End of Year Reflections

Time to pause and reflect. This year I am not going to write one of those brag letters people send about how great the kids are doing, who visited whom and where did we travel during the year because, frankly, nobody cares and those letters are incredibly boring.  Nor am I going to bore you with what they call “organ recitals” here at this old folks’ home, e.g. “How’s your gall bladder?” You don’t want to know our infirmities. Instead, as I approach my 84^th year which begins on January 1 (not a hint for a gift, as I need nothing), let’s think about the meanings of growing old. It has its awesome memories, and profound losses.

The awesome aspect of hanging around this long is that we are history. We have experienced history and have a sense of it that people under sixty simply don’t conceive of. In fact, kids under thirty must find it puzzling and mysterious. You see, I remember.

Consider this: during the brief period when I taught at Southern Illinois University I took a couple of classes from Adjunct Professor Cutright. He was a big man, a genuine capitalist of the type that the Soviets most feared and respected, for he had overseen the installation in Moscow of the American printing presses that put out Isvestia, purveyor of Communist news on an American web press. Cutright was a veteran of World War I and had been in that fearsome battle of the Marne where in hand to hand combat he had bayoneted a German kid and suffered from PTSD for years afterward. He had also been part of the 1914 mine strike in the coal fields of Appalachia. And I knew him. I had shaken the hand of a survivor of the Marne. My God!

I remember the German invasion of Poland in 1937 and the fiery crash of the Hindenberg, described at the time as a terrible tragedy, yet only 24 were killed. Compare that with 9/11 when more died than we lost at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

 I remember the letter my father got from Poland in 1940 reporting the slaughter of his family in Warsaw, a pogrom that happened before the Holocaust got under way.

I remember Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, and listening to the news announcing it while we stood by my father’s radio in the fur shop on South Michigan street in South Bend, Indiana, a building long since torn down. I remember circus elephants parading trunk to tail down the main street announcing the arrival of the Barnum and Bailey circus before the big top burned down. I remember the side show with the bearded lady and the sword swallower but didn’t have the dime needed to see Fatima and her dance of the seven veils. But then, I wasn’t over 18, either. .

I remember the afternoon in a rental cottage in Michiana Shores, Indiana,  in August 1945 the  announcement of the atom bomb bring dropped on Hiroshima, news I heard while writing a sci-fi story (never published).

 I remember the news my brother Morton got in 1950 or 51 when he learned his friend from Central High School in South Bend had been killed when the Chinese came over the Yalu River in Korea by the thousands, a war we missed, thanks to college deferments which lasted until the shooting had stopped.

I remember demonstrating against the Vietnam War while we were being photographed by FBI men looking for agitators. I remember the First Iraq War. I remember the day the Iron curtain came up in Berlin as a simple barbed wire fence, the blockade and the air lift, and later when the subsequent wall came down.

Those who can’t remember all this have missed out on History.

But there are also profound losses. In life there are many passages. There are bar mitzvahs, weddings, baby showers, retirements and, ultimately, deaths and funerals. We expect to outlive our parents, but not our friends. One of the sorrows of growing old is the death of friends. Few of my old pals are still alive. At this writing I think Bob Priest of high schools days is still playing golf in Santa Barbara, but best friend of all, Bob Reinhold, is long dead. So are Duane Burnor, who wanted to be an Ojibwa and Bill Dupree, cave explorer, doctor, and alcoholic.   Alex von Seld and Lenny Rozansky of my days in the Army in Heidelberg are still around, but Richard Ziff died last October. Jay Hutchinson, Ray Bradfield, Patricia Kelso, Sonja Barron and Sven Huldt of Stockholm days are still alive, but Fred Hetter who spotted me as a potential CIA agent, is long gone.

We have very few real friends in life. We have many acquaintances, but not many people who, like us, have experienced the same history. We can talk about World War II, because we were around then, even if we did not personally participate.

Living here among the elderly where the average age is 86, we are like neighbor John Cooper who flew a B17 in the first daylight raid on Berlin and returned alone to the barracks while most of the others were shot down, dead or taken prisoner. In that situation, and in ours, he hesitated to get too close to replacements, for who knew would be the next to go? Because an average of two residents die here every month, we hesitate to make strong attachments..

To sum up: there are awesome memories, which give us perspective on life and politics and human folly. There are also solemn losses and regrets as we see the same errors repeated. We are enriched by our experience and there are fewer and fewer survivors who share that knowledge.

The end of the year is a time of reflection. May your next year be one of peace, health, and prosperity.

Taxing Sex

Taxing Sex

This may shock you. In this state we have huge income from various sin taxes. We have a tax on alcohol, on nicotine addiction (tobacco), and income from gambling on the lottery and video poker machines. When marijuana is legalized here, as it is in Washington, we will have a tax on that. What we don’t have is a tax on sex.

Not all sex is a sin, of course, but prostitution is. It’s time the state intervened and acknowledged the sex workers, both male and female. If the state made sex workers state employees, and provided clean and safe places to work, a.k.a bordellos, with a pension plan and health benefits we would take the amateurs off the street and put the pimps out of business.

This brings to mind a series of changes in the law, e.g. prostitution without a license and IRS rules about deductibles for sex toys and various accouterments connected with the trade. The state is already a shill for gambling, and a dealer in alcohol and other addictive drugs, so why not the state as procurer, e.g. pimp?  

Legalizing and controlling the sex trade would also protect health of the sex workers and reduce the risk of what is clearly a sometimes dangerous profession. But if sex workers were licensed, like many professions such as lawyers, doctors, hair dressers and barbers, they would benefit. And if there were a tax on their services, the state would take in a ton of money we could spend on health care, schools, and public housing.

A tax on sex would be an all around winner. 

"A Tree Sees..." (an occasional poem)

Tom Wright celebrated his 93rd birthday November 22. He often publishes a poem about his window on the world and the tree he watches out his window. Here is a conceit with the tree watching him back:

A Tree Sees…

Behind its leaves

Into the windows that squint out upon the world,

Through bifocals, trifocals, and cataracts.

Theirs are the heroic faces of the septuagenarians,

the octogenarians,

and the merely elderly

but not yet old.

Not old like the tree that watches,

the observant tree,

whose life cycle has its own seasonal rhythm and perspective.

The human animals come and go.

The trees, stoic, rooted, stand fast and watch.

How Obama screwed up on the ACA

Aside from the 56 million paid to an incompetent foreign web design company to set up the ACA log on system, Obama messed up by omitting two simple words when he promised people they could keep their old health plan if they liked it. Those words were "if legal."
Anyone with the sense to read the provisions of the ACA should know that certain provisions made some old policies illegal, like not covering preexisting conditions, like putting a lifetime cap on coverage, like not including maternity benefits, not providing for annual examinations, etc. Failing to live up to those ACA provisions makes an old policy illegal under the law. But people don't read their own policies and don't pay attention.

Politically savvy readers will realize the passage of the ACA with the cooperation of lobbyists from insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies was possible because they were promised a pool of 47 million new customers, many subsidized by the US government. Who could pass up that deal? So it passed, barely.
Now the insurance companies are scrambling to cash in and the melee is causing confusion and anger.  Eventually the public will say, "Screw the insurance companies! We want Medicare for all." Then we will finally have a single payer plan.
In Denmark where I have access to the tax forms being a potential payer of Danish income taxes I see they have a 5% income tax for health, just as we have a Social Security tax. That pays the so-called premiums for health in Denmark. So why can't we be that smart?

Dear Solicitor:

Harley  L.  Sachs

2545 SW Terwilliger Blvd. Apt. 328

Portland, OR 97201

Dear Solicitor,

Your invitation and information have arrived here and been given careful, thoughtful consideration. As you are no doubt aware, nowadays we get a great number of offers and requests. What we have to do is put them in perspective in consideration of our own financial limitations.  What we are prepared to do is make a counter offer.

I am Harley Sachs, a professionally published author for more than fifty-five years. I retired from teaching in1986 and in the years since have published more than thirty books ranging from memoirs and short stories, to serious novels and mystery “entertainments.” In that long career I have never begged for donations or applied for grants. I am not now asking for money from you, either.

It is important to support the arts, not only the visual arts, but the art of the written word, for little has more staying power over the centuries than the book. However, being an author is a tough business. Thanks to the digitizing of entire libraries, an American author today is in direct competition with every other author who ever lived whose works are published in English.

The only way you can significantly support this author is to buy a book. I do not personally sell books. I do not have the capital or the space for an inventory of printed copies. I depend on my vendors, such as Amazon.com, B&N, and lulu.com for actual sales.

If you’d like to have the personal satisfaction of having supported an elderly American author in poor health, this is your opportunity. Take a careful look at the enclosed list. Visit one of the vendors and read a free sample. I know you will find a title you will enjoy. The price is right. Some are priced under $3.00! How can you go wrong?

                                     Harley L. Sachs

Disclose or not discose?

When you download a new computer program or upgrade, you have to first agree to the terms of the contract. By clicking on “I agree.”  you are bound to its terms, though you can bow out by canceling all use of the product. Hidden in that fine print no one reads is a clause that says you agree not to use the program for unlawful purposes, a long list of which is usually spelled out. The point is, if there is illegality involved, the contract is void. In case of a dispute or lawsuit about damages yada yada yada there is usually an agreement to binding arbitration.

Business contracts often use agreements of confidentiality to protect proprietary information, patents and such. The same goes for other contracts, but here’s where it gets sticky. What if you contract with an organization that then, unbeknownst to you, engages in criminal activity? Surely you should elect to bow out to avoid culpability and liability. You could be swept up as a co-conspirator.

But what if that organization that has sworn you to secrecy is a government agency that is involved with criminal activity? Are you bound by your signature to hold to the contractual terms? That’s the dilemma faced by whistle blowers like Ellserg, Manning and Snowden who exposed the illegal activity of government agencies.

Violations of the Geneva Convention, assassinations, torture, and violations of the 4^th Amendment against unlawful search and seizure are crimes the government seeks to conceal behind the Official Secrets Act.  So for speaking out are those men criminals, conscientious citizens, traitors or heroes?

Breaking the Code of Silence

MS# 1697silence/760 words

August 12, 2013

Breaking the Code of Silence

a column by

Harley L. Sachs

If you observe a crime being committed, what is your responsibility? When we watched apparent drug deals going town in the house across the street, we notified the police. That was our responsibility. If you are a witness to a crime and refuse to speak out, you are sheltering the criminals and are complicit in their crimes. You become willing co-conspirators. Should you withhold evidence, like the two friends of the Boston bomber who threw away his laptop and backpack, you are obstructing justice and may go to prison.

Of course, if the criminals in your neighborhood are likely to kill you for speaking out,   what do you do then? Keep silent and reinforce their authority to continue to commit crimes? Or take your chances and possibly end up dead or in the Witness Protection Program, WITSEC, forced to take a new identity and live in a distance place along with an estimated 40,000 other hidden witnesses?

But what if the criminal acts you have observed are committed by your own government? Who do you turn to? That’s the dilemma faced by Manning and Snowden. Manning turned to Wikileaks. Snowden went to the press. In the days of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam War, the information was turned over to the New York Times. Ellsberg went to prison.

Breaking the code of silence has consequences. If you are a Mafioso and rat someone out, your body may be found in the trunk of a stolen car abandoned in the long term lot of the airport. If you have sworn to the Government Secrets Act you may go to prison or even, possibly executed if your acr is determined to be treason.

So when is a crime not a crime? Are the victims of the Boston bombers, killed or maimed simply “collateral damage” And how are they different from the women and children killed in a house struck by a drone flying over Pakistan? In the case of the Boston bombers, they constructed and brought their pressure cooker bombs to the crowd and set them off. In the case of the drone strikes, the anonymous persons who launched the smart bombs and missiles were thousands of miles away, sitting safely on our soil.

We are not at war with Pakistan or Yemen. Their air space is sovereign territory, just as the air space over New York is ours. To fly over a foreign country and launch bombs and missiles is an act of war. To aim those weapons at approximately specific alleged targets is assassination, another name for murder.

In the case of our calling the police about the drug deals going on across the street our recourse was our dependence on law and order and the Constitution. If we had no law and order, as is the case in Iraq where those essential parts of a civilized society have broken down or are non-existent, the alternative is revenge. Hence the frequent car bombings intended to terrify and cow the neighbors into silence or submission, just as our neighborhood gang of Mafioso hope to achieve through intimidation.

So now we have Manning and Snowden who both signed the Umberto Code of Silence  known as the National Secrets Act and then observed what they interpreted as crimes. If the criminal acts are committed by your own government, who do you turn to?

Whether you believe him or not, President Obama has said he had already taken steps to reign in the excesses of surveillance by the NSA, violations of the Constitution rules against unlawful search and seizure, issues which were our grounds for the Revolutionary War against the British Empire. Obama claims Snowden’s public revelation simply hastened the changes.

The dilemma remains. Whoever fired the drone missiles and killed those innocents are removed only by miles and intent from the drunken soldier who burst into homes in the middle of the night and murdered children in their beds.  The anonymous drone “pilots” will not be charged, but they generally pay a price of guilty conscience and PTSD for what they have done. They have to live with themselves. Some cannot and commit suicide out of remorse for what they have done and the people they have killed..

But the issue remains of who do you turn to to report a crime committed by your own government? The United Nations? A complicit Congress that voted in favor like the Nazi government who passed the Nuremberg Laws that made genocide of Jews legal?

Are we all guilty for remaining silent?

A Stain on the Congress

With 90% of the American public in favor of background checks for would-be firearm purchasers, the failure of our government to pass such a requirement is a betrayal of the public interest and a stain on the integrity of our representatives.

Since the Newtown massacre of school children and their teachers there have been more then six thousand victims of firearm violence in this country. Here in Oregon we have more deaths from firearms than from automobile accidents. Think about it.

Though anyone can buy an automobile, in order to drive it off your own property you must pass a driver’s test and have a license. Yet without background checks any idiot with the cash can buy a deadly weapon. God help us.

It may not be obvious to you, but this country is the largest manufacturer and exporter of weapons in the world. The military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about has taken over. Arms companies sponsor the NRA. With their contributions to the election campaigns of our representatives it sure looks like they are owned by the gun makers. They have sold their souls in order to be reelected. The Senate is so bound up by partisan bickering and conflict that no one wants to run for office. It reminds me of the last days of Rome described by Gibbon in his “Decline and Fall.” In those days it wasn’t the weapons makers who were the cause, but the fact that people ran for the Roman Senate in order to glean all they could from the system before they were poisoned. No one worth his salt would run.

It’s time that congress stood up for the safety of Americans they represent by supporting sensible background checks for firearm purchasers. 

A cautionary tale for American Muslims

The United States has a sad history of racism and intolerance that may be repeated if we are not vigilant.
Remember, the so-called New World was colonized for two purposes: for gold and to convert the indigenous peoples to Christianity.The Spanish conquerors made every effort to obliterate all traces of the previous cultures and religions.
As the new United States expanded westward, native peoples were displaced and even slaughtered. One tribe was hunted like animals until none remained.Surviing native American Indians had their children taken from them and put in missionary schools to convert them to Christianity and eliminate their native habits, language, and religion.
When the Chinese laborers came for the Gold Rush and to build the trans-continental railway, they were eventually expelled for fear of the "yellow peril."
The United States was one of the last countries to officially abolish slavery and indentured servitude, though the latter still exists in sweat shops and aur pair girls. 
The Mormons were persecuted and had to flee to the west and settle in Utah.
At the outbreak of World War II Japanese-Americans were interred in concentration camps.
Today thousands of so-called illegal immigrants are being reported and held in camps pending their expulson.
Now, since the 9/11 attack by fifteen Muslims, chiefly from Saudi Arabia, he country is at war against Muslim extremists, using drones flying over countries we are not at war with to assassinate alleged terrorists. Each so-called "collateral damage" of innocents adds to the recruitment of others seeking revenge.
Given that history, it is essential that all American Muslims speak out against terrorism and identify potential bombers. The risk is that besides being spied upon by FBI informants, we might see an American repeat of the Nazi Nurenberg Laws.

Getting off the Grid

MS# 1696/ 614 words

June 21, 2013

 

Getting off the Grid

a column by

Harley L. Sachs

Anyone who has read my columns about surveillance over the years should not be surprised by the so-called revelations that NSA is tracking your phone calls. It’s a useful intelligence gathering method for detecting potential terrorist activity by seeing who calls who when one of the callers is a known terrorist. Like expanding ripples when a stone hits the water, the pattern reveals the center of activity. Of course, to make any sense of this you need enormous data collecting ability and super fast computers to put it all together. NSA has that in its huge complex in Utah. But you’re not a terrorist, so what do you care? Well, you might care. Here’s how:

A woman told me she was shopping in Macy’s when she got a call on her cell phone from a manikin. Seems the store models are equipped with cameras. The dummies are watching. It’s not only Indian casinos that identify your face as you walk in the door. Now some stores do it, too. Using facial recognition, the Macy’s system recognized her, where she was in the store, knew what she usually shopped for, and offered her a discount coupon on her cell phone, since that’s the department she was shopping in.

Grocery stores where you use the so-called club card know what you eat. Stores in the national Kroger conglomerate send that data to a computer in Cleveland where individualized coupons are printed up and sent to you, based on what your past buying history is. The coupons are useable only by you.

Cell phones act like a recording GPS, and can track your movements. When the Boston bombers hijacked the SUV, the escaping owner left his cell phone behind in the car. It took only minutes to locate it for the shootout that brought the incident to a blazing end. That tracking method was also used in a jewel robbery case when the cell phone records proved the movements and location of the robbers. If you have a cell phone, they know where you are.

If you value your privacy, your only hope is to get off the grid. You have to think like a spy or a criminal.  Get rid of the cell phone. No more texting. You also need to never use an ATM machine. They keep a record of who was there, with their photos, how much they withdrew, and when. Avoid them. But what about checks? No good, either, for your bank statement shows what you bought, how much you spent, and of course the sales slip lists what you paid for. Oh, and by the way: get rid of the credit cards. They track your purchases and the time and place they were used.

So: no cell phone, no credit cards, no check book, no ATMs. But there’s more: your web surfing is recorded, and all your tweets are saved by the NSA. We already knew email was screened. Best not to use a home computer connected to the web in any way. .No more internet on line shopping.  They know what sites you visit and who your Facebook friends are.

So what is left? You have to go back to a strictly cash basis. This makes it hard to buy an airplane ticket or make a hotel reservation, but if you are trying to preserve your privacy,  this demands some sacrifice. Like my son-in-law with no bank account or credit card, you live out of your pocket.

Ah, but what about that scene in Macy’s? With no cell phone, you can’t be offered that in store coupon. This gets us down to the facial recognition program. We have to do something about your face. Maybe wear a burka?

Changes in Food Choices

1695foods/ 728 words

April 18, 2013

                                                        Our Changing Foods

a column by

Harley L. Sachs

Food choices have changed drastically over the years. During the Great Depression of the 1930’s the typical restaurant menus offered, besides steak and pork chops,  liver and onions, chicken and dumplings in a white sauce,  meat loaf, half a roast or fried chicken, scalloped potatoes and various generic soups like chicken noodle or tomato. You could find ham or pot roast.  Hamburgers were White Castle sliders or Wimpy, inspired by Popeye’s burger gulping pal. You could order a grilled cheese sandwich,  egg salad or a hot dog.  Fish? Well, there was perch or cod.

Outside of cities where there were large Jewish populations, there was no such thing as a bagel. You had to find a delicatessen to get a pastrami sandwich with an authentic kosher dill pickle.  Only Jews heard of lox and bagels with or without a schmere of cream cheese.. Only in places like New Jersey did anyone ever hear of something called pizza. Even chili was relatively new, an import from the Southwest. There were occasional Chinese restaurants serving not authentic Chinese foods, but American chop suey and chow mien. How much has changed since then!

I never heard of a taco until I visited Bob, my best friend from high school, who had moved to California in 1949. A taco was ethnic Mexican food and didn’t reach the Midwest until later. He also introduced me to giant prawns at a restaurant near the Salton Sea.

Today there are bagels in every grocery store, though the New York aficionados will deny that they are authentic unless boiled first. They come in all flavors, plain blueberry, whole wheat, and “everything.” Now, of course, prawns and similar shellfish of all sizes can be had frozen in the big grocery stores. Tacos are everywhere, and MacDonald’s and Burger King, Wendy’s and other burger joints compete  with upcoming Subway which cries “eat fresh,” a comment on the places where burgers  may sit, waiting for customers, until their company-designated expiration time runs out.

My first exposure to pizza was in Newark, New Jersey in 1953 when I visited a roommate from college while on my way to Germany and army service in Heidelberg. That pizza was a memorable, milestone meal. Now they are everywhere, in all sizes with your choice of toppings.

Today you would be hard pressed to find liver and onions on the menu of most restaurants. There are occasional meatloaf offerings, and chicken is Southern fried, dipped in batter. KFC dominates the Southern Fried Chicken business and is all over the world.

We have become foodies. Portland, Oregon, for instance, has become the foodie capital of the world with literally hundreds of ethnic food carts clustered wherever there is sufficient foot traffic. A food cart, being on wheels, is taxed only as a vehicle, so there is no property tax, much to the chagrin of real restaurant competitors. At least, those offer dining indoors. 

Those early Depression days of basic meals are over. We have become epicureans. Now, thanks to the post Vietnam War influx of immigrants, we have Thai, Indian, and Vietnamese dishes in additional to previous waves of immigrants with their ethnic foods like Poles, Germans, Russians, etc. The English bought us fish and chips.  The food carts offer just about everything you can take away.  Sampling a different place every day you could indulge literally for years.

It’s all about choices, but if you long for a dish of liver and onions or chicken and dumplings, you may have to look a long time. As for fish, thanks to depleted stocks, cod has almost disappeared. Now we ubiquitous farmed seafood: salmon, steelhead, tilapia, prawns, and hush puppies grown in ponds and pens. They are crowded together in water polluted with their own excrement. To counteract the bad effects of swimming in their own filth they are fed antibiotics which we get to absorb second hand.

In those early days of the Great Depression we ate locally grown foods. Now my menu includes melon from Costa Rica, bananas from Central America, tilapia from Thailand, pineapple from Indonesia, various foods from China, even lamb from New Zealand (when I can afford it!). The list goes on and on. To paraphrase Dorothy, when it comes to food  we aren’t in Michigan any more. Our stomachs are world travelers and we don’t even have to leave town.

Premise of the Second Amendment

The Premise of the Second Amendment

a letter by

Harley L. Sachs

All this imbroglio about gun control and gun ownership justified by the Second Amendment misses the essential condition: “In order to establish a well-regulated militia…” None of those gun owners are members of a well regulated militia. The Second Amendment was created at a time when memories of colonists under an oppressive foreign government were still fresh and there was a need for resistance. This has been extrapolated by the NRA into a fear that our own government will take away our guns.

Some will argue that the states already have a militia, which is the National Guard under the control of the governors, but the Federal Government has the authority to mobilize the National Guard, and has sent our state armies to foreign lands to fight. The National Guard, then, cannot be construed as a militia to protect us from our own government.

What the Constitution appears to enable is a home guard. We have no home guard, and we have no well regulated militia. Being part of the official militia should be a condition for ownership of military-style firearms.

Job interview for an Intelligence Agency

This was prepared as a monologue for a playwriting workshop:

1066 words

The Job Interview

Good morning. I have your application for employment with the agency and I’ve read your essay with great interest. I understand that you are keen to serve our country’s intelligence service. Your minor in interpersonal relations and your foreign languages skills are a plus. I also see that you are aware that 95 percent of this work is rather dull research, not unlike what you experienced in graduate school. One difference, of course, is that for us as a field agent you will deal with primary sources. But there is a caution, which you must be made aware of before we go any further with your application.

I’m sure you are familiar with the James Bond movies. Double-O-Seven is his code number and he always identifies himself as “Bond, James Bond.” In this business you will never reveal your real name. You don’t know mine, and your application has only a number identifier keyed to the date. We do not number our agents, for if there is a Double-O-Seven there must be an O-Six and so on.

Ours is the name that is never spoken. You are never to mention the name of this agency. If in Washington should you meet people socially, the most you can say is you work for some government agency, but not us. In fact, for all you know, we might be some other agency than the one you think you applied for. But I assure you that I do represent a United States agency, and not the Mossad or the Venezuelan Embassy. Granted, in this business you can never be a hundred percent sure of anyone or anything.

James Bond carries all sorts of weapons and is provided with a fancy car and various gadgets. You will never be armed. No Beretta, no tear gas fountain pen, or any of that gadgetry. Your only tools will be your camera and your pencil. Unlike those folks in the World War II resistance, you’ll not be trained to use a secret radio transmitter.  You will be trained in tradecraft and possibly the use of certain ciphers.

 In the movies James Bond kills dozens of bad guys. Did you notice that they are killed, but never get hurt? And Bond is never arrested for involuntary manslaughter, not put on trial, doesn’t go to jail, and is not executed. Nor does he attend the funerals of his victims or meet his victims’ families. James Bond is a comic book super hero. If you have fantasies about being a super hero, forget it. This job is not for you. It is best that you are invisible.

We will provide you with a cover story. It will be something innocuous, but plausible. For instance, until her cover was blown by Mr. Cheney, Valerie Plame ostensibly worked out of a Washington law office. Her outing cost seven of our agents their lives.

 Your pay with be two tiered, your public pay, and the real salary. For instance, if your cover is to be a homeless person who sells Street Roots, you will live the life of a homeless person and spend only what you gain by begging and selling the newspaper. The rest of your pay will be held by us in escrow until such time as you leave the agency, retire, or die, as the case may be.

Partly because of current budget concerns, we can only offer you a position as a contract agent. That means you are a private contractor and not an official employee of this agency. We do that for several reasons. You will be subject to the self-employment Social Security tax. Therefore, you do not qualify for any benefits such as vacation pay, health insurance, unemployment, disability, or the pension plan.

If you spend lavishly, far beyond the means of, for instance, your cover as homeless person, you will be suspected of being a drug dealer or of doing something else illegal. To avoid that temptation, we withhold a portion of your pay in case you mess up or decide to go over to the opposition. In that case, your savings with us are forfeited. The longer you work for the agency, the more you risk losing should you mess up.

You will be required to sign the Official Secrets Act and all your activity will be classified. No one, not even your spouse or partner, not your mother or your father, is to know what you really do or what your real job is. It is a double life, not so very different from the life of a man who has a mistress or is a criminal. In fact, you must be aware that when you are working outside this country espionage is a crime. You are a criminal. If you are caught, like Gary Powers when his U2 plane was shot down over Russia, we will deny we know anything about you. Since you are not an official employee of the agency, we do not know you. You will be hung out to dry. If convicted and imprisoned, as Powers was, you may get lucky and be traded for one of their spies that we have caught. Under the Geneva Convention, if you are a soldier in uniform and captured you need only reveal your name, rank, and serial number. If you are not in uniform and are a spy you may simply be shot.

There’s an international trade meeting coming up. Should you be hired, we may ask you to attend as your first assignment. We may point out certain delegates we would like you to cultivate. Be friendly. Listen to their problems and their stories. If you are successful, they will soon think you are their best friend. You will report everything to us. You will never know what we do with your reports. You will not know what action we take as a result of your activity. It is possible that, because of their contact with you, a foreigner, they may be in jeopardy. They have their own security people at work and if they suspect that your target has betrayed their country, he or she may be arrested, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. You, by betraying their confidence, will have betrayed them to us. Can you, for the sake of our country, betray people?

 Now do you still want this job?

The Sachs Firearm Bill

The Sachs Firearms Bill

Preamble

Though the 2^nd Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms for a regulated militia, ownership and use of a firearm is also a responsibility.

Who Shall Own or Possess a Firearm?

Whereas the Constitution provides that a citizen shall be permitted to bear arms, that right shall be restricted to citizens who have not been convicted of a felony and are deemed mentally competent to pass a psychological background check. Undocumented (illegal) aliens may not own or possess a firearm of any kind. Foreign tourists with hunting licenses may possess a rifle or shotgun during the hunt.

Classification of firearms

A hunting rifle or shotgun may be owned or possessed by anyone holding a valid hunting license. Hand guns are not considered hunting firearms and no one under eighteen may own or possess a handgun. Unlike hunting weapons intended for killing game, the primary purpose of handguns is to kill people.

Registration and Insurance

All firearms must be registered with the police and insured for liability. For instance, if a gun is stolen, the gun owner must report the theft to the police within seventy-two hours. Should the stolen gun be used in a felony, the gun owner is culpable as an accessory and liable for damages and subject to prosecution, just as if he were the driver of a getaway car for a bank robber who kills a clerk. The driver is also guilty of murder.

If a gun owner lends a firearm to someone the owner is still responsible for damages resulting from the misuse of said firearm. Renters of a firearm for hunting must take out a liability insurance policy for the duration of the hunt.

Insurance of all firearms is to protect the gun owner from losses through theft and misuse. Should a person be accidentally wounded, the insurance policy may provide some liability protection in case of a lawsuit for damages or wrongful death. Such coverage may be attached as a rider on a home owner’s or renters’ policy.

Firearm owners must be prepared to show proof of insurance and registration at all times when the firearm is in their possession. Owners with carry permits must be prepared to show proof of insurance, license to carry, and registration just as a car owner must show a valid driver’s license, proof of registration, and insurance in a traffic violation.

Endorsed by

                                      

                                             Name of elected official or representative

                                                                                                  

Gun insurance

Guns are not toys. They are lethal weapons. Just as in order to drive my car it must be registered and insured and I need a valid license, a similar approach to guns should remind people that owning a lethal weapon is a serious responsibility. Instead of banning guns by type and magazine capacity, let’s require liability insurance and registration along with licenses to carry. The insurance industry could readily attach a rider to your home owner’s or renter’s policy. If stopped by the police a gun owner would have to produce proof of insurance and license, just as I must do if I am stopped in a traffic stop.  If I don’t have those, my car may be towed; for a gun owner, the gun could be impounded until the owner produces proof of insurance.

When I taught English to the Swedish police in Stockholm, you could own a gun but until you had a gold marksmanship medal you could not remove it from the shooting club. One of my students had to carry a weapon on the job, but could not have a gun at home himself as he was not qualified.

Protect your privacy on the web

Tor, a barrier to internet snoops

a column by

Harley L. Sachs

What with surveillance cameras everywhere,your grocery chain central computers knowing everything you buy and your gps capable of knowing when you’ve broken the speed limit or skipped a stop sign, or even your TV set capable of watching you instead of the other way around, it’s a wonder there’s any privacy left. If you’re worried about someone knowing what web sites you visit, fear no more. The US Navy, the Swedish government and other groups finance the Tor Project and it’s free!.

The original purpose was to aid governments and police agencies in keeping their investigations away from prying eyes, the free software also serves people with nefarious interests. Isn’t that typical? It’s like the old Mad Magazine Spy versus Spy cartoons. Just when a new technology is developed for good purposes, someone turns it to something nasty. When the internet was invented (by Al Gore or someone else) nobody anticipated that 40% of its use would be for international pornography.

It’s not enough to download and install the Tor program. You must use its browser and follow the instructions or your attempts at privacy will be circumvented. There is ample documentation available on the Internet. The idea is to conceal your IP address, so you can’t use flash player and other programs which can trace back to you. So no addons or plugins. Tor encrypts the web sites you visit.

The secret to how the system works is the routing. Your surfing is routed through other computers, and the more there are of them the better. In spy tradecraft this could be described as using cutouts, such as using a dead drop to pass your message onto a courier you never meet who passes it on to another she has never met. It’s like putting your message under a rock in the park to be picked up by someone else who puts it in a hollow tree, etc. In the case of Tor, the chain of communication is through other people’s computers, which may include yours when someone else is using Tor..

The risk there is that your hard drive may inadvertently, unknown to you, be a temporary parking place for some kiddie porn. That happened to a student in Graz, Austria. He volunteered his computer as a link in the Tor network, but when the police found the porn, he was accused of being a child pornographer and has charges pending. It’s a bit like arresting the mail carrier for having incriminating post in his bag.

The Internet overview of the Tor Project and its uses states, “Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.

“Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization.”

General Allen should have used some sort of secure cutout for his love letters. Of course, his method was to post draft letters to a phony gmail account his girl friend also had access to. The messages were never actually sent. They were opened, read, and never went beyond the draft stage.  A better option would have been to encrypt the messages using  free pgp encryption, but that demands your writing the message, encrypting it, destroying the original, and then sending it. This is tedious and of course if someone can see your’ve got encrypted messages they might be curious.

There’s much more to the Tor Project than can be covered in a single newspaper column. Study it carefully and follow the instructions meticulously or you may inadvertently give away your IP address.  Then all your efforts at internet privacy will be for naught.

More about "The Misadventures of Cpl Sachs"

Well, it's not only completed, but the little 116 page book is now set up at lulu.com for sale as a paperback for $9.95 and on the ebook readers--Kindle, Nook, and at Lulu for only $4.00. It's amazing that I could piece together so much about the mere 21 months I spent in the US Army back in the 1950's at the end of the Korean War. I wasn't much of a student at Indiana University and certainly no soldier though the army provided me with an assortment of uniforms. I realized as I completed this memoir that the army was the only time I ever had a "real" 9-5 style job. As I report in it, I had zero sex life before the army but was "normalized" by the time I was discharged. My last official duty was as a  guard on a train taking prisoners to Bremerhaven for transport to Leavenworth federal prison. The worst offender was being sent to the slammer for fornication, or maybe it was adultery. He'd seduced or been seduced by a number of officers' wives while working as a porter at a dependent hotel. I thought fornication was SOP,. standard operating practice in the army, but the Universal Code of Military Justice does in fact have adultery among its list of actionable offenses. General Petraeus please note. My own sexual exploits,such as they might have been, are not in the memoir, for, as I remind readers, Mother said it was never proper to kiss and tell. However, the love story is obliquely depicted in my MA thesis, "The Golden Grape," which is in the Indiana University library. "Queer Company" is the novel I wrote about the experimental training unit I was assigned to at Camp Breckinridge.A copy of that is in the US Army historical archives, but it's available as an ebook and paperback. I can't remember if I sent a copy of "The Golden Grape" to the archive or not. My own archive is in the warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky.The book was revised as "A Woman for Sam." It's still in manuscript form.
I suppose "The Misadventures" is my own equivalent of "Beloxi Blues" which was Neil Simon's military novel. My memoir is not a novel, of course. It's a remembrance of my own "Grand tour" of Europe in 1 1/2 day weekends. It's written for my daughters, but anyone who might find it interesting can obtain it. At times it is humorous.The identities of my pals in uniform have been kept confidential. They know who they are.