•
More than 5 million Americans slipped into poverty
•
The median income for working families declined for 5 consecutive
years
•
The personal savings rate for Americans went negative for the
first time since the Great Depression
• Almost seven million Americans lost their health insurance
• Hunger in America increased last year as 35 million Americans
struggled to put food on the table
• Hundreds of thousands of qualified high school students
don't go to college because they can't afford to
• Home foreclosures shot to the highest level in nearly
four decades
• The US lost over three million good-paying manufacturing
jobs
• Three million fewer American workers have pension coverage
• Half of private sector American workers have no pension
coverage
• The middle class continues to shrink, and poverty continues
to increase
• The US has the widest gap between rich and poor of
any major country on earth
Last
year, the collective net worth of the wealthiest 400 Americans
increased by $120 billion to $1.25 trillion. When President
Bush talks about a booming economy, what he means is that it's
only booming for the top 10% of Americans. What he doesn't say
is that for the bottom 90% it really sucks.
• • •
For
an occasional dose of insight and opinion, read Petey's
Pipeline Blog.
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invited to comment on e-zine articles or Petey's Pipeline Blog
postings at any time. Whether you agree or disagree, your thoughtful,
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will be deleted.
Address
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Running
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Pipeline Blog exist, in part, to make all of us better writers.
Let's not defeat that purpose by being hasty or becoming careless.
Random
Ramblings & Miscellaneous Musings
National
Security—Safe or Sorry: When
Terrorists Strike
by Phil Hanson
On
September 11, 2001, airborne terrorists proved that the US is
vulnerable to terrorist attacks. 9/11 was—or should have
been—a wake-up call for US citizens to become more politically
engaged, especially in regards to US economic and foreign policies.
What
many Americans persist in believing (and what President Bush
wrongly proclaimed) is that terrorists hate us for our freedoms.
That's total bullshit. Terrorists hate us because we (the US)
have a long history of meddling in the sovereign affairs of
sovereign nations. When we meddle in their affairs, they
tend to take it personally.
Does
anyone still believe that we invaded Iraq for the express purpose
of bringing democracy to that now-devastated country? That excuse,
too, was total bullshit, as was the idea—long ago discredited—that
Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center,
the Pentagon, and an open field somewhere in Pennsylvania. In
fact, Saddam Hussein never supported al-Qaida because he saw
it as a threat to his regime.
The
only reason the US invaded Iraq and the only reason the US maintains
a presence in the Middle East is because the US aims to secure,
for itself and its allies, access to and control of the oil
that is found there. Without oil Iraq and the entire Middle
East would be as irrelevant to the global economy as is North
Korea. It's always been about the oil.
Terrorism,
long regarded as an effective means of forcing compliance or
achieving a specific political agenda, is a tactic often used
by small, under-funded and under-equipped armies against the
militaries and civilian populations of larger, wealthier, more
powerful nations. That's not to say that laser-guided bunker-buster
bombs, delivered by F-16s and supersonic stealth bombers, don't
strike fear into the hearts and minds of terrorists when they
find themselves the targets of such weapons.
Are
there effective means of thwarting terrorist attacks? Yes, of
course there are. Perhaps the best place to start is to obviate
the reasons for a terrorist attack by employing diplomacy—discussion,
persuasion and negotiation—as a first option rather than
resorting to military aggression, which should be the option
of last resort. It's a far more noble gesture to bargain for
what you want than it is to steal it.
Should
diplomacy fail, other means of preventing terrorist attacks
must be prevailed upon to secure national safety. Intelligence
gathering, threat assessment and analysis, communications networks,
transportation systems, vital industries and infrastructure,
border and port security, and well-trained and fully equipped
Coast Guard and National Guard units maintained at critical
points and strategic locations all play essential roles in providing
national security.
For
sure, having National Guard troops and much of their equipment
deployed to Iraq to provide support for the occupation makes
the country less safe, not more so. That's what reserve units
are for. The National Guard belongs here, where it can
stand ready to defend this nation, not deployed overseas.
While
the US has made and is making great strides in beefing up national
security, our shipping ports remain particularly vulnerable
to creative terrorist attacks.
Picture
a container ship berthed at a busy West Coast or Gulf seaport,
waiting to be off-loaded. Picture a shipping container, just
one among hundreds stacked on the cargo deck of that ship. Now,
picture inside that container 10,000 pounds of C-4 or Semtex
high-intensity explosives and an equal weight of nuclear waste
material—a powerful and deadly dirty bomb. Finally, picture
the widespread destruction after an enormous explosion, and
the radioactive fallout raining down on people hundreds and
perhaps thousands of miles away.
Oh,
don't worry. The bomb isn't armed yet. That will be done by
remote control, perhaps from a helicopter, soon after the container
is unloaded and stored in the impound area. Once armed, the
only way to disarm the bomb is by the same way it was armed—remote
control. But it's extremely unlikely that the bomb will ever
be disarmed because our government doesn't negotiate with terrorists.
Imagine
an armed dirty bomb connected to a system of fail-safe detonators
consisting of balance, motion, vibration, and heat sensors,
with a timed detonator as the default. Attempting to move the
container results in detonation. Attempting to open the container
results in detonation. Doing nothing results in detonation.
Such
a scenario is entirely plausible, easily doable, and all but
guaranteed of success. The biggest drawback is cost. Mounting
an operation such as this costs a considerable amount of money
to purchase materials, technology, transportation and expertise.
Indeed, cost may be the only reason terrorists haven't tried
it yet.
Shutting
off the flow of money to terrorist networks cripples, but rarely
disables entirely, terrorist activity. There always seems to
be a way for determined terrorists to inflict extensive damage
on those they oppose. Stopping terrorists that are ready and
willing to give up their lives for their cause is virtually
impossible.
Coming in issue #50: Economic and Environmental Security:
Striking a Balance
Copyright
© 2007 by Phil Hanson
All rights reserved.
Write
Thinking
Punctuation
– the Marks of Professionals
Getting
punctuation right is critical to making your writing intelligible
and coherent. As with misspelled and misused words, misused
or missing punctuation takes your message off track and confuses
your readers. To help you avoid the avoidable, the next few
installments of Write Thinking deal with punctuation
marks, in all their many forms, with example sentences provided
for clarification.
Ellipses
(. . .)
Ellipses,
a series of three spaced periods, are used to indicate omissions
from quoted material, or to signify a pause, interruption, or
trailing off of speech. Ellipses aren't meant to substitute
for dashes or other punctuation marks, and any such use constitutes
a punctuation error.
Examples
of
ellipses using the above paragraph as the derivative source:
Ellipses
. . . are used to indicate omissions from quoted material, or
to signify a pause, interruption, or trailing off of speech.
Ellipses, a series of three spaced periods, are used to indicate
omissions from quoted material, or to signify a pause, interruption,
or trailing off of speech. Ellipses aren't meant to substitute
for . . ..
The
sentence read, "Ellipses, a series of three spaced periods,
are used to indicate omissions from quoted material, or to signify
a pause, interruption, or . . . "
Did the sentence read, "Ellipses, a series of three spaced
periods, are used to indicate omissions from quoted material,
. . .?"
Copyright
© 2007 by Phil Hanson
All rights reserved.
Disclaimer
The
articles appearing in Petey's Pipeline E-zine are based on information
believed to be true at the time of publication.
Neither Perfecttext.com, Petey's Pipeline E-zine nor their publisher
assume any liability or responsibility as to the accuracy or
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While we make every effort to screen out scam artists and bogus
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