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getting ready for tomorrow
Zoe and I are going down to Tacoma tomorrow to see her Mom at Western Sate Hospital. She is a long term resident in the dementia/Alzheimer's ward. We always bring down a dinner of her favorite dishes. I have the squash souffle in the oven now. I will finish cooking the rest tomorrow.
I finished loading software on my new Dell Mini 9. I've loaded Photoshop CS2, Dreamweaver MX, Cubase LE 4, Open Office, and assorted smaller programs. The Little Dell has a 16 GB hardrive and I still have over 8 GB left plus another 8 GB on an SD card in the built-in SD card slot. I won't be storing much data on this machine. It's connected to my Big Dell desktop via a wireless network so I keep my data files on the Big Dell. The main usablilty problems are more my getting used to a laptop trackpad than the small size. The small size is a real plus in carrying it around! I really like it.
While I will be using the Little Dell for a lot of things (more than I originally thought), the primary purpose was to be able to print on my HP B9180. I bought it used last May and it's been sitting in myt basement waiting to be hooked up to a computer. Last night I started setting it up to find that the print heads were clogged from sitting. This did not make me happy. If it was an Epson I would be really be unhappy but the HP has removable and replacable heads so the worst case situation would be needing to buy new printheads. I took the printheads out and cleaned them and ran numerous cleaning cycles and 3 of the 4 heads are fine now and the last one is close. I will try some more cleaning tonight. So close!
untethered
I've gone over to the small side. Yesterday's and today's posts have been brought to you from a Dell Mini 9, like the one in the picture. (Disclosure: that's not my lap.)
Dell Mini 9
It's a teeny sucker with a 9" screen and a smaller than standard keyboard. I got mine with 1GB ram and a 16GB flash hard drive. I primarily wanted it to load my photos on for printing on my printer in the basement but this little sucker does more than that. It's billed as a Netbook for internet surfing but it runs Photoshop and Dreamweaver just fine. I wouldn't want this as a primary computer but it makes a great second computer to my desktop. And it's so small and light weight. Very portable! I have a wireless router hooked to my desktop so I can share files, DVD drives (this doesn't have an internal DVD or CD drive), and printer. Cool!
mccain
Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.
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At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.
McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.
There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam - call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."
On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.
"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."
"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.
"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.
"Why? Where are you going to, John?"
"Oh, I'm going to Rio."
"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"
McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.
"I got a better chance of getting laid."
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christmas cards
Cara Scissoria Greeting Cards
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health care
Health Care Destruction
by Paul Krugman
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Sarah Palin ended her debate performance last Thursday with a slightly garbled quote from Ronald Reagan about how, if we aren’t vigilant, we’ll end up “telling our children and our children’s children” about the days when America was free. It was a revealing choice.
You see, when Reagan said this he wasn’t warning about Soviet aggression. He was warning against legislation that would guarantee health care for older Americans — the program now known as Medicare.
Conservative Republicans still hate Medicare, and would kill it if they could — in fact, they tried to gut it during the Clinton years (that’s what the 1995 shutdown of the government was all about). But so far they haven’t been able to pull that off.
So John McCain wants to destroy the health insurance of nonelderly Americans instead.
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vote early, vote often
I have my vote in. I think it was the 2006 election that Island County dropped the punch cards. I showed up to vote and was handed a paper ballot. There was one electronic voting maching but no one wanted to use it. We just colored in the boxes. Since then Island County has gone 100% absentee ballot. No last minute rush.
the elephant in the living room
In the recent Presidential debates there was an elephant in the living room that no one wanted to talk about. There was a lot of talk about how we were going to cut expenses here, there, and everywhere, except for the military. Guess where our biggest expense is? And guess where everyone wants to spend more money? Having a military that want's to control the world isn't something we can afford any more. England found that out in the 1950s.
Going on an Imperial Bender
How the U.S. Garrisons the Planet and Doesn't Even Notice
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Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay, often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads" (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).
At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military "sites" abroad.
The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard -- that is, the population of an American town -- are functionally floating bases.
And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.
Now, that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than you care to know, stop here.
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Meltdown at the Pentagon
Our Shrinking, More Costly Force
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It is common knowledge that the Pentagon is spending more in inflation-adjusted dollars today than at any point since the end of World War II.
The $635 billion appropriated in fiscal 2007 is $31 billion, or 5 percent, above the previous high-water mark of $604 billion in 1952. 2008 will be higher at about $670 billion, and 2009 will likely be more still.
It should also be conventional wisdom — but isn’t — that our military forces are smaller than they have ever been since the end of World War II; major equipment is also, on average, older than it ever has been before; and key elements of our most important fighting forces are not ready for combat. At new highs in spending, all that is an accomplishment of spectacular incompetence — if, indeed, that is the cause.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the human and material stress they have imposed on the forces, are not the cause. The negative trends have been around for decades. The wars have not siphoned off money from the non-war parts of the Pentagon budget, known today as its “base” budget. In fact, above and beyond the $800 billion-plus the Pentagon will have received by the end of 2008 for the wars, it has also received about $770 billion more than was planned for it in 2000. One would hope this huge “plus-up” for the peacetime, or base non-war, budget would have addressed some of the decades-old problems. It didn’t; today they are worse.
The base Defense Department budget has increased — in inflation-adjusted dollars — from $370.8 billion in 2001 to $518.3 billion in 2009, a 40 percent increase. Comparing actual Pentagon base budgets to the base budgets planned at the start of the first President Bush administration (for the years from 2001 to 2009) computes to an added $770 billion.
The “plus-ups” for each of the military services demonstrate how more money has made our problems worse.
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Use It or Lose It?
How to Manage an Imperial Decline
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Do empires end with a bang, a whimper, or the sibilant hiss of financial deflation?
We may be about to find out. Right now, in the midst of the financial whirlwind, it's been hard in the United States to see much past the moment. Yet the ongoing economic meltdown has raised a range of non-financial issues of great importance for our future. Uncertainty and anxiety about the prospects for global financial markets -- given the present liquidity crunch -- have left little space for serious consideration of issues of American global power and influence.
So let's start with the economic meltdown at hand -- but not end there -- and try to offer a modest initial assessment of how the crumbling U.S. economy might change America's global stance.
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2 moms
I haven't written about our moms lately. Things have been pretty unchanged, until lately. Saturday Zoe and I visited her mom Gerry at the dementia/Alzheimer's ward at Western State Hospital south of Tacoma. She had been moved from the ward she had been on the past two years to one that has only dementia and Alzheimer's patients. We aren't too happy with the move. Zoe will be working harder to get her up on the Island. Zoe has more here. We had an early start (it's a 2 1/2 drive) so we had time to stop by the nursing home where my mom is. She had a bad cold so she wasn't doing real well. She doesn't eat a lot and is losing weight. Her hearing seems to be going. She is walking more, which is a good thing. As to whether she can get in and out of a car we don't know. My brother Terry is going to try but it doesn't really look like she can. The family may have to bring Thanksgiving and Christmas to her. Last year at this time she was living in an assisted living home and we were able to take her out to dinner and bring her over to Terry's for a family gathering. She is a lot worse now, although she has gotten over her pneumonia and her lungs are clear. She is 88 1/2. Each year we wonder if this will be the last holidays with her. She keeps hanging in there but we know are pushing out luck.
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