Warning!

I set this page up to serve as a repository for interesting and provocative observations from my friends and associates. If you've got something to add, send me an e-mail, and I'll post if here. Good topics include science, politics, technology and the arts (especially painting, architecture and the like). Nothing is expressly forbidden, but if I consider something offensive and refuse to post it, in all likelihood, most other people will be far, far more offended. My long-time friends will know that's true...

And let's not get huffy and outraged by someone else's opinion, political or otherwise. The whole idea of this thing is to spark interesting commentary. With our popular media aggressively pulverizing ideas down to lowest common denominator slop these days, I'm starved for some fresh, yet fully-formed thoughts, and I bet you are too. So it wouldn't be worth my time to maintain a web page of lazy platitudes and puffy, banal affirmations. If you get really angry, go check out Carol's more pleasant non-confrontational musings here, so you can calm down.

8 September - Wes Baker - Cedar Rock

This is a special photo essay of a Frank LLoyd Wright house we toured in August. Check it out here.

6 August - Wes Baker - SPAM vs. Art

This piece requires its own page due to all the pictures. Check it out here.

14 June - Wes Baker - Jailhouse Crock

This morning, I heard a quote from one of our distinguished Democrat Senators that really made me chuckle. I don't have the exact text of his statement, but it went something like, "I know every American soldier is now worried about how they'll (sic) be treated if they (sic) get captured by the insurgents, now that the world has seen how we're treating prisoners in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib."

Let's count up the problems here one by one:

1. No US Senator can claim to speak for "every US soldier." But this sort of self-serving hyperbole is common among politicians these days. I remember how Bill Clinton used to respond to pointed questions with assertions like "The American people think this," or "The American people want that," as if he knew exactly what all 300 million of us think or want. But compared to the rest of the statement, this is a minor annoyance.

2. Speaking as an (admittedly, now retired) airman myself, I was a bit concerned about the other side's treatment of prisoners when they started lopping off people's heads with kitchen knives, way before Abu Ghraib ever came up. In fact, filmed beheadings have been standard products of Muslim extremists for decades. During the early stages of the uprising in Chechnya (fueled by Al Qeada of course), the Chechens had a nasty habit of capturing young Soviet soldiers, then sending videotapes of their slow, agonizing beheadings to their families. When was Daniel Pearl killed? Early '02? And he wasn't even a member of the military.

Now, Iraq has always had such a fine record of dealing with captured POWs itself. I've heard they buried thousands of Iranian POWs alive in the early '80s, just bulldozing them into the desert. The press reported back in the late '90s (based on classified information that they obtained somehow) on the Iraqi treatment of our female prisoners during Gulf War I. According to that information, every one had been sexually assaulted, as had many of the male prisoners. So everything was just peachy before Abu Ghraib Senator?

The point is that the murderous scum that are running the "insurgency" in Iraq don't think we're anything but a pack of devils. They see our prisoners as nothing but pawns in the propaganda war, and they've been doing unspeakably barbaric things to them from the beginning.

3. The Air Force Academy used to maintain it own Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program. SERE got started after the Vietnam war as a way to help train aircrews how to deal with being shot down in hostile territory, captured, interrogated, etc. The Academy program was a smaller, more focused version of the main course up at Fairchild AFB, near Spokane. That one is still active, but the Academy program was severely restricted after some incidents in the '90s.

I can't go into much detail about what went on in SERE, for obvious reasons. I can tell you that every cadet went through SERE (until the incidents), and that the course was about three weeks long. The resistance portion of the training amounted to about a third of that. I learned a lot as a student, but subsequently volunteered to be a SERE interrogator for two summers. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't the greatest student. I was 18 then, and somewhat more vulnerable to intimidation and physical pain than I should have been. But after one stint as an interrogator, I knew how to handle the process far better.

The work was considered so unpleasant that we actually got extra leave not available to other cadets, but a very small number of us even decided to interrogate for a second year. This was discouraged by the full-time administrators.  At some point in my second term, I started to realize why: It was psychologically dangerous.

I watched a couple of people start to enjoy it a bit too much, in a sadistic way. There's something about having absolute control over people in a prison that brings out the very worst in previously decent folks. I really think it's pretty much inevitable. The best way to prevent it is through loads of supervision, including frequent no-notice inspections. Rotating guards from one assignment to another is also a really good idea. What happened at Abu Ghraib is an obvious violation of the supervision requirement. The fact that a Brigadier General was assigned to command that prison should have been a big message to everyone involved that the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM wanted the place to be run the right way. Inexplicably, it wasn't. Certainly, the tiny group of toads that committed the abuses and took the photos should have been punished severely, but the general is the one who is most to blame.

But the amazing thing is that the abuses were so incredibly minor. I'm not excusing them, but when weighed against the things the prisoners had done (Remember that stuff about feeding people into plastic shredders, and cutting off heads with kitchen knives?), it was pretty tame. I really have a hard time feeling bad for the prisoners because we let dogs bark at them, or made them get naked in front of women. Again, I can't say much about what happened inside SERE, but I have yet to hear anything come out of Gitmo or Abu Ghraib that was well beyond what 18 year old cadets (of both sexes) faced at the Academy in the '80s. There is one qualification to that; at least cadets knew there was a limit to how far the punishment would go, and to how long it would last. Even so, I'm not going to lose any sleep over how those detainees are being treated.

More later...

26 May - Wes Baker - Philibuster Phollies

As usual in national political debate these days, much of the "news" wafting around in the press about the recent Senate judicial filibuster situation appeared to be designed by and for halfwits. Well, that might be a little strong, but honestly, anyone with a high school education should have been laughing his or her head off over a lot of it. Or maybe sobbing was more appropriate.

For instance, the Democrats tried tossing around this proposition that they were protecting some sort of minority right enshrined forever in the Constitution by the founding fathers. Now I don't mind if they want to make a political stand on the appointment issue, and in fact I can't honestly imagine them taking any other course, given the demographic reality of their current party membership. But let's not invoke the Titans with a feeble assertion that would have them turning in their graves. Even the most casual reading of the Federalist Papers will reveal that the founders were concerned with checks and balances amongst and between the three branches of the federal government (two actually; they didn't expect the judiciary to become the grand arbiter of social engineering that we have today). They said nothing related to the "minority rights" of political parties. In fact, they never anticipated the formation of political parties in the first place, and a lot of them ended up in bitter, friendship-ending struggles with one another when the parties eventually developed. So the idea that the Constitution was meant to protect political parties is hogwash.

Then there was this nonsense about how the precious filibuster itself might be hanging in the balance, as if it's the key to preservation of our republic. I thought our "progressive" friends were always on the side of democracy; "one man, one vote" and all that rot. The most offensive part of this argument was the repeated call for us all to remember the famous filibuster scene from Mr Smith Goes to Washington. At least one of the Democrats even brought up ol' Mr Smith on the Senate floor. Does appealing to some moldy Hollywood fiction for guidance on how to run the country seem like a reasonable approach to you? Imagine if we tried that with other important matters: Why, we can't get rid of our Jim Crow laws! What about that nasty Negro from the famous Birth Of A Nation? Treat women with respect - No Way! Haven't you seen Charlie's Angels? If I wanted political debate conflated with pop movie references, I'd read Maureen Dowd's column. People, get real.

Let's be honest about what this is all about. Thirty years ago, the US Supreme Court removed the power of the states to regulate abortion. For a number of reasons we could debate here, the democrat party is now coalesced around the protection of national abortion legality as its major unifying cause. In the mean time, a lot of people that used to support abortion, or at least tolerate it (including me and Carol) have changed their minds. Part of that is a stronger Christian influence that has built steadily since that time, but I think the invention and widespread use of the Sonogram was an even bigger factor. In any case, this is the contentious national issue of conscience for the 2000's.

I see some intriguing parallels with the slavery issue of the 1800's. In both cases, each side saw a clear moral justification for their stances. In both cases, individuals took stands they knew could get them killed. In both cases, the national legislature did the thing it was more or less designed to do when hyper-divisive problems developed: Kick the issue down the road with a "compromise." In the great Missouri Compromise, Congress merely put off deciding the slavery issue once and for all, thus allowing enough years to get everyone even more deeply entrenched, eventually leading to the Civil War. In this case, the Democrats are trying to prevent the appointment of conservative judges who might someday limit Roe vs. Wade. They've lost so much power lately due to successive election losses that the only tool they had left was the filibuster. With weak-minded Republicans caving in, we just ended up with another dangerous compromise.

I don't see a new Civil War over abortion coming, but the issue demands legislative solution. Letting it up to the Supreme Court is what got us into this mess in the first place. None of us can say for sure how it will end, but if I were a betting man, and some demon would take my wager, I'd put my money on some sort of limitation of Roe issued by the Supreme Court within 10 years. The Republican Party was created in the 1860's as Congress crumbled under its inability to deal with the slavery issue, and I believe we may be in the midst of a similar political upheaval right now.