One one level, it’s a cheap way for the Navy to horn in on the USAF contract for the purchase of the F-22 Raptor airframe.

At another level, it shows a disconnect between society and the understanding of our military.

But…its’ sorta like being able to “zap” an AF jet with the bad manners and planning to land on a Naval location, only we’re imprinting the youth of America with the right model of the real aviators!

As the toll of US troops lost in the GWoT nears 3800, the AP is counting down the next few deaths.

For a moment, extract yourself from the steely eyed glare at that one metric and consider this:

Traffic deaths should top news
By Peter J. Woolley – Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, December 28, 2006
The nonstory of 2006 was also the nonstory of 2005. It is a nonstory every year going back decades. Yet the number of people who die in car crashes in the United States is staggering, even if it is absent from the agenda of most public officials and largely ignored by the public.

When all is said and done and the ball begins to drop on New Year’s Eve, 44,000 people, give or take several hundred, will have died in auto accidents this year. To put that number in perspective, consider that:

• At the 2006 casualty rate of 800 soldiers per year, the United States would have to be in Iraq for more than 50 years to equal just one year of automobile deaths back home.

• In any five-year period, the total number of traffic deaths in the United States equals or exceeds the number of people who died in the horrific South Asian tsunami in December 2004. U.S. traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of two tsunamis every 10 years.

• According to the National Safety Council, your chance of dying in an automobile crash is one in 84 over your lifetime. But your chances of winning the Mega Millions lottery are just one in 175 million.

• If you laid out side by side 8-by-10 photos of all those killed in crashes this year, the pictures would stretch more than five miles.

• If you made a yearbook containing the photos of those killed this year, putting 12 photos on each page, it would have 3,500 pages. If you wanted to limit your traffic-death yearbook to a manageable 400 pages, you’d either have to squeeze more than 100 photos onto each page or issue an eight-volume set.

Can you hear me now? Automobile deaths are the leading cause of death for children, for teen-agers and in fact for all people from age 3 to 33. Yet this annual tragedy is not a cause celebre.

Opinion leaders largely ignore the ubiquitous massacre. No marches, walkathons, commemorative stamps or fund-raising drives are organized. It is not brought up in the State of the Union address. It is rarely the subject of public affairs shows. Statistics aren’t updated daily in major newspapers or broadcasts.

Gruesome crashes are reported just one at a time, each as if it might never happen again. Little attention is paid to the aftermath: safety measures taken or not taken, the workings or non-workings of the justice system. These avoidable deaths, as well as more than 2 million nonfatal dismemberments, disfigurements and other injuries that go along with them, have become part of the fabric of everyday life in the United States.

Elected officeholders naturally take the path of least resistance. They are well aware that significantly reducing deaths on the roads requires radical solutions in the form of regulation, investment and enforcement. Roads need to be made safer, for example, by extending guardrails and medians to every mile of busy highways. Speeding and aggressive driving need to be much more rigorously controlled. Trucks need to be separated from automobiles wherever possible. And cars need to be built slower and stronger.

But every solution is readily opposed by someone: manufacturers, industrial unions, truckers, consumers, taxpayers — though all are potential victims themselves. The public is not to blame. It is hemmed in on every side by mind-numbing advertising and shouted stories of the moment. Apparently no medium is willing to bludgeon people — as they need to be — with statistics and trends on the dangers facing them every time they set out in their automobiles.

Only if there is a public outcry will this situation get the attention due it. Only when people fully realize the absurd and avoidable costs of the dangers that stalk them on the road — and then demand governmental action in the form of forceful intervention and strict regulation — will this become the story of the year, as it should be.

— Peter J. Woolley is a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University and executive director of PublicMind, a public opinion research group there.

Kinda puts some things into perspective, don’t you think?

Tracked back @:  <a href=”http://steeljawscribe.com/2007/09/22/open-trackback-saturday-3/trackback/”>SteelJaw Scribe</a>

Just a slice of life:

Driving in the pre-dawn traffic to work, and lo and behold….no warning on the radio stations, that breathlessly report accidents and traffic snarls.

I have come to believe by the time the radio news reports an accident, it’s just about been cleared up when you hear it.

So, heading south with the herd of fellow worker bees, I see smoke ahead, off to the left, but the road takes a turn that way. Traffic, is moving like it normally does, so I surmise the source may be on the northbound side….

As I come over the rise, there is a law enforcement vehicle behind the smoking one. Traffic is merging to the right of the four southbound lanes. I find, not being in the right already, have to begin moving over. The talk radio station news begins the 1/4 to the hour report. Nada on the smoking car. Speaking of smoking, the flames become apparent in the vicinity of the hood of the stricken vehicle. I begin to fear the authority on site will call us all to a halt, for safety reasons, but somehow, the traffic still flows, as drivers fairly politely allow others to enter their lane on the right, which also will quickly become a major exit.

I get moved, then have road space to get back over one lane to the left to continue on my normal path. As I pass the car stopped in the middle of this major artery, the entire front end is fully ablaze in the pre-dawn, almost sunrise light. Tires are flat and falling off the front rims, but I don’t slow more than necessary, still keeping my head on a swivel for the other vehicles around mine.

Now in almost no traffic (for a change), i head towards work, and the hourly report comes on….not a word about a major car fire, but there are at least three other fender benders in the county.

Funny, with all the cameras and live feeds and helicopters…and cell phones…somehow the news didn’t get the story.

Some of the pitfalls of John Edwards mandated universal health care have been discussed in DJ’s post yesterday. DJ does point out this plan has been tried in England, and it’s a disaster…

I suggest the overall discussions on this topic of forced probing by doctors, or it’s off to the Gulag with you! hasn’t hit on one of the most critical points…following the money. My “angle?” John Edwards is a lawyer, Hillary Clinton is a lawyer. So are about every other person in the top level of elected government. A “healthy” (pun intended, why, yes!) sum of money is made by the legal profession in suing people. They also do not collect a portion of the money awarded in judgments, either. Bill Bennett’s brother, when hosting Morning in America one day, when asked how much he charged an hour commented that it was a lot, but you should see the ratio of collected to uncollected fees.

Puzzle piece #2: Lawyers, when given a case, do what? They chase the “deep pockets.”

Puzzle piece #3: The Federal Government self-insures. We don’t pay Lloyd’s of London to protect against risk…we hope we’ll find the money “somewhere” when we need to pay off a successful award against faulty/negligent/criminal behavior by those employed by the Government.

See where I’m going? I hope so.

If all doctors and medical professionals become civil servants, you won’t be able to sue them, just as you cannot sue a Government official, who was acting in the capacity of a Government employee now. If the wrong mangled limb is amputated in the operating room after an accident, sue the Government. If you are given a prescription that causes you to have an allergic reaction, one noted in your medical history, sue the Government. If your baby is delivered wrong, sue the Government.

Unlike doctors, who can give all their assets, exhaust all their medical malpractice insurance, and still come up wanting in the money they owe you, the Government has the deepest pockets of all of us, and…it’s not like they will take off to Hong Kong if they don’t feel like paying. There will always be a physical address, and a civil servant you can harass until you get your claim paid, with the added benefit of being able to call your Congress critter to ask them to sick their staffers on the unlucky civil servant, overworked and underpaid, to make sure you get front of the line privileged treatment…

Oh, just forget that not only will we pay for each other’s health care, we will pay for every and all claims against the “universal Health Care” system, regardless of how unfounded and/or frivolous they may be. Sort of a bigger version of when you take your car into the shop with a mangled fender “Are you paying for it, or is this an insurance claim?” philosophy, except it will be the millions of smaller wallets that will suffer…after all, who could deny a compassionate response from the Government, when one of it’s citizens has been wronged?

Think about it. Lawyers will love it…sue crazy America will love it. Judges will be even more overworked, along with the entire court system…and all of that will be a very, very big boost to the legal profession. WhatI ask you not to think about is how the cost, astronomical as it will become, will be buried deep within the Federal Budget’s pages…a mere “drop in the bucket” we will be told, of the over all trillions we need to run the country…so open your checkbook, IRS will be coming to you soon.

Better take up the local diploma mill’s offer to get your degree in paralegal services now!

Next idea: Universal Legal Service. Yeah, like we’d have a snowball’s chance of getting that passed into law by a bunch of lawyers…

‘Nuff Said…(got you thinking, didn’t it?)

Tracked back to: SteelJaw Scribe who joins the land of “OTB”!

Maybe we’ll have to begin paying farmers not to grow peanuts anymore, for fear a small segment of society will demand complete access to all venues, public or private, free from any responsibility to avoid situations that may, in fact be life threatening…

From a local franchise door…no kidding!How soon do we stop driving on roads because it’s too difficult for parents to pay attention, lean out the window and yell “GET OUT OF THE STREET BEFORE YOU GET HIT BY A CAR!” when little Johnny strays off the grass and onto the asphalt? When you see the signs in your neighborhood “No Motorized Vehicles Allowed – Children Might Be on Roadway” you’ll know we’re renounced all personal responsibility…

Post yer trackbacks here!

Not so much of a “sea story” today as a “war story” to put my context on some recent news….

The dispatch from the 5 NCOs in the 82nd Airborne Division was illuminating, but not necessarily in a complimentary light. The President and many other Government reports say the Surge is bringing results. The NCOs say they see daily problems. So, who’s telling the truth?

Both, I submit and here’s a little personal experience that leads me to this conclusion: I first became a pin cushion for the medics in 1962, in order to move overseas to Okinawa. Off my father packed us up for a two year adventure to see the world. We first lived just west of MCAS Futema, with a few families of Army sargents living next on the same street of a few concrete block houses. Thus began my “indoc” into military life. I played in the sugar cane fields and around the large above ground tombs, occasionally finding artifacts and ordnance left over from a massive conflict not quite 20 years past. We moved about a year later to live on Fort Buckner, housed amongst the Green Berets, the pride of John F, Kennedy.

From our association in these neighborhoods, and the concentrated presence of the military, I began to absorb the first person history of the war in Vietnam. Being in 3rd and 4th grades, I wasn’t much of a newspaper reader or news watcher, so the information came in listening to the adult discussions.

Back home we went for a few years, then off to Guam for 8th through 11th grades (67-71). More massive exposure to the military, this time the Navy and Air Force, with some Marines and Coast Guardsmen sprinkled in. BY now I had pretty much set my life study path on warfare and modern history, and, with the war in Vietnam being larger, I heard more, plus I watched the news and read the papers and news periodicals now. In Boy Scouts, and on sports teams, I had military men as leaders and coaches. I listened to their “war stories.” Being overseas in a large concentration of military bases also brought me “Stars and Stripes” newspapers.

The net result of this is I grew up in the middle of first person accounts of the conditions in Vietnam, from the Special Forces A_Teams, to the Marine who had a three crossbow bolts go past the tree trunk he was sitting against, all the while thinking more mosquitoes were swarming, until he turned to look. Add to that the DoD press of the “Stars and Stripes” generally putting a detailed, yet rosy face on the war, and ladled on top, the stateside media that seemed to tell a story much different than what I was getting from my “other sources.”

Were any of these sources not telling the truth? For the most part, they all told it as they saw it, albeit through the filters they each put on it.  No one author or story teller had access to the “big picture,” even if they claimed to.  Those filters, by default, cause even the most detailed oriented writer to miss the mark.  I believe most people actually comprehend this concept, they just don’t acknowledge it often when they voice their opinions.

My long term reaction? For several decades, I voraciously read all things on Vietnam I could come across. There are many stories and it’s not that they don’t match up, but they tell stories as varied as the direct, uniformed troop combat in I Corps, to the SEALs skulking about in the night among the Viet Cong controlled villages in the Mekong Delta.  To this day, it’s almost like three separate conflicts to me, due to this multi-facted exposure.

The NCOs provide a valuable first person view of the villages they walk, but they do not see all of the story, nor does any one else, yet all of the reports, in this war from bloggers, from bloggers become published authors, to guys with digital video cameras becoming movie producers, and then, those “standard” reporting sources. One day, when we have the time, and the dust has settled and tempers cooled by decades of reflection, we will have a better chance to see what really is happening now, as word of mouth and first person stories at the top, middle and lower levels come forth.

It would be foolish, as I’m sure many with military experience, and those with historical perspectives, to base the overall progress of the war on the reports of 5 well spoken non-commissioned officers, but we would also be foolish to not make significant note of the problems they face daily, indicating there is more good work to be done.

What if, just for speculative purposes, we formed a deliberative body of elected officials. We then chartered them to formulate procedures and processes by which we would manage our society. Next, we might, via our voices in print and in polls and via the ‘net, collectively indicate what we felt the most seriousness about, communicating to them our priorities. Then we agree to pay them for this work and we then get back to our work of construction buildings, laying asphalt, fixing power generation plants and downed bridges.

Sounds like a good plan to me.

But….what happens? This esteemed group, by their actions, decides they would rather divide up into smaller factions and adopt a philosophy or “anything EXCEPT what the opposition wants!” Oh, then they begin to demand that their solution is the only acceptable one, and everyone else MUST do as they say, or they will do nothing but lay constant roadblocks in the way or any other progress. And…don’t get me started on endless cycles of hearings to find some fault with circumstances you just don’t like.

And top it off, with many serious issues unresolved, the body decides to further endear themselves to the working man and women, by taking off from work in the high heat of August, after promising to get it all done when you come back.

Congress: you have to love their way of collecting a fat paycheck and racking up an incredible retirement benefit package, while still not getting significant issues taken care of…

Now, consider for a moment, could I have been describing the Iraqi legislature? The actions of their elected officials seems very much like the constant, infantile squabbling coming out of our own hallowed institutions of the Senate and the House.

Here’s the irony I see: If one of our strategies was to build up democratic governments in the Middle East, beginning with Iraq, I would submit we just might have become overly successful, but somehow, we have failed to see the outcome for what it is. The Iraqis went to the polls, as we did, voted in people who promised to tackle the many issues that “We the People” have confirmed are worthy of their attention, but what have they, like us, received in return for our statement of confidence at the ballot boxes? Lots of talk, lots of back-biting, lots of wasted energy and certainly, not any worthwhile decisions. Quite a striking parallel, I’d say.

To be fair, there have been some Iraqi politicians who have lost their lives going to work. I can’t say that for our elected representatives, nor would I wish it on any of them, but I do see how there is some degree of courage the Iraqi must muster that ours need not actually have to have to get to their offices daily.

I think that the Iraqi politicians have, for the most part, modeled themselves after what our “democracy” style of today represents, which is something more like a “ME!-ocracy,” (I think that may be my 4th original/phrase concoction) were the “I” or “Me” is the ultimate customer of the process and the rest of us are supposed to “eat cake” while also sometimes standing up and yelling “I want it MY WAY!” or “WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?!?!?!?!”

Maybe we expected that the Iraqis would have gone through a series of historical events of fiery oratory from modern day Jeffersons and Madisons and Washingtons and Henrys, and since that has not occurred, we don’t recognize they have skipped right over all of the hard work of getting it out on the floor, in speeches that will be recorded and repeated and quoted for centuries to come, then coming to a common ground, acceptable to the many, and from that unity of view, begin to take on the daily irritations of life, once the nation has a foundation.

So the irony of it all comes in many words and actions, with our own elected officials, who have yet to complete some important bills, for one the annually written (SURPRISE! – It happens every year!) Defense funding bills, moan and complain that the Iraqi parliament will take the month of August off for not only vacation, but because it’s so darn hot. Our elected reps make such remarks, while wiping the sweat from their brows, claiming Global Warming has made Washington, DC hot this same August (like so many other Augusts before), then they hop on their jets and beat feet out of town for…yes, “vacation”….Maybe they somehow justify theirs as superior to the time off of the Iraqis because they will be out at fund raising events, which, is their main work, so they are really not on vacation in their mind. Nice rationalization, but what they consider work is merely an investment in their future in a job where they can decide their own priorities and not perform, with little fear of being called to account for a lack of measurable results.

Note to Iraqis who might be reading this: You’d be better served studying our history before the late 60’s – early 70’s “flower children” brought their “do your own thing” mentality to the halls of government.

One more ironic point: I bet we could never get the libs to stand up and say “Hey! Time to bring the troops home in VICTORY because we have given them democracy! The Iraqi politicians are just like us, and we’re a democracy: Do nothing, lazy, power hungry, entrenched careerists, on vacation in August with nothing accomplished for all the pay, in it only for ourselves! Hooray for America!”

“Made ion America” with cheap and poor quality parts fabricated in China.

I’m going to stand in the sun and practice mechanical skills with regards toi feul and cooling systems on a Dodge that is my transportation.

This is number three major issue to arise during ownership, the result of poor product standards. Details later…

So, a question for anyone interested in chipping in two cents (and you don’t even need PayPal!), ponder this:

The routine Monday posts are titled “Monday Maritime Matters.” Would it be too fadish to rename it to “Monday Naval Contemplations?”

Just a thought.

Input, as simple as “Yes/No” accepted. More lengthy thoughts appreciated as well.

Next thought: I don’t have some magical WordPress plugin to rotate my header graphics, but I can whip out topical pictures pretty quickly. Not that this is a well travelled blog, but if you have a picture of merit, with some connection to mostly nautical things, and would not mond having a SWO pin and some brand name lettering overlaid on it, I’d be happy to put it on the hosting server for regular use. Some topical stuff for holidays, special occasions, or maybe earthscapes/astronomy stuff, too. Format is 730 px wide x 200 px tall…can go up to 900 px wide, too, if it frames better. let me know if you’d like to participate.

Be back in a few (hours)!

P.E.T.A. eats its own. NO MEAT FOR YOU TODAY!!!!! Jerry Sienfeld, contact your nearest P.E.T.A. Chapter, I think there’s a consulting/stand up gig in it for you.

On 6/28/07 at the Democratic Debate, Hillary comments that we’re holding a lot of non-violent offenders in prisons and we need to get them out and figure a better way to handle it. On 7/02/07, she decries the use of Constitutionally appointed Presidential powers over the topic of a man sentenced for lying. Ironic on many levels: If lying is no longer non-violent, has she been living with a violent man? As someone who has had a close, personal relationship with a man who used the very same provisions during his time as President….and a lot more than 80 some times…more like around 400, to include someone convicted of trafficking and selling weapons silencers.

OK, many years ago, an Army Officer said something the media excoriated him for during the Vietnam War. The Live Earth is now of the mind to “Make carbon in order to reduce it.” Funny, throw a concert on each continent (I guess they haven’t figured out that ticket sales in Africa and India might not cover the expenses). Sure, mega-wattage for amplifiers, lights and associated electrical systems during the concert, heating and cooling for the performers and their massive entourages, not to mention people up and going somewhere they might never have traveled to, just because they will feel better about helping the cause, while stomping all over the virgin land mass of Antarctica. Crazy idea. What about raising funds by just passing the word and bringing people on board with your cause. Maybe they’re afraid of getting nailed by anti-SPAM laws of the Federal Government.

And, the capstone of the week: Humans using more than our fair share of solar energy. Scary. I wonder if they calculated from the number of people turning their skin to leather on the beaches of the world. And….if some snail darter isn’t inland where I might be, am O supposed to package up the sunlight raining down and ship it to someone living near a pond, so they can release the energy over the water and let the darter get some quality rays?

Geez…it’s getting nutty out here, but I will draw the line at providing free cars to lemmings. They’ll only take a one way trip to the nearest cliff and careen over it, no matter what they tell you about their plans for the day.