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I am not an athiest. I believe in God. One of the foundations of the USA is the right to practice (or not) the religion of your choice.
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I just think that Christianity is a nice fairy tale. Like Alice In Wonderland, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.
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But Islam is not just a fairy tale. It is very negative and harmful. I read an article today that in Iran if you renounce organized religion this is punishable by death. Gosh what a bunch of crap.
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LINK: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,538466,00.html
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I love it when words are 100% the same when translated. Even the various different meanings of the word.
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The Obama poster below uses the word cambio when talking about change. Political change.
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And when you go to the store and you get monetary change back, this type of change is also called cambio.
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I used to subscribe to the El Paso Times. I cancelled my subscription because of several factors, but mostly because it contained far too much advertising and too little news.
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During the last month the automated telephone dialer for the El Paso Times has dialed me seven times asking that I re-subscribe.
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I have asked them to stop calling me numerous times, both by telephone and by email. On January 31, 2008 Don Flores, who is the Excecutive Vice President and Editor of the El Paso Times, sent me this e-mail:
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Dear Mr. Garland,
I apologize for the trouble.
I have forwarded your email to our circulation director.
Please let me know if the problem continues.
Again, thanks for bringing this to my attention.
--Don Flores
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I have told these people that I have malignant cancer, and that because of my illness I require a lot of sleep. I have also informed them that my telephone number is on the National Do Not Call Registry. Apparently I am not getting through to them because now less than a month later their automated computer telephone dialer has called me four times during the last 48 hours.
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My own personal human eye can see from about 425 or 450 nm in the short wave portion of the visible spectrum (blue or purple) to a wavelength of about 650 nano meters in the longwave part (red).
I have been experimenting around with my spectroscope which came in yesterday.
First, using a conventional fluorescent bulb I calibrated it for the bright green line at 546 nm which is the element mercury.
Then I started looking at various things and seeing the lines in their spectra. I got the pictures on the left from the instructions, and I took the top picture on the right while I had the spectroscope pointed at a cloud right next to the sun.
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The bottom picture on the right is what a compact fluorescent bulb looks like through the spectrascope. Here one can clearly see various individual emission lines lines, some bright and some dim.
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This morning the BBC reported on Fidel Castro retiring.
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They used words like "glory days are long gone."
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I certainly don't dare compare myself with a longtime head of state, but having been retired about 2-1/2 years now I have to agree with Castro.
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Free At Last, FREE AT LAST! Finally have the time to pursue the things I am really interested it.
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link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7259399.stm
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The headlines in today's El Paso Times say that Margo was interviewed by the FBI about the public corruption case that is under investigation. Six people have pleaded guilty to serious federal charges in this case.
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Margo, a wealthy Republican, is head of a large insurance organization in El Paso. His wife serves with the Bush administration in the area of the arts. Her art gallery is located in the basement of her husband's business operation at JDW Insurance.
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The newspaper could have used headlines saying that "Margo Helped The FBI" with their investigation, but they chose not to. Without coming right out and saying it, I get the feeling that they are casting aspersions at Margo.
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Margo is running against the long time office holder Pat Haggerty. Margo has been accused of moving into the district as a sham, only so that he would be eligible to run against Haggerty. Pat Haggerty is well known for being honest and saying exactly what he thinks, even when it means that the rich and powerful will be upset with him.
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I am tempted to vote in the Republican primary just so that I can vote for Haggerty.
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I was reading in the British press about a lady who was testifying in court. She described the accused person as being completely amoral.
It made me look up the exact definition of the word “amoral.” It is important to differentiate between being amoral and being immoral. The former simply does not recognize traditional rules of right and wrong. The later understands that certain behaviors are wrong, but goes ahead and does them anyway.
It made me think about the phrase, “You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.” I think it might be appropriate to expand this to, “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your colleagues.”
I have had a few friends over the last half century who sometimes were a bit immoral. Driving while intoxicated, cheating on their taxes, having sex with people who were already married to someone else, etc.
In addition I have had the misfortune to know a few people who I would classify as amoral. They just didn’t think that these traditional rules had anything to do with them. It wasn’t that they did things they realized were improper, they were so self-centered and arrogant that they felt they were far beyond these rules of behavior.
I can think of at least four people without any difficulty who would qualify as amoral. All were people who I was forced to associate with because of my job. I guess that if there is any grain of truth at all in Christianity they will eventually pay for their hateful behavior. If not in this life, then in the next. After watching these people for years I find that the common man is smarter than he is given credit for. These men have become very wealthy financially, but they no longer get any respect from the communities they live and work in. And over the years it is clear to me that their self-respect has also horribly diminished. Despite all superficial appearances of happiness, they are miserable in this life. Alcoholism, addiction to mood enhancing drugs, divorce, etc.
It seems clear to me that the same sorts of behaviors that will get one into heaven will also make one’s time spent in this little one act play happy as well. So try to live by the ten commandments. It doesn’t matter one bit if Christianity is a fairytale and a bunch of hogwash, or if it is literally true. The exact same rules of morality will make you happy now and also get you into heaven at the end of the chapter.
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We had a little light dusting of snow over the weekend here in the Chihuahuan desert of El Paso, Texas.
I saw this AP photo on the DW website this morning. They also had a light snow on the Acropolis hill in Athens. Years ago I visted the remarkable ruins of the Parthenon.
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It occurs to me that John McCain has a lot in common with Bobbie Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And even though he is pro-military, he is heavily disliked by the defense industry because of the investigations he had done of them and their corruption.
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McCain is a gentleman in the finest sense of the word. He does not intentionally piss other people off or say brutal, mean things about them. And he has compassion for those less fortunate than himself. But he is sometimes painfully honest.
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Unless he is suicidal I would recommend choosing a vice presidential candidate who is even more liberal than himself.
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If he should be talked into choosing a conservative running mate, lunatics in the extremist, fundamentalist right wing might begin to view assignation as a reasonable option.
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I guess the same advice should be given to each of the remaining three candidates.
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Frank Rich has a great op-ed article in the New York Times today.
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Memorable to me is his description of David Letterman saying that the Republican candidates for president were all old white men who looked like they were getting ready to tee off at some expensive, restricted membership country club.
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He describes how just a few months ago the concept that it might actually be possible in America to have a female president or a black man as president was extraordinary. And that now just a few months later this is almost ho-hum.
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I love the following quote from the article, talking about John McCain:
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For all the changes in Virginia and elsewhere, vestiges of the Southern strategy persist in some Republican quarters. Mr. McCain, however, has been a victim, rather than a practitioner, of the old racial gamesmanship.
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In his brutal 2000 South Carolina primary battle against Mr. Bush and Karl Rove, Mr. McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was the target of a smear campaign. He was also pilloried for accurately describing the Confederate flag as a “symbol of racism and slavery.” (Sadly, he started to bend this straight talk the very next day.)
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He is still paying for correctly describing Jerry Falwell, once an ardent segregationist, and Pat Robertson, a longtime defender of South African apartheid, as “agents of intolerance.”
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And of course Mr. McCain remains public enemy No. 1 to some in his party for resisting nativist overkill on illegal immigration.
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Very Good! The Confederate flag as a “symbol of racism and slavery.” Oh yes. And telling the truth about these racist old white men who pose as Christian religious leaders.
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I am not a Republican. I view the Republican Party as a political party for people who are greedy, completely materialistic, and the types of people who in private say hateful things about poor people and anyone of a different color or religion than them.
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But with all that said, I like Big Mac. I would prefer Obama, but I could accept McCain as the leader of the free world.
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LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/opinion/17rich.html?em&ex=1203397200&en=2427f7c3cc6ed0d0&ei=5087%0A
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Or maybe it is an aroma thing.-
In the early 1970's I had a big problem. The Vietnam war was still raging, and I had the opportunity to enlist in the U.S. Army for three years with a guarantee of where I would be stationed and what my military occupational specialty would be. The other option was to be passive and do nothing, in which case I would soon be drafted but only for two years. I would almost certainly go to Vietnam, and I would very likely come back to El Paso as a young man in a flag covered box.
I chose to give up an extra year of my life and enlisted in the U.S. Army to be stationed in West Germany. So the first time I visited Berlin was in 1972. The Berlin Wall was very real at that time. I also got to attend the summer Olympic games in Munich in 1972. I was there the day that the Palestinians brutally killed the Jewish athletes.
Years later the company I worked for offered me a nice promotion to move to Europe and become the General Manager of the European division of our company. So I moved to Europe for a second time. It was a 14 hour per day job, and I did it for the next fifteen years. I bought a house in the south of The Netherlands, roughly one mile from Germany and about 10 miles from Belgium. 
By this time the Berlin wall had already come tumbling down. I have visited Berlin many times since then, and I even have a small chunk that I personally collected of the old Berlin Wall.
When I moved to Europe if you wanted to go to Germany or Belgium you had to stop on the freeway, and present your passport to the bureaucratic and officious customs officials. They looked at you with disdain, like you were some kind of a second class citizen. It often seemed like they stamped your passport just so that you would leave. Then you stopped at the bank right there on the freeway to change your Dutch Guilders over to either German Marks or Belgian Franks.
The Dutch didn’t like or trust the Germans. Not at all. If one wanted to get a Dutchman upset, all you needed to do was bring up the subject of Germany, or even worse say something kind and positive about the German people.
By the time I moved back to America some fifteen years later the situation had changed greatly. Before the change over the locals told all sorts of horror stories and had all sorts of reasons why it would not work. The border fences were torn down anyway. The Customs and passport control facilities were bulldozed, as well as the banks whose sole purpose in life was changing money from one nation’s currency to another. The Netherlands no longer had their Dutch Guilder, the Germans gave up their stable and strong Deutsch Mark, and the Belgians did the same with their Franks. On the exact same day everyone changed over to the Europe-wide common currency called the Euro.
All the prophets of doom said everything would go to hell. But it didn’t. The light skinned people said that allowing all these dark skinned people from the South (like Spain and Italy) to live and work in their countries would destroy their culture. But it didn’t happen. In fact it made life a lot easier. There were no longer any long waits at the border. You didn’t even slow down. The only way you knew you had gone from one country to another was the road signs. People began going over to Germany and Belgium for lunch or to go shopping, since you no longer needed to worry about using a different currency or the wait at the border control station.
If a policeman was chasing a bad guy in Germany, he no longer had to stop and give up the chase at the Dutch or Belgian border. He just kept on going, doing his job. Citizens of one country no longer had to get permission from the host government to move to a different country, or to work there.
There were a great many people who were afraid of this change. Fortunately the more reasonable and sensible people won out. It was indeed a great experiment onto unchartered territory, but it worked out fine.
So are the Europeans more open minded, forward thinking, and bolder than us Americans? Nope. Not at all. This may cause some anger among my European friends, but I think that many of the good ones emigrated to the New World to help build America. It mainly was the losers and the lazy ones who stayed home. And then many of those who stayed home ended up getting killed in the various wars which have tortured Europe.
America is a country of immigrants. Our country has been built from the very finest people choosing to leave their native countries and moving to the U.S.A. in order to better themselves and their families. Americans are for the most part hard-working people. Ask any single mother who is working two jobs, or the person in the ghetto or barrio who works all hours just to try and provide their family with a decent living. There are not many jobs that Americans will refuse to do, and that Mexicans will do. The problem is the very low wages and the virtually non-existent benefits.
Bringing in Mexican nationals to do these jobs is just a continuation of the culture of slavery.
By legislation we need to bring up the wages of these dirty and difficult low skill jobs to decent levels where one can support a family, and also to require that all employees (temporary, part time, and full time) be provided with health insurance and decent pensions. Stop treating these people like slavery in America is still alive and well, and suddenly one will find that there are plenty of Americans who are ready and willing to do these difficult jobs.
A big change like what I am proposing isn’t going to happen as long as most of our elected officials are controlled by money and big campaign contributions, are afraid of change, and only look backwards.
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A friend just e-mailed me a wonderful letter to the editor regarding the choice between Senators Obama and Clinton.
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You won't be sorry if you take the two or three minutes to read this:
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http://www.mainelincolncountynews.com/index.cfm?ID=30409
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I wrote much of my little brother's written request to become a conscientious objector with the U.S. Army. It was approved. So I have been actively thinking about the subject of pacifism for many years. I was reading about pacifism and came across a couple of interesting things. One was a discussion about Gandhi.
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Gandhi was asked towards the end of the war, "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? -- If not, how do you propose to save them without reverting to war?"
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Gandhi's response was that German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." -- After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly.
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Good heavens. Cold and impractical. In fact although I hesitate to say that Gandhi was out in space, this quote sure leads one's thinking in that direction. There are many situations where violence is justified and in fact will avoid much greater bloodshed in the future. Dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an example. The Americans belatedly joining the fight in WWII is another example.
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But there are far more examples where the opposite is true. Like the Vietnam war.
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The other interesting discussion I was reading concerned whether the carpenter from Nazareth actually committed suicide.
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John 10:17-18 has Jesus saying, "I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord." In other words, it sounds as though Jesus, perhaps by some act of will, ended his own life; if not an act of suicide, an act of surrender. So, is suicide justified?
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If we believe the semi-historical accounts portrayed in the Bible, then Jesus knew quite well that by taking on the Roman power structure the Romans would decide to punish him by crucifixion. He made a calculated and conscious decision to take this path.
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In the twenty first century this sort of action is called Suicide By Police - get the power structure so pissed off at you that they have no choice but to kill you. All you have to do is to point a gun at a cop and yell threatening words. And 2,000 years ago there were similar actions you could take where for sure the powers that be would end up putting you to death.
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If one has terminal cancer and suicide is just an early end to the suffering, a conscious decision to avoid months of horrible pain, I would say that suicide is clearly justified. My paternal grandfather had terminal lung cancer, and he chose to go this route. I may eventually make the same decision; only time will tell.
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But if there is subtle pressure by the younger relatives to go in the direction of euthanasia just so that these healthy young people can avoid some unpleasantness or emotional discomfort, or so that they will inherit more money, then I would have to classify their actions as murder.
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Asked if he wants President Bush to campaign for him Senator John McCain said, “I would be proud to have President Bush campaign for me and support me in any way he feels is appropriate, and I would appreciate it."
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Bush is a liar and a rude bully.
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I think the real John McCain is beginning to show through. That's good.
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My doctor in England, Dr. Terry Hamblin, is one of the world's top specialists in CLL. He has decided to retire. He will be greatly missed.
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Dr. Hamblin is always a gentleman. He is a very well read man, and he has an open mind. In fact he is surprisingly open minded for an older gentleman.
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I was reading his blog today. The following entry is fascinating. It is typical of him in that it is upbeat and a little funny, and that he tells the truth as he sees it. Regardless of what is politically correct at the moment.
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LINK: http://mutated-unmuated.blogspot.com/2008/02/gender-imbalances.html
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I hope this won't be too much of a shock for you all, but I have decided to retire. I know I'm supposed to be retired already, but that was just from the British NHS. In a month's time I will be 65 and start to draw my old age pension. I have decided to use this date significantly to curtail my activities, and one of the things I am going to stop is responding to questions on this LIST.
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I am also stopping seeing patients personally.
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I will still be writing my blog and I will continue to write little articles about CLL there. I am also going to write a small book for patients about CLL, but the time has come for me to stop being so available. I will continue to publish about CLL - there are several reseach articles in the pipeline, and I will continue to give advice to various groups such as the Gene Therapy Committee, the UKCLL Forum and some of the data management boards that I am on, but my wife and I are going to spend more time doing things that we can enjoy together before my arthritis finally catches up with me.
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My finishing date is March 12th. After that messages posted on this LIST will not be seen by me.
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Terry Hamblin
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Or as the nice old lady asked Big Mac (John McCain), "So how are we going to beat the bitch?"-
El Paso, Texas. --El Paso Del Norte, the pass of the North. If you are sitting in Mexico city, then this is pass through the mountains that go down almost the entire length of the North American continent. --So the Pass Of The North.
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The mighty Rio Grande river made the same assesment back when it really was a mighty river.
Oddly enough airliners flying 7 or 8 miles above the city also have to funnel through this same pass of the north.
Immediately south of El Paso is the country of Mexico. It is best to avoid flying over another country's air space. And immediately to the north of El Paso is the massive White Sands Missile Range with its attendant restricted airspace. This government missile testing and firing area covers an area of the desert of almost 3,200 mi² (8.287 km²).
Out walking the dog this afternoon at one point I counted thirteen contrails in the sky overhead at one time.
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-A significant portion of the drinking water in the city of El Paso, Texas goes through asbestos cement water pipe.
The "competent authorities" say that this should be no cause for concern. That it in no way is a health issue.
Government authorities also t
old us that smoking cigarettes and using pesticides like DDT were not health hazards. I don't like negativism and I don't want to be a prophet of doom. But it sure won't hurt to put a water filter on your sink. Several companies make them. I have the Brita brand and I am satisfied with it.
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LINK: http://www.dir.ca.gov/Title8/341_17.html
http://asbestos-anyu.blogspot.com/2007/12/400000-miles-of-drinking-water-pipes.html
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Update 12 February 2008: I got an e-mail today from a lady I know who works for the local water utility company. She informed me that there is no AC pipe in use anywhere in the system. She also let me know the strange fact that employees of the local water utility are not permitted to drink bottled water when at work!
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So I told her about a fight I got into with them back in the early 1980's. I wanted to run plastic pipe to our factory when we connected up to the city system, but the municipal water utility felt that there might be health issues involved with the plastic pipe. So they insisted that we use asbestos cement pipe. Odd but true.
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I also let her know that in some areas of the city the water tastes fine. But that in the newly built suburb which I live in, the tap water has an offensive odor and taste. And that the Brita activated carbon filter does a good job of taking those offensive odors/tastes out.
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I really don't think that the El Paso Municipal Water Authority has some kind of a coverup or a conspiracy going on about this asbestos cement pipe. Apparently it has not yet even been proven that drinking asbestos is harmful to one's health. I really think that my friend is simply more familiar with what types of pipe are being used nowdays, and that she just does not know what happened in the past.
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About 60 days ago disc defragmenter in Windows Vista stopped working. Not long afterwards I discovered that it would no longer do Windows Update either.
I was getting an error code. So I went to the Microsoft web site intended to help with problems like this. The error code wasn’t listed there, and when I searched for this particular error code all I found was other Windows users like myself who had the same problem.
Today finally I Goggled this error code, rather than looking on the Microsoft site. I found a thread that had a conversation about how to solve this problem.
I tried doing what the guy said and it worked perfectly.
Here is the funny part. In the conversation was a response from a guy who said, “My name is XXXXXXX and I am a service engineer working for Microsoft. I tried what you suggested and it worked. Thank you very much.”
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This is why Microsoft should not be allowed to buy Yahoo. They are a company that is out of control. The only thing that keeps them profitable is their monopoly on operating systems.
Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name.
Nobody came
Father Mckenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved
---------------------------------------------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boc7rnhkLAk
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I have read several different places recently that British kids are really poorly educated because among other things, they think that Eleanor Rigby was real when actually she was fictional.
--------------------- WRONG!
Urban Myth. I have been to her grave. I guess you could say the song was wrong; I came....
Paul McCartney even thinks she is mythical. Her grave is in the little cemetery right outside the church in Liverpool where Paul and John met the first time. My guess is that they stepped outside into the little graveyard to smoke a doobie, and now Paul doesn't remember having seen her gravestone. http://flickr.com/photos/paul_garland/669458008/
This is a great picture of the Quarry Men on July 6, 1957 the day when John Lennon and Paul McCartney met. http://www.beatlesource.com/savage/1950s/57.07.06%20fete/57.07.06fete.html
http://flickr.com/photos/paul_garland/2255174872/
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http://judithweingarten.blogspot.com/2008/02/eleanor-rigby-is-real.html
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Chelsea is an adult. In fact she is almost over the hill. Chelsea is now almost 30 years old. She lives in New York and is a high powered financial executive working with the Avenue Capital Group. She used to work for McKinsey & Company as a staff consultant. -
I know a few people who say the Islamic religion is one of peace and tolerance. No doubt these people have some really nice, kind friends who are also Muslims.
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So do I. Some of the finest, nicest people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing grew up in the Muslim faith. Honest. My friend Mustafa who is from Tunisia but lives in the Netherlands now. And Mohamed who grew up in Afghanistan but lives in Brussels, Belgium now.
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Anyone who makes the blanket statement that this religion is one of peace and tolerance simply has their head in the sand. CNN is reporting that women are turning up dead (some even beheaded) in Baghdad simply because they refused to cover their hair up. This is an incredibly barbaric religion.
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LINK: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/08/iraq.women/index.html
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This is what Philip Roth thinks of President Bush II. He says W is the worst president ever.
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I'm glad I'm not alone. Sometimes I think maybe I'm getting a little radicalized or extreme, but when I read an article like this I realize that in fact I'm probably being a little too kind to Baby Bush.
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LINK: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,534018,00.html
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I am so glad the someone prominent finally had the courage to come out and say this openly.
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TORONTO (Reuters) - The woes in the U.S. financial sector are "poetic justice" for bankers who designed and sold complex investments that have since gone sour, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said on Wednesday.
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"It's sort of a little poetic justice, in that the people that brewed this toxic Kool-Aid found themselves drinking a lot of it in the end," he said.
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LNK: http://www.reuters.com/article/innovationNews/idUSN0631767220080207
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Some reports I have read say this is by a margin as high as 2 to 1.
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I don't want this to sound ethnocentric or racist. Really. But it is accurate.
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I have been closely associated with the Mexican American sub-culture most of my life. In fact my Mother was so busy running her little business that our maid played a big part in raising me. They tell me that my first spoken word was in Spanish.
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I hate to generalize, but having lived around Mexicans and also having lived in the deep South for several years I have observed that Hispanics/Latinos are among the most rabid racists I have met. Many are openly anti-black. So saying that Hilary won their vote is not really fair. They simply voted against the black man.
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I sure don't know. Senator Clinton is smart as hell. And her health care plan apparently is much better than Obama's.
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But here she has gotten all teary eyed in public again. At her age I would expect her to be well beyond the stage of her life where hormones rule.
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A few tears at the Ground Zero memorial might be appropriate. But not because you meet up with an old friend, a fellow cut throat lawyer.
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Think about Angela Merkel in Germany. Nice, charming, and tough as nails. Easily takes on and handles a room full of the top male leaders in the world. If she started crying all the time it just wouldn't work. Not at all.
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Because of my political activism, my deep felt sense of outrage, and my outspokeness I have had people accuse me of being a bitter old man. Old I accept. Sometimes grumpy. But not bitter. Not at all. I am very grateful for the wonderful pathways that I have travelled. What a surprise. Sometimes it is almost humbling.
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Other friends accuse me of ranting. Well listen to this guy if you want to hear a good rant. Its certainly not time to give up. It is time to get off our big fat dead asses and get moving! When the times get tough the tough get moving!
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Lee Iacocca is another grumpy old man who has seen some of the world. His new book called "Where Have All The Leaders Gone?" is a well thought out call to action. It is available through Amazon, if you prefer it is available on an audio CD (my choice), and the paperback will be out in April.
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Here is an excerpt from his book.
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'Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'Stay the course'
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Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America , not the damned 'Titanic'. I'll give you a sound bite: 'Throw all the bums out!'
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You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore.
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The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq , the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving 'pom-poms' instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of the ' America ' my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?
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I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have. The Biggest 'C' is Crisis! Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.
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On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes.
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A Hell of a Mess. So here's where we stand. We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia , while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves.
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The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership. But when you look around, you've got to ask: 'Where have all the leaders gone?' Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, omnipotence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.
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Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.
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Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm.
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Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.
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Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when 'The Big Three' referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, what are we going to do about it?
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Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.
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I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bonehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?
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Had Enough?
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Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope, I believe in America . In my lifetime I've had the privilege of living through some of America 's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises: the 'Great Depression', 'World War II', the 'Korean War', the 'Kennedy Assassination', the 'Vietnam War', the 1970s oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11. If I've learned one thing, it's this: 'You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it's building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That's the challenge I'm raising in this book. It's a call to 'Action' for people who, like me, believe in America . It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close. So let's shake off the crap and go to work. Let's tell 'em all we've had 'enough.'
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E---------------------------------------------- Excerpted from 'Where Have All the Leaders Gone?'. Copyright (c) 2007 by Lee Iacocca. All rights reserved.
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