usually been filtered through biased sources in the media and in the ‘conventional wisdom’ we pick up through our own social networks of family, friends and co-workers. As the facts become outweighed by the conjectures and fabrications found in ‘conventional wisdom’ the crime itself becomes a kind of ink blot, or Rorschach Test, where we spin our own explanation for the crime based upon opinions, faulty data and outright fabrications until we see what we expect to see – and lose sight of the truth.

This is bad news for those like the Ramsey family and Richard Jewell who become mired in our fabrications like flies trapped in amber. Richard Jewell refused to accept his fate and eventually saw himself publicly vindicated; Patsy Ramsey was not so fortunate, dying from ovarian cancer before seeing herself proven innocent in the eyes of the public.

Patsy’s fate is not unusual for victims of ‘conventional wisdom’. Is it possible that the term is just a euphemism for the chants of the lynch mob? After all, in the absence of a conviction in the criminal courts weren’t Patsy Ramsey and Richard Jewell convicted in the court of public opinion and hung? Isn’t this the same type of ‘conviction’ that resulted in innocent people being lynched or accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake in bygone eras? Perhaps these eras aren’t so ‘bygone’ after all, just that the noose is now made from tabloids and newspaper, and the fires from gossip TV shows and talk radio.

Can talk be as deadly as a noose or a pyre? Ask the Ramsey family, Richard Jewell – or perhaps even OJ Simpson.

Published August 20, 2006 – as Perspective, in Connecticut’s The Day——————————————Recently Reuters News Service has come under scrutiny for passing off doctored photographs to newspapers. On Aug. 6, Reuters fired Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj and withdrew 920 of his photographs from their archives. Since then other news outlets including The New York Times, Associated Press and AFP have been criticized for running photographs that have been posed, manipulated, or misleadingly captioned.

The problem that these news outlets face is that, as photojournalist Eddie Adams once said, photographs lie. Adams took one of the most famous photographs ever, of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong prisoner Nguyen Van Lem on a Saigon street during the Tet Offensive of 1968. In Adams’s photograph we see a disheveled handcuffed man at his moment of death. We do not see the events that led to his execution, his gunning down the wives and children of South Vietnamese officers, including that of a subordinate and close friend of General Loan.

Adams himself regretted the power of this photograph and later apologized to the general and his family for the damage it did to the general’s reputation. Adams stated, “’Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.’

Photographs are not created in randomly or in a vacuum. They result from a series of conscious and unconscious decisions made by the photographer. A photojournalist begins with an assignment, a perceived need for a photograph of a certain type. The type of photograph and photographer will vary according to the assignment; we don’t expect photojournalists to travel to Iraq to shoot flowers just as we don’t send war photographers to cover flower shows. Once a photographer or his editor selects the assignment, the photographer must decide the subject matter that best fulfills it.

After the photographer finds that subject matter, she must decide on composition: What do I include in my photograph? What do I leave out? Where is the best light? Do I want to highlight my subject with a shallow focus, or do I want to include other elements using a wider lens? He will usually take several photographs of a subject, each differing slightly from the others to be assured that one of the photographs will meet the assignment’s requirements.

The mere presence of a photographer can alter a scene. In a photograph taken by newsman Arthur Weegee in 1940, a woman cheerfully smiles for the camera as she kneels behind paramedics trying to resuscitate a drowning victim on a Coney Island beach. Her expression changes a photograph from a scene of human suffering to a haunting, bizarre one. During the first Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian youths were careful to cultivate their image as Davids fighting against Israeli Goliaths, throwing pebbles at Israeli soldiers and settlers while foreign news crews were watching them, and switching to heavier and larger stones once they left.

The selection process continues on the computer after photos are taken. A photographer or his assistant is faced with more decisions. Are there elements that need to be highlighted or de-emphasized? Is more cropping needed? Cropping, cutting elements out of a scene, changes the context of a photograph. Imagine Adams’ photograph missing either one of the subjects, and it completely loses its power, becoming a picture of a soldier firing a pistol or of a man cringing. Cropping is perhaps the most powerful tool a photographer uses to determine a photograph’s context both during composition as well as after it is taken.

Once the photographer is satisfied with her work, she passes it on to her editor. The editor must then evaluate it based on different criteria from those used by the photographer. What size photo do I need to fill this space? Which photo goes with the written copy the best? Usually an editor must select one or two photos from several hundred photos taken by different photographers, a task that can be just as daunting and biased as the decisions made by photographers themselves.

Is it any wonder that at the end of this chain of conscious and unconscious decisions we have what Adams himself described as lies and half-truths?

While technology has made it even easier for photographs to be created, manipulated, and enhanced for editorial purposes, our perception has not kept pace with these changes. We may consciously recognize that the image of a model has been manipulated to remove blemishes, wrinkles, enhance skin tones and even elongate legs and slim down waists, yet we still unconsciously cling to the belief that what we are seeing is real. She looks perfect; therefore she must really be perfect.

Since the Reuters scandal broke, manipulated images are appearing at a maddening pace, threatening the public trust of news agencies and publications around the world. However it is impossible to remove all bias and prejudice from the process of making and presenting a photograph. While much will be made by those who have been hurt by the photographs produced by these outlets, the problem will remain that the adage “seeing is believing’” holds us in its thrall.

Adams said ‘The General killed the Vietcong; I killed the general with my camera.” His photograph rallied the anti-war movement in the U.S. as it became the symbol of an atrocity, the execution of an innocent civilian by a corrupt regime supported by the United States. Adams himself fought against this interpretation of his photograph, saying that General Loan “was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.”

Photojournalists must accept responsibility for their work and consider what messages they carry and how they will be used. They must admit that like Adams’s photograph, theirs can kill. At the same time we must free ourselves from our deeply held trust in the medium by recognizing that photographs are not a shortcut to Truth, and contrary to our perception, often lie.

Scott Kirwin is a photographer and writer who lives in Philadelphia.

Face Up on the Guillotine – The Revolution of the Democratic Party

Back in my college days I took a class on revolution taught by an Israeli Marxist. Even though my politics have shifted rightward from where they were back then, I haven’t forgotten what I learned and recognize it as being one of the better classes I had while pursuing a political science degree.

One of the important things I learned was that it is the nature of revolutions to turn on themselves. In the end, the revolutionaries often – but not always – turn into what they revolted against in the first place. The rebels become the regime, and during that process they inevitably turn on their leadership. The death warrant of Danton is signed by Robespierre who in turn is sent to the guillotine, face up, by those he once led.

It is becoming clear that the Democratic Party is in the final stages of a revolution begun three years ago by the so-called “Deaniacs,” liberal supporters organized using the Internet. Howard Dean’s presidential candidacy was energized by liberal bloggers, who pushed the grass roots campaign resulting in a juggernaut behind the former Vermont governor. Don’t forget that a month before the 2004 New Hampshire Primary, Al Gore, Bill Bradley, Barbara Boxer and Jimmy Carter all came out in support of Howard Dean’s candidacy and recommended that other candidates unite behind him to focus attacks on President George Bush.

However, the existing Democratic powerbrokers including the Clintons’ man Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), stymied this revolt temporarily by engineering John Kerry’s candidacy. The day after Kerry won New Hampshire, journalist Carl Cameron announced “Dean may be done.” He was – in one of the most spectacular flameouts in modern political history.

The day after Kerry lost the ‘04 election, Howard Dean announced he would make a bid for the DNC chair. An AP article at the time quoted him as saying the Democratic Party had to “establish a separate and unique identity from Republicans”. To that end the revolutionaries empowered by Dean took power by replacing McAuliffe in Feb 05, and have since pushed the national party leftward under his leadership.

We are currently in a stage of ideological “purification” – think Mao’s Cultural Revolution here – where the rank and file all carry their little red books, don red scarves, and rat-out their parents as “counter-revolutionaries”. The most visible attacks are centered on Joe Lieberman, who has suffered some of the nastiest attacks I’ve ever heard of let alone seen in a democracy. Some on the Left have referred to him as “Rape Gurney Joe,” implying that Lieberman opposes emergency contraception for rape victims (he doesn’t).

Pretty monstrous stuff – beyond the pale of even the most enthusiastic Karl Rove acolyte. Now other Democratic politicians are running scared, afraid to find themselves in the cross-hairs of the “purification cadres”. Others inevitably will find themselves in that position before the ‘06 election in 3 months’ time. 3 months is plenty of time for careers to be shortened, reputations ruined, and political capital spent.

But the cycle of revolution will not stop. Eventually the moderates who survived the purges eventually retake power in the stage known as Thermidorian Reaction (Marx was big on stages) after the revolutionaries weaken their cause by destroying themselves.

When will that happen?

There are two likely points:
1. The November ‘06 Election – The Deaniacs demand an oath of fealty to their belief that the Iraq War is a failure – just at a time when the war is petering out and the Iraqis are taking care of themselves. Should the war fail to be the defining issue in November, their “ideological” candidates will be trounced at the polls. This will force Dean to quit the DNC and leave the Deaniacs stunned, disheartened, and eventually apathetic – allowing the few remaining moderates (those who haven’t been purged and become Republicans) to take back the party.

2. The November ‘08 Election – Should the Deaniacs survive the midterm elections, they will be even more energized and place a McGovern-type presidential candidate at the head of their party. While Americans may not like the Iraq War, the odds are that they will like a Left-wing ideological candidate even less. Expect a landslide victory for the Republicans along the lines of ‘72 or ‘80.

Americans aren’t very ideological. Most are too busy to be energized by any one particular issue. Given the conditions of a growing economy and a war that is successful in its aims in Iraq, as shown by the failure of the anti-war movement to gain traction during the past 5 years, then it is likely that the revolutionaries will fail; it’s only a question of when.

Will Howard Dean find himself face up on the guillotine like Robespierre? Only time will tell.

Published as Guest Commentary in the Delaware State News on August 1, 2006.—————————You don’t have to be a Jew to support Israel. It’s a democracy like the United States. It has been a staunch American ally in an unfriendly neighborhood. It has strong political, social and religious ties to the United States.

However it’s more personal for me. One of my earliest memories is the destruction of airplanes sitting on the tarmac in Jordan by terrorists on September 12, 1970. I was 3 years old.

At the time my sister was a flight attendant for TWA. One of the planes hijacked happened to be a TWA flight, and my father – a physically imposing man – was driven to hand-wringing and pacing until he learned that my sister was safe.

Two years later I sat mesmerized in front of the TV watching the hostage drama in Munich unfold. There 11 Israeli athletes were held for 18 hours by Palestinian terrorists before being massacred.

The Arab-Israeli conflict became a part of my daily life when the Arab oil producing states decide to punish the Western nations for supporting Israel. Gasoline doubled overnight from 59 cents a gallon, straining my parent’s budget and ushering in a period of high inflation. Terms like ‘Misery Index’ entered my vocabulary as I watched the nightly news during dinner at home.

As I grew into adolescence I became fascinated by world history. I saw unforgettable photos of the Holocaust and read the stories of unimaginable horror in the concentration camps. I learned how Israel was founded from the ashes of the crematoria.

Since its founding, Israel has been cast into the historical role of the Jewish people: the world’s scapegoat. For decades, the Israelis have been portrayed as greedy – taking away land from the Arabs. People forgot that Israel accepted a two-state solution proposed by the United Nations at its creation. It was the neighboring Arab states, and a large proportion of the Arab population of the prospective Arab state of Palestine who refused to accept the existence of Israel. This continues to be the stand of the Palestinian Authority under the elected leadership of Hamas – a terror group explicitly founded to wipe out Israel and enslave the Jews living there.

The terror attacks continued. As the Israelis suffered, the world convinced itself that the only solution was for Israel to trade the land it had won in battle for peace.

In 2000, Israel itself believed this. It pulled out of south Lebanon. With American guarantees and assurances to both sides it offered the Palestinians all the land it had gained in the prior 33 years. But the Palestinians refused the offer.

Soon, families sitting to dinner were murdered by Hamas terrorists. Toddlers eating pizza at a Jerusalem fast food restaurant were slaughtered by Islamic Jihad attackers, their families paid by Saddam Hussein, their faces painted on walls and names bestowed on streets in Gaza and the West Bank.

Soon after this attack, America experienced 9-11 and shared in the misery of being under attack. On 9-11 the World prided itself by saying everyone had become Americans. In retrospect the truth is that on 9-11 we became Israelis.

Still, Israeli clung to the myth that by pulling out of the lands it had captured in battle, it could buy peace. It pulled out of Gaza, dragging Jewish nationalists screaming at the soldiers who carted them away. Gaza was emptied of Jews, and the first thing the Palestinians did upon taking control was to set fire to the evacuated Jewish synagogues, celebrating and dancing as the temples burned to the ground.

Now Israel finds itself at open war with its enemies. Rockets packed with ball bearings fall upon its northern cities. Hamas attacks continue in the south. Once again the Europeans and the United Nations return to their anti-Semitic roots and try to hold Israel down so that its enemies can attack her without fear of being struck back.

But as an American, I see the truth. It may be possible to talk your way out of a mugging, but you can’t negotiate with a killer. Israel has tried negotiating, has tried playing by the rules imposed on it by the United Nations and the Europeans – and what has it gotten? Dead Israelis.

I stand for Israel because I see it as a desert that has bloomed through the hard work and brilliance of its people. I see a people that has suffered unjustly for thousands of years continue to suffer today. I see a people who refuse to accept the status of victims. I see a people who value peace but aren’t willing to trade it for annihilation.

I stand for Israel because Israel is a nation where Arabs, Jews and Christians live together in peace – next to states where religions and their books are banned outright. I stand for Israel because it values everyone. It holds gay pride rallies next to nations where gays are hung from forklifts. It treats women as equals in all ways, while the women in nearby nations can’t even leave their homes alone.

I stand for Israel because it is at the frontier of civilization, an outpost of honesty in a region mired in corruption. I stand for Israel because in the fight to preserve the light from the darkness, we are all Israelis.

Like many men I hate shopping. That high-pitched whine you hear outside your window on Saturday afternoon might just be us passing by as I’m dragged whining to the mall by the Wife.

But strangely enough I enjoy shopping online. In fact I enjoy buying anything online including the same stuff I buy at department stores and shopping malls. The difference between the two experiences is that one is a chore, the other is a sport.

And like snowboarding, skateboarding and parachuting it’s an extreme sport called “Extreme Online Shopping” by those who partake in it. While not as physically demanding as most sports, it does take practice, concentration and skill developed over a long period of time.

The goal of extreme online shopping is to buy what you need while paying as little as possible using the resources available on the Internet. You start by visiting a website such as Fatwallet.com.

Fatwallet.com is an information clearinghouse for extreme shoppers. Here you will find the latest deals on everything from detergent to digital cameras and the strategies involved in getting the best deal. These strategies include using “pricematching” (where stores promise to match the price of an item sold at a competitor), rebates, coupon codes, and other tactics to score the best deal possible. With the proper strategy, people have been known to nab items FAR – “Free After Rebate” – or even better, make money on the purchase of the item. Of course YMMV – “Your Mileage May Vary” – meaning that some store managers or phone customer service reps may not agree to the strategy and thereby kill your deal.

Take for example the recent sale on a Samsung laser printer. An office supply store listed the printer at $129.99 with an $80 rebate, bringing the price down to $49.99 plus tax. While $50 for a laser printer may strike many as a pretty hot deal, most extreme shoppers viewed it as lukewarm at best.

Some shoppers noticed that a competitor had the same model printer on sale at $79 without a rebate. They took the store ad to the office supply store and demanded the store match the competitor’s price. While many store managers refused to pricematch the item (the YMMV part of the deal), others did – matching the difference by the stated policy of 110%. After the pricematch and rebate, the extreme shoppers got a laser printer for the price of sales tax with $8 left over. That made it a pretty toasty deal.

As you would expect, extreme shopping is bad for business. In a 2004 Wall Street Journal article Brad Anderson, chief executive officer of Best Buy Co, labeled such extreme shoppers as “devils” and developed strategies to discourage such shoppers from shopping at BestBuy. Other stores have tightened up their pricematching policies, for example including rebates in their calculations or refusing to pricematch stores that they do not consider direct competitors.

In the example of the laser printer, the office supply store’s corporate office began to reject the rebates of those who successfully pricematched at the stores. While some had received confirmation that their rebates were accepted, it was unclear whether everyone who jumped on the deal would receive the rebate. To make matters more confusing, an advanced copy of a BestBuy’s 7/31/06 – 8/5/06 ad circulated showing that the price of the printer would be $59. Since this was after the rebate had expired but within the 14 day low price guarantee of the office supply chain, extreme shoppers then figured out a new approach. The potential payoff? A free laser printer plus $27 before tax. But as a poster on the site pointed out, this was a “big YMMV” and it wasn’t clear how successful this plan would ultimately be.

For many that mileage has already run out. Some extreme shoppers have stopped publicizing their finds or strategies to prevent others from abusing them. Divisions have appeared between those who enjoy the hunt for a good bargain, and small merchants who use this knowledge to buy as much of an item as they can in order to sell it for a profit, usually on eBay. As one FatWallet poster, “rctay”, complained “(Fatwallet) is a victim of its success. Unless you happen on a deal in the first few minutes it will probably be dead…There are so many resellers grabbing large volumes also. The sellers are adapting to bargain sites also…”

In the end the merchants must in order to survive, and extreme shopping will go the way of hunting bison and shooting passenger pigeons from trains. But in the meantime a bit of extreme shopping may be just what your pocketbook – and your mind – needs to beat the summer heat.

The hunting down and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi a world away has brought the spotlight onto Delaware through the comments of Green Party candidate Michael Berg. Berg, whose son Nicholas is believed to have been beheaded by Zarqawi himself, has been quoted by publications around the world as saying President Bush “is more of a terrorist than Zarqawi.” “Zarqawi felt my son’s breath on his hand as held the knife against his throat. Zarqawi had to look in his eyes when he did it,” Berg is quoted as saying in an AP wire story. “George Bush sits there glassy-eyed in his office with pieces of paper and condemns people to death. That to me is a real terrorist.”

In Berg’s world, there is no difference between Zarqawi and Bush. However his characterization shows an ignorance of both men, and is unfair to the President regardless of your support or opposition to the war in Iraq.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi spent his entire life murdering people in cold blood, and as the head of al Qaeda in Iraq sought through the murder of civilians to sow fear and terror in order to achieve power. The goal of al-Qaeda in Iraq was to ignite a civil war in which one religious group would systematically wipe out another.

His group is implicated in the Feb 22 attack on a Shiite shrine that nearly tipped Iraq into chaos. On November 9, 2005 he claimed responsibility for a triple homicide bombing in Amman Jordan that killed 60 Sunnis. On May 7, 2005 two cars filled with explosives ploughed into a US military convoy killing 20 Iraqis. On February 28, 2005 a bomber under his command killed 125 Iraqis – mostly Shiites in the city of Hillah. 205 Muslims dead. How many Americans did he kill during that same time period? Just two – in the attack on the convoy.

Americans, blinded by the drumbeat of the characterization of the Iraqi conflict as Vietnam by many on the political Left, have failed to see the reality that the conflict is not Iraqi against American: it is Sunni against Shi’a, Shi’a on Shi’a, tribe against tribe – and Extremist vs Secular – all occurring with Americans in the middle trying to keep the sides from killing each other. To that end, the conflict is more like the efforts during the 1990s to stop the genocide in the Balkans than it is Vietnam. Zarqawi was never a great military leader or strategist like Ho Chi Minh. In one of his last videos he is shown needing help handling a machine gun. Instead, he is more like Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy – a psycho killer elevated by the politics of the region to the level of “holy warrior.”

Zarqawi called for jihad not only against Americans and Jews, but against Shiite Muslims the world over. His last statement, which some military analysts on the website StrategyPage predicted would lead to his “martyrdom” by elements within al-Qaeda, was a rambling screed calling for the destruction of Shiites in Iran and in Lebanon. No one in the region is sad to see him go – including al-Qaeda which is celebrating his death on jihadi websites on the Internet.

Only Michael Berg is saddened. His moral equivalence between a psychokiller and a president, a man who has used every power he had to kill indiscriminately and another who has the power to destroy the world but not used it – is an insult to those of all religious faiths who strive to improve the world. His belief shows a nihilistic disregard for the difference between saints and sinners, between Mother Theresas and Hitlers, throughout history and our needs to champion the former while protecting ourselves from the latter.