bogen.org

After working my way through the 1100+ pages of James Mills’ book, The Underground Empire there remains no doubt in my mind that the United States Government is intimately involved in drug trafficikng.Mills’ book was published in 1986 and is now out of print. And, while many of the specific stories it covers are now old news, the trends and policies are not.

It is clear that the Federal government, acting through the CIA, has deep and long-.lasting ties with large, powerful drug smugglers around the world. The CIA uses these ties for a varieties of purposes: intelligence gathering; government destabilization; weapons smuggling; and the like. In many cases, these activities are essentially underwritten by drug addicts in America.

This is not to imply that CIA planes and boats bring narcotics into the USA and that CIA agents are dispensing coke and crack on street corners. What the CIA does do, is protect the upper levels of the large narcotics smuggling organizations from prosecution. This helps those organizations maintain their money, connections, and institutional memory, thereby making those organizations more resilient, durable, and flexible.

In one specific instance, the CIA facilitated the smuggling of drugs into the US from a particular smuggler’s network. The profits from the drugs were then turned into weapons. The weapons where then exchanged with Central and South American rebels in exchange for more drugs. The rebels would then use the weapons to destabilize the governments in their home countries. The now destabilized governments would then turn to the US Government for help restoring order within their borders. That was the ulimate goal of the program: enticing foreign governments to forge tighter military ties with the US Government. That the program was paid for by US drug addicts, instead of US taxpayers, was just a bonus in the eyes of many.

In many ways, the US government’s generally ineffective “War on Drugs” is a reflection of its involvement with smuggling. The vast majority of arrests made in the War on Drugs are low-level smugglers and dealers; the people moving a half-pound of pot or a couple ounces of cocaine. The number of so-called drug kingpins indicted and tried in this country, given its high-tech investigative techniques, broad military powers, and numerous police agencies, remains pitifully small. Are we seriously to believe that one guy operating out of Columbia, Mexico, or Peru can outwit the US Government for ten or twenty years without ever making a mistake? What about all of the low-level dealers and smugglers? Why don’t they turn in their higher-ups? Why don’t those higher-ups then turn in their higher-ups? Why can’t we just go up the drug smuggling food chain until we reach the top? How often does that happen? About never.

Clearly, there are some major questions that remain unanswered in the so-called War on Drugs. While Mills does not, and can not, answer all of those questions, he does ask them.

The books primary voice is that of the people in it. Mills does little to no editorializing. In fact, the vast majority of the book is dialogue spoken to him or others. He only interjects his own voice to help move the story along from place to place or to consolidate long periods of time and distance down to a reasonable length for an already large book.

While the size of the book, its relatively abstract subject matter, and its long-past publication date might dissuade some from picking up this work, they would be missing out on something by passing it by. The Underground Empire is a book that I will remember for a long, long time and it has certainly altered many of the ways I think about the so-called War on Drugs.

MADISON, WI -- The Bogen Household today announced a bold new plan to revisit the grocery store in 2018 in a newer, safer vehicle, named the Bogen Vehicular Traveler, that will replace the current Bogen Wagon which was purchased from Saturn, a division of General Motors, in 1998.Bogen Household spokesman, David Bogen, called the plan, "grocery shopping on steroids."

"We will use many of the same technologies that were used in 1998 to get us to the grocery store and back," said Bogen. "Our new vehicle, which will enter service in 2018, will be bigger, however."

In addition to safely transporting Household members safely to the grocery store, the new Vehicular Traveler will have multiple utility uses. The Bogen Household predicts that its members will also use the Vehicular Traveler to shop at the hardware store and visit far-flung friends and family.

Safety experts predict that with the ever increasing mileage on the current Bogen Wagon, risk of failure grows ever larger each day. With the new Bogen Vehicular Traveler, the odometer will read near zero and the failure rate is predicted to be far less frequent.

Some critics have questioned the program and where the funds will come from in the Bogen Household's relatively tight budget. Bogen Household spokesman David said that the new Vehicular Traveler will not take funds away from the Pet Maintenance or People Clothing programs. In addition, others have questioned whether funding such a program is smart given the recent pace of spending on Hurricane Katrina, and the War on Terrorism.

"You don't cancel Christmas when there is an important football game on television. You don't cancel Labor Day when the house needs to be painted. We're not about to cancel trips to the grocery store," said David.

Representative Tom Delay (R-Texas) said of the program: "It is extremely important that the Bogen Household continue to travel to the grocery store well into the future. If the Bogen Household stops eating, the terrorists win!"

The Bogen Household's current plan calls for the continued operation of the current Bogen Wagon until the new Vehicular Traveler is purchased and delivered.

That is essentially the mesasge coming from NASA these days. While newspapers across the country print front-page stories about NASA’s plans (including the story upon which this satire was based), the real news in the story is what isn’t being asked.

1. Why is it considered great progress to build a vehicle using technology that was widely understood in 1969?
2. Why will it take six or so years to build a vehicle using technology widely understood and implemented in 1969?
3. Why is it such a big deal that NASA is going back to a place in 2018 that they visited just less than fifty years earlier? I don’t issue press releases when I travel back to South Dakota, Massachusetts, or California. Why should NASA?
4. Why does the American public have such low expectations for NASA that it is news when they promise to use forty year old technology to not go boldly into the unknown?

The American public ought to start asking very hard questions about NASA and whether or not we’re getting our money’s worth from that institution.

Sarah and I spent part of the weekend visiting friends and family in the Twin Cities.Friday afternoon, we packed up the car, bid Dalla adieu, and headed northwest towards the Twins Cities: Minneapolis and St. Paul.

We got to St. Paul in the early evening. Sarah has to conduct another coring operation for her master’s thesis, and some of the equipment she needs had been recently built in Minneapolis. Part of our mission was to pick up that equipment. Our first stop was at a house in St. Paul to pick up 150 lbs. of aluminum coring rods (all about eight feet long), several eight-foot lengths of plastic tubing, the coring device itself, numerous four-foot lengths of PVC piping split in half, a bundle of foor-foot lenths of plastic tubing, and various other coring essentials. With the car now stuffed to the brim with coring equipment, we headed for the house of our friends, Josh and Sarah Ann.

We unloaded all of the coring gear into their garage and spent the night relaxing in their house with them. Their cats have a history of pulling evil tricks on me in the middle of the night, so it was a bit of an anomaly when the cats merely settled for walking across my head several times during the night.

In the morning, we all piled into the car and headed for Hell’s Kitchen in downtown Minneapolis. Hell’s Kitchen makes some of the most fantastic breakfast food on the planet, and I make a point of eating there at least once every time I spend a night in the Cities. We were not disappointed this trip as the food was spectacular, once again.

Sarah Ann had a pile of work she needed to finish over the weekend, so she and Josh headed back to St. Paul while Sarah and I strolled the downtown streets. Our destination? The fabled, Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.

My parents and their friends met us at the Metrodome for a (meaningless) baseball game between the Minnesota Twins and the Chicago White Sox. Before the season began and Minnesota’s season headed south, it looked like that three game series would have serious playoff implications. As it turned out, the Twins were essentially playing for nothing other than pride. They called up and played several players from their minor leage team and filled the infield with some of their bench players. However, they did trot out Johan Santana to pitch, which meant that something good was likely to happen for the home team.

Something great happened for the home team, for a change. The Twins not only scored runs (a rarity worthy of mention this year), but the White Sox hitters may have been better served to stay home that day. Santana had overwhelming stuff and he struck out thirteen batters. He didn’t allow a hit or walk until the fifth inning. Santana pitched into the ninth inning when he just ran out of gas. He had two men on base, with nobody out, and at that point, he had given all he had. He walked the next man and several of his pitches didn’t even make it to home plate.

Twins manager, Ron Gardenhire, trotted out to the mound and Santana left the game to a standing ovation. In came the Twins’ All-Star closer, Joe Nathan. Nathan faced an unenviable position: three men on base; nobody out; the heart of the White Sox order coming to the plate; and a shutout pitched by a man who gave everything he had on the field.

But, All-Stars are supposed to emerge victorious from situations like that and Nathan was equal to the moniker. Fourteen pitches and three strike-outs later, the White Sox were walking dejectedly back to their dugout while the Twins were celebrating a great win. It would have meant even more to the Twins and their fans if the game hadn’t been meaningless, but I think that all the fans in the stands left happy that day. Even White Sox fans had to be happy that they witnessed such a dominating pitching performance.

After the game, it was time for lunch, and we all headed over to The Local for brews and food. We ate outside and everyone seemed to enjoy sitting around with beer and pub food after a good game.

After lunch, my parents and their friends headed back to their hotel while we shopped for a few gifts Downtown. Eventually, we called Josh and he picked us up and brought us back to their house.

We sat around the house for a while, chatting, until our stomachs signaled it was dinner time. Josh and Sarah Ann took us to Pad Thai, a Thai restaurant located in St. Paul. We loaded ourselves down with a variety of Thai food before heading out to tackle one of the Twin Cities’ numerous miniature golf courses.

We ended up at Burnsville Mini Golf. If you’ve ever wondered what miniature golf will be like after nuclear war, Burnsville Mini Golf is probably a good approximation. It was clearly built many years ago, and not a cent of the profits has been sunk back into the business. The sign isn’t lit, which makes finding the little business quite a challenge at night. They have a limited number of putters and balls. One soft-spoken high-school student works in a nearly empty clubhouse. If you want a drink or a snack, you’ll need to scale the chain link fence to reach the convenience store next door. The holes are constructed of artificial turf on concrete pads with walls made of bricks. In many places, the turf is coming up from the concrete. In other places, the turf is gone entirely. Many of the bricks are broken or missing. In fact, the large number of unsecured bricks on many holes means that one could rearrange the holes as desired. The water holes had no water. Many stones from the surrounding landscaping were present on the course, leading to some interesing and unexpected ball trajectories. Some of the holes weren’t lit which makes them quite a challenge at night. There was one other group on the course when we showed up. Other than that, it was only us. Clearly, Burnsville Mini Golf is nowhere near the upper echelon of the miniature golf galaxy.

Regardless, we had a good time playing the course. When your ball is just as likely to leave the course by traveling through a hole in the wall as it to go into the cup, you can’t take the game too seriously. Josh didn’t even have a miniature golf ball; he had a regular golf ball. This meant that his shots often acted very differently from ours, often to interesting and funny effect. So, while Burnsville Mini Golf isn’t likely to host any sort of professional miniature golf tournament any time soon, if you just want to be out and about on a pleasant September evening, it suffices.

Sunday morning, we strapped much of the coring equipment on top of the car, said our goodbyes, and headed back to Wisconsin.

As usual, I posted some pictures of the trip.

I’ve been working my way through a book that’s just a bit over 1100 pages long. However, as I near the end of that epic journey, a book I had requested through the library became available. I set aside the massive tome yesterday to focus for a brief time on a graphic novel, V for Vendetta.Some of you may be aware of the fact that the Wachowski brothers of The Matrix fame are making V for Vendetta into a movie. While the movie has been delayed into 2006, I decided to jump into the novel and see the original story for myself.

V for Vendetta tells the story of an England set in the 1990′s (though, it really should have been set in the ever-so-common “not too distant future” to keep from dating itself so quickly). England has become a fascist state where all the Jews, homosexuals, blacks, Asians, and the like have been consigned to concentration camps. Those that are deemed pure enough to remain English citizens are subject to regular doses of fear, intimidation, and propaganda.

It is into this world that “Codename V,” as the character is known throughout the book, is thrust. V acts as an agent of change and his tools of choice are murder, explosions, and mayhem. It is V’s struggle against a totalitarian society that forms the framework of the book.

The story takes some shocking twists and turns, each of which seems natural and completely unforced. The book itself is told in a series of stories as the book is simply a collection of the original stories bound into one volume. Some of the stories are related as songs (complete with musical scores); others are told as rhyme; still others feature long stretches of action set to Shakespeare’s “MacBeth.” As you might guess, this book isn’t your run of the mill graphic novel.

While the action and story are interesting, the book is really a mouthpiece for the author’s politics. Politics and political theory form the backbone of many characters’ decisions. There is extensive discussion of how and why a supposedly educated and civilized people let such a society form. And, of course, there is discussion about how to best break-up and build anew that same rigid society. If you’re looking for a book that won’t challenge you while it entertains you, look elsewhere.

V for Vendetta now finds itself placed on my mental list of books that I would recommend to nearly anyone. Reading the book may spoil the movie, but there is so much information and philosophy in the book that I can’t imagine the movie will even begin to plumb its depths.

From a newspaper story in today’s paper:

The strain was apparent in other ways. Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, dropped his head and cried on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans,” Broussard said. “Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.”

Broussard said, “The guy who runs this building I’m in, emergency management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home, and every day she called him and said, ‘Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Momma, somebody’s coming to get you. Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday’ – and she drowned Friday night. She drowned on Friday night.”

“Nobody’s coming to get her, nobody’s coming to get her,” Broussard said. “The secretary’s promise, everybody’s promise. They’ve had press conferences – I’m sick of the press conferences. For God’s sakes, shut up and send us somebody.”

It took just a bit over four days to get military assistance in any sort of meaningful numbers to New Orleans. Are we supposed to be impressed when it finally arrived?!?What can learn from the unbelievably slow military response?

• First, that most of the military folks were coming by highway or ocean from distant parts of the country.

  It is roughly 1100 miles from Madison, WI to New Orleans, LA. Google estimates that distance can be driven in just a shade under 18 hours. So, if you ordered up the local National Guard Military Police unit (which has happened) and told them to hit the road, they could be in New Orleans in under one day.

  And yet, those folks weren’t scheduled to leave until yesterday.

  One good question might be, “Why didn’t they fly?” Let’s assume there is a shortage of military transport aircraft in the United States (a valid assumption given the number currently employed in Iraq and elsewhere). How much effort would it take to charter a few commercial planes to fly troops to New Orleans? Was United Airlines realistically going to say, “Well, we’d like to fly troops to Louisiana, but we’ve got this half-full flight from O’Hare to Boise that we need to fly instead.” Sure, they’d have to land somewhere like Baton Rouge and the troops would be bussed into the city, and they probably wouldn’t have their heavy equipment with them, but they would have themselves, their uniforms, their radios, and their guns, and that’s what important. New Orleans didn’t need a company of field artillery, they needed 10,000 guys with guns interested in law and order.

  But, it seems obvious that most of the National Guard units drove to LA.

• If you look at the list of resources being sent to New Orleans, it is reasonably pathetic considering the wealth of this nation and the amount of money spent each and every year on the military. We’re supposed to feel proud that four helicopters from Pennsylvania are being sent? The 823rd Red Horse squadron is coming with fifteen vehicles? Wow. Fifteen whole vehicles. Eight airlift helicopters? That’s what we get for our multi-billion dollar defense budget?

  The DoD operates about 5500 helicopters [pdf]. Not all of those aircraft are capable of picking people off rooftops or evacuating hospitals, but even those that aren’t capable of such things could be put to use. If looters are shooting at helicopters, why not simply use Apache helicopters (armored against small arms fire) to direct rescuers and troops on the ground? Helicopters traditionally used for scouting or artillery spotting could be used to assess damage, direct traffic, and the like. But, wherever the military has those 5500 helicopters stashed, it isn’t about to send more than a double-handful to New Orleans.

• There was absolutely zero planning on the Federal Government’s part for what might happen after the hurricane hit.

  Look at what’s happening at one of the Louisiana military bases. The SeaBees, also known as the United States Navy Construction Battalion, were evacuated from one of the local bases prior to the storm’s arrival. Apparently, they were told, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.” The military is now asking the Seebees to call-in because, gosh, we could use their services and the military doesn’t know where they are.

  What colossal dimwit sends the Seabees away from a hurricane zone without clear instructions on how to communicate once the danger has passed?!? That’s like misplacing the 101st Airborne in the middle of a war.

  The Seabees. Their motto is, “Can do.” Builders of uncountable earthworks, bases, and the like in warzones and peacetime alike. Sure glad we don’t have them on the job right now. It’s not like there is a couple thousand giant civil engineering problems to be solved.

• One of my new favorite people is Lt. General Russel Honore. He’s spoken with CNN several times via telephone, and I love it when he ends his response to a question with, “Over.” That’s just too cool.

The more I read or hear about Hurricane Katrina relief, the more questions and concerns I have.Yesterday, President Bush and others vowed again to rebuild New Orleans. But does that make any sense? There is no way to simply rebuild the city so as to make sure that such a disaster does not happen again. Sure, we could make the buildings capable of withstanding the fury of a Category 5 hurricane, but that wouldn’t make them impervious to flooding. In fact, many of the buildings in New Orleans are still standing. They just happen to be filled with water.

So, yeah, we could rebuild the buildings, but the chances that they would flood again are quite good. Unfortunately, channelization of the Mississippi by the Army Corps of Engineers has destroyed most of the wetlands that provided a natural barrier against flooding. Almost nothing man builds as a replacement for Mother Nature works as well as her designs. The levees that surround New Orleans are a prime example. The wetlands provided a natural first line of defense against flooding and hurricanes by absorbing massive quantities of water like a huge sponge. A combination of wetlands and levees might have saved the city–a defense in depth that needs to be rebuilt before the city is submerged again. But doing so will be incredibly complicated, expensive, and slow. And how will people take it if the Federal and state governments spend millions upon millions of dollars restoring swampland primarily inhabited by gators, slop, and mosquitos? Do you honestly think they will find that to be a good use of money, especially once someone characterizes it like I just did? As a politician, it’s probably hard to run for office once you’ve been characterized as pro-swamp and pro-gator while your citizens live in refugee camps.

That leaves the city relying on things that people can see and easily understand: levees. Relying on levees alone, without restoring the wetlands, returns the city back to a single-point-of-failure model. Even the Corps of Engineers acknowledges the fact that living behind levees pretty much guarantees that, at some point, you will pay the price. “‘Levees fail. People need to realize when they make a decision to live behind levees that there’s a risk that comes with that,’ said Jason Fanselau of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Sacramento office. ‘They can fail on warm sunny days like we saw last year with Jones Tract (San Joaquin County), and they can fail with huge wet storms like this week’ along the Gulf of Mexico.” So, the levees get rebuilt, but taller this time.

Unfortunately, that isn’t enough to prevent the city from flooding again. With most of the city below sea level, and now behind gi-hugic levees, it will simply be a matter of time until the whole place is one giant swimming pool again.

So, maybe the vast majority of city should be raised up. Again, it would be obscenely expensive, but maybe the city needs to be built 12 feet higher than it currently is. That would at least get the vast majority of it 6 feet above sea level. To do so, however, would require an exercise in earth movement that I cannot begin to comprehend. It would take billions of loads of fill to raise the city up. And, doing so might mean that all of the infrastructure currently underground is abandoned. Again, can you even begin to calculate how much it might cost to install all the utilities for a major American city, from scratch, at once? But, if we don’t raise the city up above sea level, then what’s to stop it from flooding like this again?

If we step back a bit from the geographic problems, we can see some other major problems. First, most of the city’s structures will need to be razed once the flood waters recede. Most building contractors worth their salt are as busy as they want to be. It’s not like there are several million building contractors and construction workers just sitting around, waiting to first raze, and then rebuild an American city from scratch. All those people have to come from somewhere. And if they don’t, who is going to rebuild? Someone suggested to me that the residents of the city will do the majority of the building. Sarah responded, “That’s how Third World shanty towns get built.” And that’s very true. Just because there are thousands and thousands of people sitting around with nothing to do, it doesn’t make them qualified to frame a house, plumb a bathroom, or install electrical outlets. They may be able to perform some small subset of those tasks, but most likely they’d just be in the way of the people doing the real work of rebuilding.

Some people have suggested that we could ship them manufactured homes. Yeah, some very small percentage of them. But where are the thousands of idled manufactured homes factories that were just waiting to crank out several thousand manufactured homes in just a couple of months? They don’t exist.

Even if they did exist, where will the building materials come from? Most likely the building materials that comprise the current buildings will not be salvageable due to mold. So, billions of board feet of lumber will be needed; plywood sheets beyond count will be ordered; shingles, pipes, electrical wire, windows, gutters, siding, paint, and all the other bits that go into a home will all have to come from somewhere. And, while I have no doubt they can be procured eventually, it will take some time for manufacturing to provide them.

Another problem is that factories simply won’t be willing to expand rapidly to provide all this stuff. After all, what do they do with it once New Orleans, Mississippi’s shoreline, and the like are rebuilt? It doesn’t do them much good to invest huge quantities of money in equipment, buildings, and employee training only to run out of markets in a matter of months or a year. Then they’re sitting on this huge production capacity which isn’t useful to them and is costing them money in the form of upkeep.

Looking at the human factors, there are equally difficult problems. What on Earth are the 25,000 people in the Astrodome going to do with themselves? What about the hundreds of thousands of other people scattered across the US who fled from Katrina? It’s not like they can all run down to the grocery store and get part-time jobs bagging groceries to earn money for a couple of months. The nation has no shortage of people who work part-time for low wages; they’re called teenagers and they’re everywhere. Maybe the government will be forced to create a Civilian Conservation Corps-inspired agency to employ these people and give them something to do with their time. Get them started on projects where manpower is key and necessarily skills can be taught. Clean up parks and shorelines; paint civic buildings; build bicycle and hiking trails; sweep streets; create civic gardens. All of these tasks are the sort that require strong backs, a will to work, and some very basic know-how.

How will the people in the Astrodome get around Houston, a city notorious for its car-centric lifestyle? They don’t have cars so they certainly can’t drive. Who would sell them a car? They don’t have money and jobs. How will people stuck in small towns without any public transit infrastructure get around? What money will these people spend? How will they keep from going crazy or getting violent for months on end with nothing to do? Are they all going to sit around learning how to knit so they can knit some new curtains for their homes which don’t exist? There are already towns in Louisiana that have doubled in size as refugees wash up on their shores. How will the infrastructure of those towns handle the sudden doubling of need for clean water and sewage disposal?

It is clear that there are very real and very serious questions facing not just New Orleans and Mississippi, but the United States as a whole. These questions go far, far beyond getting people out of New Orleans. If we all just sit around, thinking, “Well, we got them to the Astrodome, now back to American Idol,” the United States will fail this very real and very serious challenge.