Saigon 134

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon is home to some of the best soup in the world. Here at Pho Le we enjoyed some really good Pho along with the owners shouting at each other and staff as the patrons swirled in and out off the street. Piles of basil, sprouts were on the shared tables. About $2 for a huge breakfast bowl.

The people of Saigon have been very welcoming and friendly. The press of humanity is both exhausting and fun in this city of about ten million, spread over many miles of tiny shops, restaurants, and busy streets flowing over with scooters, taxis, and people.

Everybody knows that – regardless of temporary bailout advantages – long term Government spending cuts are imperative to restoring the economy and restoring US prosperity.

The two big ticket items in our US budget are Military and Entitlements.   Interest on the debt is also substantial, but to cut that you need to … cut military and entitlements.  Nothing else really matters that much in terms of reducing the deficit and debt to levels that won’t cripple the future of our children.

So, my proposal is to do a MUCH better job of combining military expenditures and training in ways that support infrastructure projects.     This will require more research, but it seems odd to me that we invest tens of billions per year training soldiers to do things in isolation that could be helping build US infrastructure.  e.g. Building shelters, communications, etc.  Why not redirect some of this training to things that enhance our infrastructure here at home?    Obviously there are several obstacles to overcome – most will be bureaucratic in nature, some will come from the left wing who will fret that the military should not be integrated into everyday life in this fashion.   We should be able to overcome both of those.

Keeping soldiers safe should always be a very high priority, but too few defense advocates focus on this nearly as much as projecting big power in the form of complex and expensive systems and massive troop deployments.    I’d argue that the *only* area where we should basically not worry about costs is in troop safety.

…. more on this later ….    need to see what exactly we spend our money on in what Eisenhower correctly suggested would be a massive complex of unnecessary and wasteful spending.

Today the naively misguided Dr. Phil show featured the emotional tragedy of pirates attacking tourists.    Now, I’m no fan of pirates and as a frequent traveller I’m hoping not to get attacked by pirates anytime soon [especially when I visit Hue, Vietnam area in February], but the weepy nonsense featured on talk shows to suck in the naively misguided emotions of we in the rich world really, REALLY bothers me.     When I scoffed at the Dr. Phil pirate nonsense as trivial compared to malaria somebody even told me I was not being compassionate enough!

Why do these stories interfere with solutions?   They distract us from the real tragedies at hand – many of which we can actually do something about.  Hey, Dr. Phil – here’s a solution provider we’ll never see on your show :  http://www.rbm.who.int/donate.html

There is a proverbial bloodbath in terms of lives lost from disease in the developing world, yet we simply don’t want to hear about that.     Given that it’s much more within our control than, say, Pirates in the Caribbean, I think we should pay a lot more attention.

A child dies of malarial disease every 30 seconds.     Pirate deaths may be very interesting and get viewers excited, but our attention to this stuff isn’t going to change much in the world.

So, am I a hypocrite for not doing more than a few donations per year to fight malaria and intestinal disease?    Yes I am, and I encourage everybody to write about why.    Like most people I struggle to provide less talk and more action when it comes to charity.  However at least I recognize the foolish hypocrisy of fretting over nonsense vs substance.     That’s an important first step, because without it we’ll continue to squander billions of hours and dollars fighting fake demons while the real killers remain.   Adding yours to the growing voice in favor of sweeping global health care initiatives may not save us from any pirates, but it’ll save millions of children from a horrible deaths.

Malaria No More	The Global Fund	Against Malaria Foundation
SurfAid	Nets for Life	Nothing But Nets
Malaria Consortium
		Global Business Coalition web site
	Medicines for Malaria Venture	PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative