I must recommend to Chi Trib, Sun-Times, Daily Herald, Daily Southtown, and any other Chi medium as news and/or feature subject, Michael Yon.  He’s a former Green Beret who became an “independent journalist” last January after attending funerals of friends killed in Iraq.  Traveling with U.S. troops — “embedded” is the word we got familiar with during the initial fighting — but sometimes going off on his own in Mosul and other hot spots, he blogs with words and pictures, providing a unique view of Iraq that’s an important alternative to daily roadside explosions and other horrors of war.

Seattle Times has covered him here  and here, as in telling how he almost gave up on his venture:

Back in February, one month into his stay in Iraq, writer Michael Yon almost ended his attempt to chronicle the war in an online blog. He lacked the backing of a newspaper, magazine or book publisher, and grew weary of the risks of life in a combat zone as he embedded with U.S. troops.

“I was ready to get out. I wasn’t getting paid, and it was damn dangerous,” Yon said. “Every day I was thinking ‘Is this the day I might get killed or get my legs blown off?’ “

Yon hung on, emerging as one of the best-read bloggers of the war (his site is michaelyon.blogspot.com), as he chronicled a tumultuous spring and summer in Mosul with the “Deuce Four,” a battalion of the 24th Infantry Regiment, part of the Fort Lewis-based 1st Brigade (Stryker), 25th Infantry Division.  

He’s been adopted and sometimes accompanied by actor Bruce Willis, and there’s this coverage here, but mainstreamers have not caught on to Yon so far.  True, he’s not a newspaper guild member (I don’t think), but that doesn’t stop Chi Trib of course and shouldn’t bother the guild shops either.  They are missing good stuff, such as:

Posted July 21, 2005

Description of weapons cache found in a room hidden under a barnyard floor. Mosul, Iraq

The temperature down there was at least 20 degrees beyond any measure of hot. The air was filthy with dust, darkness, and the menace that wafted like a stench off all the bombs, bombs, and more bombs. I was sitting on bombs and missiles that I could not identify — there was not enough floor cleared for three men to stand. There were mortar rounds, some with fuses, some without. Some fuses had no safety pins. Some rounds had charges on the fins. There were surface-to-air missiles, RPGs, and strange munitions of various sorts. The danger was severe, but with this much explosives, it wouldn’t matter if you were in the hole or a hundred yards away; if this thing blows, game over.

Are the daily newspapers of Chicago and elsewhere missing a good bet, or aren’t they?

Good Sunday morning, and here’s a nice item with which to start your week.  It’s by a returning Iraq vet from a blogger named Austin Bay via one self-named Instapundit, and do not expect to read it or anything like it in your morning Chi Trib.  (I haven’t checked, so sure am I; but if it is there, I will push a bean down Ontario Street for a block with my nose):

After my return from Iraq I received phone calls and emails from military friends as they either came back to the US on leave or finished their tours and re-deployed “Stateside.” The typical phone call went like this: “I’m back. It’s great to be home. What’s up? How are you doing?” Then, the conversation quickly moved on to: “What’s with the press and Iraq?” The press usually meant television. On tv Iraq looked like it was going to Hell in a handbasket of flame and brutality; however, the images of carnage didn’t square with the troops’ experience.

Yes, Virginia, you can’t always believe what you read and hear and see on a screen.

Go here for Nancy J. Thorner’s 11/15/05 letter to Daily Herald, “Iraq shows progress despite naysayers,” that begins:

The constitutional election held on Oct. 17 in Iraq was an unbelievable historic event, even though many in the major print media seemed to have difficulty giving the Bush administration credit for the successful Iraqi election. Out of a country of 25 million people . . . 9 million voted in a move that will undoubtedly nudge Iraq toward creating a type of democracy that will be appropriate to their background and culture.

If you are a Thorner-letter fan like me and want to read further, however, it costs $2.95, which is a first in my surfing–searching experience.  It costs that much for a Chi Trib or NY Times archived article for which its writer was paid an arguably handsome amount.  The Herald, on the other hand, wants money for a letter to editor.

If you are an insider, however, having received the entire letter from its writer, you can read it all and find this, last paragraph:

The next milestone in Iraq will happen on December 15th when another vote will be held to elect a new parliament.  One hopes that the media will truthfully report on the event with accounts of what the election represents for the people of Iraq and for the world.  Enough of the naysayers, the doubters and the political pundits who sometimes seem to favor a win by the terrorists instead of victory for America and its coalition partners in Iraq.

As for naysayers and doubters, look no further than today’s Chi Trib page-one head, “Iraq’s agony spreads,” which is a gloom-and-doomer of the first water.  And typical, with obligatory eyewitness disaster-story account, “I thought a rocket had hit the mosque,” from a man in the washroom when the suicide-bomb went off in the Grand Mosque, etc.

It was the “deadliest attack in weeks.”  It “ came amid rising tensions ahead of December’s crucial election” (see above).  And (next paragraph), it happened near where “around 170 ill-treated detainees” were found by American soldiers days earlier.  Gloom, doom, and more gloom.

Rewriting this account, written on deadline by a hard-working reporter who like almost all reporters knows what her editors want and what will appear in print — it becomes second nature — I would have taken “As is so often the case in Iraq, however, although foreigners were targeted, the casualties all were Iraqis,” appearing in story’s middle, and made it the lead!

Elsewhere among the mediums, a network TV news account had this yesterday — flipping, I did not note which of the three, Curly, Larry, or Moe — at the close of a multi-second acount (long for TV) of the day’s disasters, when the reader added as appendix or afterthought something like “Elsewhere, U.S. forces killed 34 insurgents in (such & such town).” 

What about spending half of those seconds on something like “Marines win firefight” or “Rockets find their mark”?  The reader would go along with that, the crazy reasoning in support of it being that there’s a war going on, and 34 to nothing constitutes a win.  It does in the NFL anyhow.  And one less brick would be put in place as support for pulling out.

[It’s] typical of most products today: the material portion of their costs is small. Thus the question is not the difference between what different parties to the production get paid, but rather who adds value, how much, and where.

This is John Larrivee, assistant professor of economics at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, on the fair-trade coffee movement, on the Acton Institute site, asking “Why Not Fair-Trade Beer and Cakes?” whose raw material sells for so little compared to the finished product? 

If Starbucks is evil for the vast difference between what growers get paid and what Starbucks receives for its coffee, these other cases [a few cents worth of barley for beer at $3 to $9, $10 of flour for a $300 wedding cake] are worse.

Citing low productivity in coffe-growing countries, he says

The real problem is that in a market with low entry barriers (like agriculture), how much people earn depends upon how society-wide productivity affects the quality of outside opportunities. In the United States, farmers’ standard of living is higher because if the difference between how they can live farming and how they can live with another occupation grows too great, they will pursue other options.

Where there are no options, farmers are stuck.  In addition, “fair trade” prices would draw more producers into the raw-coffee market, driving down prices.  In which case you would have to keep selected, or non-selected, producers out, guild– or labor-union style, limiting beneficiaries arbitrarily.

All for the sake of “social justice” by of a “just price,” when (as late-16th-century Spanish Jesuits Molina and others argued) it’s the market that determines the just price.  In this case, Starbucks makes a better coffee and a better sales pitch and succeeds, vastly expanding the coffee market, to the benefit of coffee producers.  Meanwhile, Caribou and Seattle’s Best have their go at it.  This free-market process

will ultimately support more farmers around the world, and may transfer more funds into those countries than would have been the case in any “fair-exchange” system. These funds will gradually improve productivity in those countries, and do so far more effectively and fairly than any fair-trade program ever could.

Social justice promoters have good motives, but they should consider how the world works before they try to remake it.

Mark Brown’s Sun-Times column, “Cashier’s nightmare doesn’t need to get any more extreme,” is about Jewel-Osco’s unreasonable requirements in a merchandising scheme, one of probably thousands tried daily in stores and store chains around the country. 

Jewel-O has “a misguided program” in place, says Brown.  If you don’t think so, consider the “17-year-old cashier who literally [really?] has nightmares” about doing the wrong thing.  A less sensitive writer would have written, “who claims she has nightmares.”  Did she show them to Brown?

“A 62-year-old [Jewel employee] prays before she goes in to work each day that she’ll remember each time without fail because she’s already messed up twice.”  This is bad?

“If you’re unfamiliar with the source of their anxiety,” says Brown, “you may have missed Sunday’s column [I did] about how Jewel-Osco cashiers are subject to losing their jobs if they fail to call each and every customer’s attention to the Xtreme Value item that is being sold at the register that day.”

“A dedicated, veteran employee” told him about it.  How does he know she’s dedicated? Or how do I know if I didn’t read Sunday’s column? I don’t know.

The deal is, if the checkout man or woman doesn’t make a certain offer, the alert customer gets an item at no cost, and the non-alert checker gets penalized.  Happens enough, they get fired. “Instead of a carrot, there’s a stick,” says Brown, who apparently believes in one but not the other.

“We’re talking about people’s livelihoods, which are being put in jeopardy because somebody is willing to snitch to beat the system out of a dollar-bag of trail mix — the Xtreme Value item this past week,” says Brown, who is clearly caught up in this.

Look, if this were Ma and Pa on the corner, telling Susie Q to remember things or she’s out, he wouldn’t (a) know about it or (b) think it called for a column if he did.  But do companies like Jewel-O ever go out of business, leaving thousands jobless?  If you are going to focus on “a dollar-bag of trail mix,” you are going to miss macro-economics — what governs thousands of jobs and meets needs of thousands of households — completely.

Brown argues against the program in place, quoting the angry checkout people.  Having instituted hundreds of retail-store programs in his career, he is convinced this one’s a loser.  Furthermore, he says the corporate owner may want to cut back on higher-paid employees.  (I can’t imagine that.)

But the killer is that nightmare.  “Last night, it took me an hour to go to sleep,” the 17–year-old told him, “and I woke up in the middle of the night crying because in my nightmare I saw this random man that gave me the you-didn’t-offer-me-the-Xtreme-Value stare. In my dream, this was the last time, and I would be fired because of him.”

Brown asks, “Please don’t add to the nightmare.”  Wait a minute.  A literal nightmare or the other kind?  And where’s that story about competing and staying in business?