A few good things about a military draft....

In case you think that there is nothing good that can be said about compulsory military service, I happened to note a few on Terry Cowgill's blog recently.

They are in comment #11 on the blog entry that follows:

http://tcextra.com/terrycowgill/2007/01/11/a-grim-little-talk/#comments

I'm glad, as always, to have comments.

Call me "Out of step with the regiment"

Relationships with Iran then -- and now

In a former life, I was a compliance and loss prevention weenie at Citibank, now Citigroup.

Back then, a couple of decades ago, an entity called Bank Melli had been identified by the Treasury Department as an official bad guy, an agent of a hostile state, namely Iran.

Bank Melli had a fancy office on Park Avenue, accounts with Citi, and a fancy international clientele. I can remember jumping through hoops to close down everything Citi had that even SOUNDED like Bank Melli. We kept them on the "pink list" -- the official paper listing that circulated to all the branches -- as "No Further Dealings" for several years. That list had sufficient weight in the institution that if some poor branch person should happen to process a wire transfer to an entity on the pink list, or, God forbid open an account for such an entity, they could be confident that their job was history and they would have an appointment with the US Attorney of the Southern District of New York.

Yet, from what I heard upstairs, despite all of Citi's efforts at being good guys in this, we still got pretty badly abused for having dealt with Bank Melli BEFORE they made the "big time" -- the Treasury Department list.

Now, I understand that a Chinese firm that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange is the prime mover behind a multi-billion dollar loan to.........wait for this...........IRAN, for the purposes of developing their nuclear industry.

The NYSE, evidently having little sense of history, appears to have decided to stonewall, rather that summarily delist the firm in question. (This sort of action -- cessation of all business relations -- was evidently something that Citi was expected to have done voluntarily back in the old days, even before Bank Melli made the Treasury List).

HOWEVER, the Chinese firm is an oil company.

I could leave this right here right now, and I probably should, once I suggest that the likelihood that the Treasury Department, under the current administration, would put that company on "the list" is very low -- and if, going a step farther, bowing to political pressure, Treasury should happen to do add them to the list, the likelihood that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York would be permitted to discreetly mention this fact to the New York Stock Exchange is remote in the extreme.

Friends of Cheney, you know.

The Whacko Generation....

All within a fairly short period of time, I've seen: (1) an article about a 12 year old girl, a special education student, who was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for wetting her pants at school. (2) My daughter came up with some scandal from a high school in Texas where some of the girls were (gasp!) taking pictures of each other holding objects (not penises) with condoms on them and generally being disrespectful of adult authority -- like giving a teacher the finger. (3) And the New York Times had a scare article about the successor community websites to www.myspace.com -- most specifically scary for them was www.stickam.com -- where people as young as 14 might be permitted to exhibit live webcam pictures of themselves on line with no web nanny ensuring that they did not do SOMETHING that would bring the world to a speedy end.

The world of soccer has independently been screaming -- this time with extremely good justification -- about the ADULTS who scream at the kids, the refs, the coaches, and each other during games of kids as young as FIVE (5) years old.

Synthesis:

--I am quite willing to cut special ed students a lot of slack, simply because they have some otherwise-ableness that puts them in that category, and because they universally have to put up with a ton of crap about "riding the short bus" and so forth. Arresting one because she pees in her pants, even if it appears to be a defiant gesture, is a far greater indictment of the adults involved than it is of the kid.

--As my astute daughter points out about the Texas cheerleaders, Newsweek must have been awfully hard up for prurient content to print the article. (It reminds me of the five page spread US News and World Report did a few years ago about the legion of fifth graders who were allegedly fellating every male in sight.) The "cheerleader" tag was probably what made the story even moderatly titillating. Otherwise, it was just a story about kids behaving normally (for adolescents) and adults being completely over the top.

--I took some time and looked at stickam.com and have to say that it is pretty tame and routine stuff. There are a lot of kids from about 13 and up (some no doubt fudge their ages -- when did kids NOT fudge their ages?) of both sexes, a few older people (some older women, but mostly men in their 30s chatting up the teenage girls), and not very much at all in the way of prurient content. Most of the girls have something in their profiles to the effect of "If you ask me to show my boobs I will ban you".

Okay, COULD one of the men strike up an on-line acquaintance with one of these tamales and arrange a meeting? Yeah, sure -- if the girl wants to. And something perhaps is different from my own teenage years, when I saw girls I knew having surreptitious meetings with older guys from the surrounding towns? I'm sorry, but the way kids are instructed today about the perils of the internet, beginning in elementary school, no girl goes with a guy she meets on the web without full knowledge of exactly what she is doing.

I would say that live webcam chatting probably makes things safer for the kids than the previous text-only chatting, in fact! As the cops note, it is easy for them to pretend they are a 13 y.o. girl and by promising sex lure a dirty old man to a bust when using text-based chat room contact. It would be a whole lot harder to do with both parties face to face via webcam.

--With regard to soccer adults, I'll say that the adult behavior is downright appalling. I run a summer soccer program at Trinity Church, in Lime Rock, CT, and I do hear what the kids say about some of the parents/adults they encounter in local recreational soccer, middle school soccer, and travel team soccer. From what the kids report back, it's pretty clear that Goshen, CT, wins the title for the most egregiously offensive adults in my area, but the ongoing commentary in the Youth Soccer world about problem parents -- and problem adults in general -- makes it clear that there are similar whackos elsewhere, probably in even greater numbers.

--What has been going on for the last several years in Washington, DC, in terms of selfish, irresponsible and hypocritical behavior by adults in high level elected positions provides only more evidence that the generation that followed mine is completely bonkers. They are clearly the antithesis of what Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation" -- namely the generation that preceded mine.

Interestingly, the generation that followed the whacko generation -- today's kids, teens, and twenty-somethings -- seem to be a whole lot more sane. Witness the special ed kid peeing in her pants, the Texas cheerleaders, and the www.stickam.com clientele. Their behavior is actually quite age-appropriate. It's a shame that the whacko generation can't deal with it!