The Uncolumnist

Will the Real Problem Please Stand Up?

2008-07-22T05:12:00.001-05:00

Will the Real Problem Please Stand Up?
By: Matthew

Reality dictates that we live in a society that is not economically friendly to those who have children, particularly not at an early age. Raising children is an extraordinarily expensive endeavor despite the numerous attempts by local, state, and federal governments to ease the financial burden of parenthood with entitlement programs, tax incentives, and so forth. Childbirth is seldom a lucrative enterprise. As result, the prevailing common wisdom is that childbirth under any but the most economically secure circumstances amounts to fiscal (and, by logical extension, social and moral) suicide. The greatest reproductive horror we may foist upon ourselves in this day and age, save perhaps the contraction of a sexually transmitted disease, is the dreaded teen pregnancy. Statistics will easily support the argument that teen pregnancy can lead to poverty, reduced educational opportunities, depression, and other social ills. The offspring of teenage mothers suffer their own host of problems. It should come as no surprise that commentators of all stripes routinely express shock and dismay whenever a display of teen sexuality and fertility rears its ugly head.

What we have seen recently is a rash of incidents hinting at a growing trend in teen sexuality, at least according to the media pundits reporting on them. Amid reports that teen pregnancy is on the rise, we had the release of the acclaimed motion picture Juno featuring a heroic teen mother; an alleged (falsely alleged, as it turns out) teen pregnancy pact resulting in 17 teenage girls from a single school in Gloucester, MA becoming pregnant within the span of a year where normally 4 per year become pregnant; Jamie Lynn Spears, younger sibling to Britney Spears, becoming pregnant and giving birth below the age of 18; and Miley Cyrus, a pop-cultural icon to many 'tween girls, being photographed in pseudo-sexual poses for Vanity Fair magazine. Additionally, a hacker has apparently obtained more unseemly photos of Cyrus from a cell phone, some of which he has released and some of which he has threatened to release on a future date.

To top it all off, we now have a study out of the UK claiming that all this exposure to rampant teen sexuality and positive images of teen pregnancy is damaging teenage girls psychologically. The study further concludes that pressure to lose weight, wear makeup, wear "adult" clothing, and have plastic surgery is also causing harm to teen and 'tween girls. The entire study (and many others) can be found on Girlguiding UK's website - www.girlguiding.org.uk - though a condensed synopsis of the study is making the rounds on popular news sites (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,382021,00.html). Central to the study is the stunning conclusion that girls come under a great deal of social pressure to appear "pretty" to other girls to gain social standing, and that media outlets aimed at young teen girls can have an enormous impact on how 'tweens perceive beauty along with socially-acceptable behavior.

Is the real problem here the content of 'tween media, or is it that 'tweens drink up such garbage like it's purple Kool-aid? It has long been documented that the psychology of young women can be quite different from males who often revel in defiant, counter-cultural displays, but what has not emerged is a reliable method of disabusing young girls of the idea that media outlets can and should affect their behavior. To its credit, the Girlguiding UK study does hold forth positive feedback from parents and peers as a viable bulwark against negative peer pressure driven by sensationalist media outlets; unfortunately, a sole focus on bolstering the self-esteem of girls ignores the very important life lesson that media outlets frequently spew pure garbage that must be held in suspicion, particularly from their entertainment and fashion news divisions. Furthermore, there is the stark and cold reality that girls become powerful and dangerous members of society as they develop physically and sexually, giving them the power to create human life and spread STDs in the most awkward of circumstances. It would be foolish for us to assume that an overwhelming majority of young girls would shun their own developing sexuality regardless of how logical and prudent it might be for them to do so. Should any significant number of young females successfully experiment with tossing aside their own virginities, today's socially inter-networked 'tweens would no doubt learn of the phenomenon very quickly and consider experimenting themselves. It is quite possible that Miley and Jamie Lynn serve more as icons of a trend rather than instigators of socially unacceptable behavior. A great number of young girls are fighting against the tide of social pressure from adults, embracing instead the notion that teen sexuality (and fertility) need not be held in shameful contempt by all those who bear witness to it (or partake of it). You can censor media all you like, but you won't stop a widespread change in culture and sexual mores in the process.

In the end, it does not seem that anyone can pinpoint what the problem is beyond the fact that many adults are profoundly uncomfortable with current trends in teen sexual behavior and the all-too-coincidental increase in sexually-charged media content aimed at teens and 'tweens. As far as media content goes, the way to protect your children is to instill in them a healthy level of contempt for vapid entertainment and fashion reporting (at the very least). However, no matter how much your struggle to brainwash your children into staying virgins until at least the age of 25, some of them are going to discover that their genitalia are functional at a much younger age and will exploit this fact towards whatever end they see fit regardless of the short-term and long-term consequences. What remains to be seen is whether or not this cultural shift, should it prove to be lasting, will include a thorough and meaningful adjustment in social behavior on the part of young women to account for the many hardships of teen pregnancy and childbirth. We adults have not found a solution to the social ills associated with teen pregnancy short of preventing pregnancy itself; can a generation of networked teens do any better? Don't bet on it.

Honda's Hydrogen Gambit

2008-07-22T05:10:00.001-05:00

Honda's Hydrogen Gambit
By: Matthew

By now some of you may have noticed that Honda is pushing a hydrogen fuel-cell automobile in limited markets in the United States (notably California). Apparently Honda feels confident that there are enough hydrogen filling stations being built to meet the needs of would-be buyers of the FCX Clarity. Let us ignore the automobile's merits (or lack thereof) for the time being and consider carefully what this means: Honda is betting that hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles will compete directly with or even supplant vehicles running on gasoline, ethanol (or e85), diesel/biodiesel, or electricity. That's a bold statement, even for a major automotive manufacturer like Honda; the future of fuels is uncertain, and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles that utilize stored hydrogen from a pump may be one of the least viable alternative-fuel solutions on the market.

The problems with storing hydrogen for use in a fuel-cell are numerous: hydrogen is a highly combustible, low-density fuel that must be stored at ridiculously high pressures in expensive storage tanks. Gasoline, ethanol, and diesel/biodiesel fuels are also volatile and dangerous, but they are generally cheaper and easier to store and transport than hydrogen. Production of hydrogen is also an issue since hydrogen doesn't exactly grow on trees. There are numerous means by which to extract hydrogen from a variety of compounds, though most if not all hydrogen-extraction methods are "lossy" in that the energy required to separate and isolate hydrogen from its source is greater than that which will be released when the hydrogen is used as an energy source. Hydrogen production generally requires either electricity, fossil fuels, or biofuels which could often be used more efficiently in other applications. Producing hydrogen is neither cheap nor efficient. Going out of our way to replace gasoline with hydrogen will do nothing for the environment if we obtain all our hydrogen from coal-fired power plants or coal gasification plants. Not all hydrogen-separation methods are environmentally unfriendly, mind you; one could make the case for a hydrogen economy if a sufficiently effective and high-volume solar thermolyzer were developed (thermolysis being the process of breaking water down into its component parts - oxygen and hydrogen - at extremely high temperatures). Even existing solar panels could be used to produce hydrogen via electrolysis, although doing so has not yet proven to be terribly cost-effective. In reality, the United States will see mass-production of hydrogen from either nuclear power plants or coal plants of some sort which will not necessarily give us the energy independence or environmental benefits that the public seeks from alternative energy sources.

The idea of a hydrogen economy isn't a bad one, even if it does lock us into the pay-at-pump mentality that has driven our gasoline/diesel economy for decades. Most individuals will have neither the inclination nor the ability to produce hydrogen on their own despite the fact that consumer-level electrolyzers could theoretically be marketable. The real sticking point for home-brew hydrogen operations will be in production, pressurization, and transport/storage of the gas. It will be difficult to carry enough hydrogen from a home-based production facility for anything more than local driving, and a unit capable of pressurizing hydrogen well enough to fill a fuel-cell auto would probably be pretty expensive. At that point, you're almost better off with plug-in hybrids that would not require expensive and elaborate electrolyzers/hydrogen separators for refueling at home and would be capable of plugging into any number of outlets in numerous locations for remote refueling. Developments in capacitor technology will further improve the longevity, capacity, weight, and cost factors on batteries making plug-ins increasingly desirable as competitors to hydrogen fuel-cell cars. Of course, plug-in hybrids and the like require electricity as well, but they can be fed from a solar array or wind farm just as easily as could a hydrogen fuel-cell car (aided by an electrolyzer of course). Other alternatives, such as compressed-air vehicles and cars that purport to run partially or fully on plain old water, may emerge as superior technologies when compared to existing plug-in hybrid and fuel-cell cars. We all want the best technology to win, but as is so often the case, the most profitable technology will be touted by corporations and politicians alike to the detriment of American technological superiority.

Hydrogen fuel-cell autos offer us a chance at energy independence, but that chance comes at a heavy price. It is expensive and somewhat dangerous to store and transport hydrogen, and it is difficult to produce it in large enough quantities to feed the American appetite for energy. Better solutions could likely be found, but those solutions will be ignored by many industry players in favor of a technology that maintains the pay-at-pump status quo that has lined so many pockets in the past. As interesting as the Honda FCX Clarity may seem, we deserve better.

Aquadon'ts

2008-07-22T05:09:00.002-05:00

Aquadon'ts
By: Matthew

Once more, we have a toy recall stemming from a toxic product produced in China. For those who are not familiar with the product known in North America as Aquadots (Bindeez in Australia), they are a toy manufactured by Australian company Moose Enterprises P/L and distributed in North America by Spin Master Ltd. Aquadots consist of numerous beads that can be arranged in numerous designs using craft kits. Once the beads are sprayed with water, they stick together thanks to adhesive chemicals in the beads, forming permanent (or semi-permanent) designs that can be removed from the kit's tray. The toy was presumably intended for children of a certain age level as is often the case with any arts & crafts toy; besides, any toy containing small beads could amount to a choking hazard for children ages 3 and under. All you have to do is read the packaging on any toy with small parts to know that.

The reported problem with Aquadots stems from products shipped out of Shenzhen, China by the Wangqi Product Factory. As is so often the case these days, Moose Enterprises had apparently arranged for their product to be produced by the Wangqi Product Factory as a cost-saving measure. Someone at the Wangqi facility decided to save even more money on their end by using a different, cheaper chemical when producing Aquadots than called for by Moose Enterprise's formula. Namely, they replaced 1,5-pentanediol, a relatively benign chemical, with 1,4-butanediol, a cheaper chemical that metabolizes into gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (aka GHB, a popular date-rape drug) when ingested by humans. Understandably, neither Moose Enterprises nor Spin Master wanted tainted products on the market, so both Bindeez and Aquadots have seen recalls in Australia and the United States until proper replacement beads can be shipped. Reportedly replacements in Australia will be coated with a bitter substance known as Bitrex to prevent children from ingesting them in the future, and one would hope that the same substance will be used in products shipped to the United States.

It is certainly understandable that Moose Enterprises would be upset with their partners at the Wangqi Product Factory given how much trouble was caused by deviation from Moose Enterprise's intended product formulation. That alone was reason enough for a product recall; the fact that at least five children (three in Australia, two in the US) have suffered serious side-effects from swallowing tainted Bindeez/Aquadots prior to the recall only added fuel to the fire. What would seem to be just another case of a bum toy from China, however, may be a slightly more complicated matter. Nobody seems to want to talk about the fact that toys with small parts, like Aquadots, have long carried warnings against exposing the toy to children who are at a serious risk of ingesting small parts (at least in the US anyway). It's a sensible enough warning since small children are prone to choking themselves by swallowing or inhaling bits and pieces of toys that they can not easily dislodge from their own throats. One would assume that Aquadots carried the same warning even before the recall. Most of the reported victims of tainted Bindeez/Aquadots seem to have been under the age of 3 as well (a notable exception being a 10-year-old girl in Australia that swallowed some beads). Not to make any excuses for Moose Enterprises, but most of those children were already significantly endangered by gaining access to Bindeez/Aquadots regardless of their contamination with 1,4-butanediol. The inclusion of Bitrex in future revisions of the toy should address most concerns that people might have over unintended consumption by small children.

The point to this exercise is to realize that the most serious threat posed by Aquadots to small children was their small size. Our media's tendency to blow things out of proportion and/or focus on sensationalism prevented most commentators from realizing this fact, much less making mention of it in the news. You may as well complain about children getting tetanus from playing with tainted, rusted nails (why were they playing with nails in the first place?). Nobody wants a poisonous product being sold to children, and the recall was appropriate for that reason alone, but the resulting scaremongering in American news outlets was worded in such a fashion that one could conclude, at least from headlines alone, that Aquadots actually contained a date-rape drug (they didn't) or that someone would feed your children Aquadots in an attempt to rape them. Most of the reporting was eventually accurate or semi-accurate, even if the headlines were a bit off, and still nobody seemed to want to notice that the two cases of Aquadots-related sickness in the US involved the consumption of a toy that was a significant choking hazard. Toy-related injuries (such as small children choking on toys intended for older children) will cause more harm and claim more lives every year than Aquadots ever has or ever could thanks to 1,4-butanediol. No matter how tainted or ugly the defective products from China become, we must remain focused on essential product safety, particularly when it comes to toys.

The Ignorant Lawmaker

2007-11-29T23:26:00.000-05:00

I think I might have found the biggest idiot and the most ignorant person in Arkansas. Senator Denny Altes recently wrote an email to Fort Smith Mayor Bill saying, "we are being outpopulated by the blacks" and "we are being overrun" by illegal immigrants. We meaning white people. He also stated "We are where we were with the black folks after the Revolutionary War," Altes wrote. "We can't send them back and the more we (anger them) the worse it will be in the future.... Sure we are being overrun but we are being outpopulated by the blacks also. Mr Altes if you will go back and do a little research and homework on your statement about blacks outpopulating "yall" I think you will quickly change your statement.

But yet Mr Altes didn't think comments were racist. Last time I checked and as of here lately, anything said in that nature has been considered racist. And furthermore we, African American/Blacks have a right to be here. We didn't come illegally. We are U.S. citizens. So just where is it that you are wanting to send us back to. But yet you seem to think the more you anger us the worse it will get. Did you stop to think your ignorant comments would anger people? Thank yourself for making it worse.

Mr Altes you are a disgrace to lawmakers. You are a disgrace to the state of Arkansas in which I was born. You do not deserve to be a lawmaker. Maybe one of the immigrants or blacks (as you call us) should have your job. I'm sure a lot of us could do a much better job.

Green Gas Generator: Basic Model

2007-10-27T02:23:00.000-05:00

Three weeks ago, you may recall that I wrote about the Green Gas Generator, a fantastic device built by local inventor George Palmer that reduces fuel consumption and improves horsepower using excited water. Since then, he has installed a basic Green Gas Generator in my ’04 Saturn Ion 1. The device in my car is nearly identical to the model he now offers for sale at the price of $399.95. The model installed in my car is basic in the sense that it is one only one part of the full version. The full version will consist of the basic model plus at least one other part (the basic model will be upgradable to the full version) that will draw a small amount of power from the engine and provide performance in line with, or better than, that cited in my previous article. Without further ado, here are my impressions of the basic device, from top to bottom:

Appearance and Installation: George was kind enough to install the device for me, and it did not take long at all; someone skilled enough to work on an automobile could probably do it in 15-30 minutes, tops. The Green Gas Generator resembles a green tube roughly the same size as a 2-liter bottle of soda (perhaps smaller) with a flattened top sporting a hole for filling the device with water. The hole is sealed by a screw-in cap that is easy to grip and provides a good seal.

Operation: The only thing you really have to do to operate the Green Gas Generator is fill it with water. Water needs to be added slowly, and it is important not to add too much, though the device can account for excess amounts of water on its own. Any old tap water or distilled water will do. From personal experience, I recommend a clean funnel to ease the filling process, though it is hardly necessary. I have gone as far as 114 miles in my Ion 1 without running out of water.

Impressions: My engine had more pep with the Green Gas Generator installed than it did the day I drove it off the dealer’s lot, and it seemed like I was using less gas. The only other impression the device made on me is that it made a pleasant gurgling noise while the car was running.

Testing and Results: To test fuel economy, I did two round trips from the Exxon near I-24 on South Rossville Boulevard to the Citgo at Exit 306 on I-75 South (south of Calhoun, GA) and back. At each stop, I checked the trip meter for mileage and divided that by the amount of gas required to top off the gas tank to calculate miles per gallon. I kept the Green Gas Generator filled with water at the start of each leg of the trip. One round trip was made at 60 mph, while the other was made at speeds varying from 70-75 mph. The results: at 60 mph, I averaged 37 mpg. At 75 mph, I averaged 36 mpg. The current EPA highway MPG estimate for a 2004 Saturn Ion 1 is only 29 mpg, and that’s for a brand-new car (my Ion has 50k miles on it). Thanks to the Green Gas Generator, I gained a minimum of 7 mpg on the highway! I have not yet done any tests to see how the Generator affects engine performance, but I will take care of that as soon as my schedule allows.

Pros:

- Improves gas mileage

- Adds pep to the engine for higher speeds/better acceleration

- Easy and cheap to operate

Cons:

- None, really, unless you’re bothered by having to go under the hood to fill the Generator every now and then.

Conclusion: Even the basic Green Gas Generator works very well. More power to the engine and better fuel economy is well worth the money. This device works so well that it should be required by law to install Green Gas Generators in existing automobiles and include them in new cars ala catalytic converters. Nobody could possibly make a logical argument against buying and using a Green Gas Generator unless they actually like burning more gas while getting less performance out of their engine.

Once this device enjoys widespread adoption (which it should . . . we’d be crazy to ignore it), our nation’s fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions will plummet. Gas prices will drop and global warming will be significantly diminished. Not only does this machine save its buyer money and provide them with a fun ride, but it is socially; economically; and politically important to anyone and everyone who operates an automobile. I can’t wait to install a full version of the Green Gas Generator in my car to see just how much improvement I’ll get out of that! If you are interested in learning more about the Green Gas Generator or want to inquire about purchasing one, there is a new contact email address at gggenerator@yahoo.com.

Packing it up

2007-08-21T00:31:00.000-05:00

This blog is going on hiatus while I do my posts on Whitehouser. Try not to miss me too much!

Awash in Feet

2007-08-16T23:25:00.000-05:00

Living in a religiously diverse society can be difficult. For years, the ACLU and other like-minded groups have fought tooth and nail to de-Christianize American society in order to make life easier, or at least more comfortable, for non-Christians and Christians who seem to have a problem with seeing their own religion (or some rough approximation thereof) promoted in public. There have been pros and cons to the de-Christianization campaign waged by various liberals in the past several decades, but end result has been a widespread transformation of many Christians into comparatively toothless versions of their old selves. It's hard to find Christians dedicated enough about their religion to make conversion attempts during casual conversation or to use their religion and/or denomination as a way to undermine somebody else's. Granted, some of the bible-thumpers have taken their game online to protect themselves behind a veil of anonymity, but such tactics in and of themselves show how modern Christians have lost confidence in the public face of their religion. Those within the Christian community who have watched the public become less doctrinal in their approach to religion and less willing to discuss or practice their faith in public often lament these seemingly-irreversible changes. Those without a recognizably Christian religious background are probably feeling more comfortable living in the US with a kinder, gentler, and quieter Christian majority. Moving towards a secular society that supports the private practice of religion certainly has made life easier for those who have long been in a religious minority.

Unfortunately, there is one religious minority that seems to want to fill the void of power created by Christianity's slow withdrawal from the public eye. Islam, a religion every bit as expansionist as Christianity, is slowly spreading across the United States and leaving its mark in many communities. The latest issue that has upset Christian conservatives who feel whipped like dogs as they lose one battle after another to keep their religious symbols in public view is the issue of public foot baths for Muslims. Those not familiar with Islam might be confused as to why Muslims might need foot baths in the first place; simply put, Islam requires its followers to wash their bodies five times a day before prayers. Such a feat is no simple matter in a standard American public restroom with toilets and sinks (never mind that they could probably use portable sanitary wipes, but oh well). Americans are generally kind and considerate folks, so it should come as no surprise that the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the Minneapolis Community and Technical College have both dedicated public funds to the installation of public foot bathes to accommodate Muslim students. This might seem like a good idea until you look at it from the perspective of a Christian whose religion has been taken out to the woodshed time and time again by public institutions fearing lawsuits from the ACLU.

If you think about it, the conservative Christians have a point of sorts, not that it makes much sense for them to make it. A secularized society is pretty cozy and comfortable for just about everyone, even Christians once they learn that they can still follow their religion without rubbing it in everyone's face at every possible occasion. Those who remain bitter about the rollback of their own religion's public facade are now spitting and hissing loudly at the advance of Islam's public presence in America, which makes very little sense; logically speaking, the advance of Islam should justify a slow return of Christian religious displays in public facilities funded by taxpayer money. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right? Strangely, in America, that's not how it works. The conservative Christians who should logically want to return their religion to its former place of publicly-ensconced glory are instead playing a sour grapes game of "if I can't have it, nobody will" when it comes to public displays of religion. The ACLU and their ilk are stupidly promoting the installation of Muslim-oriented prayer aids in public buildings using taxpayer dollars. So, in a bizarre twist, the Christians are fighting for secularism while the ACLU is fighting against it.

The controversy does confirm a few suspicions that some have had about the ACLU: they are blatantly anti-Christian to a fault. How you can justify shooting down Christian religious displays of every shape and size for years on end while promoting foot bathes for Muslims is beyond reason. As one who rather enjoys our current secular society, I am bothered by the installation of any plumbing aimed to assist anyone in their daily prayer ritual whether it be funded by public money or not. The fact that it is Islam that receives such accommodations is worse still, considering that it is an extremely aggressive and expansionist religion compared to other minority religions, such as Wicca, Buddhism, Santeria, and so forth. Where are the public facilities to accommodate Druids, Scientologists, and Hindus? I don't seem to have noticed any (and I'm sure the Christian zealots would cry foul if there were any). What is the one religion with the temerity to assume the position that Christianity has lost in American society? The answer is Islam. Of all America's minority religions, Islam and only Islam wants to be a publicly-recognized and accommodated religion to aid in its expansion. In the name of further marginalizing those evil, wretched, hated Christian conservatives, some liberals are willing to abandon secularism by promoting Islam.

Were the ACLU truly interested in fostering multiculturalism and religious diversity, they would treat Islam the same way that they treat Christianity by insisting that it remain a privately-practiced religion. One stark difference between modern Christians and Muslims, however, is in the way that each group reacts to secularism in general. Christians gripe, moan, connive, and ultimately retreat. Muslims, on the other hand, react differently, at least according to some of those who seem oddly desperate to meet their religious needs. According to the President of Minneapolis Community and Technical College, "The foot-washing facilities are not about religion, they are about public safety. Christians and Jews aren’t going to kill anyone over this issue. Muslims are different. We’ve already received threats saying the college will be bombed if we refuse to build this facility. So, as anyone can see, we’re not promoting the Muslim religion. We’re saving the lives of our students and faculty". Those are strange words spoken in strange times, and what they really mean is anyone's guess. Do liberals want to promote Islam's expansion to use it as a weapon against America's Christian majority, or are they simply afraid of Muslim radicals that will kill at the drop of a hat? It is a mystery. Perhaps both motives drive the ACLU and other de-Christianizers to spread Islam, bit by bit, into every nook and cranny of American society.

It should be noted that foot bathes, in and of themselves, are no matter of significance. The question is, why build them? Bathing so religiously is not standard practice for Americans, and it is not logical or appropriate to assume that we will all change our daily hygiene to match that of Muslims by choice or by coercion. Public facilities always have and always should reflect the basic needs of the people. Those needing to wash themselves a staggering five times per day can very well provide themselves with their own facilities if necessary. The bathing schedule required by any religion, Islam or otherwise, is not the problem of the American public, nor will it ever be. Anyone threatening to bomb a university over the matter should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Your religion is a private matter, and the requirements of your religion are yours to fulfill; get used to it. Why can't the ACLU agree with me on that point? Hopefully, by now, we have some idea, but I'm still waiting for an honest answer from them.

Just Another Agenda

2007-07-29T12:47:00.000-05:00

Everybody's got an axe to grind and a plan to push. Everybody's got an agenda. Some are better than others, of course, and a few make it into political platforms in one form or another. Sadly, those that do make it into political platforms are seldom innovative and even remotely specific. For any budding politicians looking to break the mold on environmental and energy policy by embracing future commercial interests while also satisfying many of the needs and wants of environmentalists, I submit to you some musings of mine posted back in February on Slashdot.org and edited for this column:

Some of this may seem impractical, but I would think the following should hold true:

It is theoretically possible that we will reduce the variety of building materials utilized in the public and private sector to predominantly include carbon-based materials such as carbon nanotubes, diamond-nanotube composite, aggregated diamond nanorods, and other similar materials. We'll still probably need metals for a variety of tasks, but our current concrete/steel/asphalt/wood/plaster/sheetrock economy will likely be scrapped in favor of an economy based around superior technology. In light of this potential development, our primary resources will include:

1). Energy
2). Fresh Water
3). Carbon

Therefore, the most intelligent way to counter the effects of global warming on human society would be to ensure the rapid and stable mass-distribution of the aforementioned resources, in one form or another, to as many communities as possible.

Energy, most likely in the form of electricity transmitted across a grid (as we have now), stored in the form of hydrogen transmitted by pipeline or ground transit, or stored in batteries/capacitor banks will be at the core of our economy more so than it is now. Carbon-based construction utilizing multi-walled nanotubes and similar substances will likely require massive amounts of energy to produce building material in desirable quantities. It is also likely that we will be utilizing an increasingly mechanized workforce in the future which will further our need for energy.

With sufficient energy, we should be able to:

1). Build intracontinental water distribution networks much larger than anything currently available to ensure proper irrigation of lands regardless of weather conditions
2). Power massive pump/levee/dam systems to evacuate water faster than it can accumulate due to flooding and store it until it can be safely released into normal drainage channels.

3). Provide sufficient desalinization services to keep water distribution networks fully supplied, at least until we perfect technology that lets us separate water into hydrogen and oxygen from mere exposure to sunlight (a process that would yield rather than consume energy and purify water at the same time).

4). Fabricate building materials out of super-strong carbon-based materials which we may use to reinforce existing structures or build advanced infrastructure that will withstand the punishment of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

5). Power armies of automated construction machines tasked with rebuilding our entire civilization's housing and infrastructure out of materials stronger than those which we use now.

That would nearly handle any crisis imaginable outside of soil depletion and rising sea levels. I would imagine that coastal cities would eventually have to be moved inland or built on stilts (which is doable with the right materials and a sufficient amount of effort) to survive unless someone wants to protect entire coasts with sea wall networks or . . . something.

In any case, all of the above have one thing more than anything else: energy. Lots of it. Maybe more than a hundred times the energy we produce now, too. Sadly, supply is currently being outstripped by demand. That's one situation that must be reversed.

Of course, there are problems with plans such as those I outlined above, as I also noted:

There are a few problems with plans like mine:

1). At least in the United States, problems seem to exist in the logistical and political arena when it comes to macro-engineering. Example: The Big Dig. It was a technically feasible plan ruined by graft, corruption, and possibly incompetence.

2). Modern industry, or at least the face of modern industry visible to the public, seems more concerned with small, disposable/replaceable products. In a sense, even our housing and infrastructure (roads in particular) are disposable.

3). Owners of existing infrastructure that would be replaced by that mentioned in my plan (or in plans like mine) would not enjoy seeing the value of their assets undermined and would interfere accordingly.

However, you are correct in asserting that much of the technology associated with "green" political movements has improved so vastly that it makes sense to adopt it on technical merit alone without worrying about environmental benefits. The question is, who really wants a safer and more efficient tomorrow?

Honestly, if you are a would-be policymaker, politician, or political commentator looking for something seemingly novel, logical, and simple that will set you apart in a political debate, please consider what I have said here carefully. I stand by my remarks, though the energy source(s) we shall use to make the above possible have yet to emerge. Nuclear power and clean coal will only take us so far.

Hopeless Hopefuls

2007-07-24T04:39:00.000-05:00

Far too many Presidential candidates have declared their interest in winning the White house at a time that is far too early for my tastes. I suspect that many other Americans feel the same way. Despite our probable mutual disgust for the early Presidential campaign season, many questions have already arisen about the qualifications these First Executive would-bes might have. Are they fit to be Presidential candidates? Can they win their party's nomination? Can they win a general election? And, the most important question of all: do they have what it takes to be President?

Not everyone agrees on which qualities make a good President. It would seem that one Presidential quality sorely lacking in today's crop of candidates is the ability to set a clear, cohesive, and concise agenda independent of outside influences. A good President should not only be able to set his (or her) own agenda but inspire others to follow that agenda. In this respect, effective Presidents have marshaled broad support for causes that fall outside of the usual liberal or conservative plans for action. Right or wrong, Presidents who are effective leaders not only unite people behind a cause but exemplify said cause by being a principal founder.

In contrast with effective leadership, our current Presidential hopefuls seem to have all the leadership skill of a rusted hobnail. Every candidate, with the possible exceptions of the one-dimensional Tom Tancredo and the not-yet-running-for-President Al Gore, have carefully crafted "positions" based mostly on polling data, party platforms, and political analysis generated by talking-heads or think-tankers. In this context, a politician's position is meant to convey to the public what they would do in response to a given situation. Politicians who adopt positions are reactionary in nature in that they suspect the modern political climate of the day to be a fixed, known set of situations and conditions clearly defined by numerous two-sided issues held to be of importance by voters. A pro-active Presidential candidate would see the office of the Presidency (or even any high office in Congress or the Senate) as the opportunity to enact new initiatives aimed an guaranteeing American prosperity without being specifically beholden to existing political viewpoints. A true leader can, and often does, establish his own plan of action backed by his own policy of leadership. In contrast, we have a soon-to-be-outgoing President who rather obviously championed causes that were not of his own creation; Bush could hardly be considered the progenitor of any great modern political movement which is likely the reason why his own policies seem beyond his understanding, a bit like luggage he's borrowed that is too large for him to carry alone.

For an example of a strong leader who was able to set a clear agenda that fit his own vision for the future of the United States, we could look as far back as President James K. Polk. Polk effectively seized upon the vague Jacksonian notion of "manifest destiny", which called for continued American expansion in North America, and transformed it into tangible action both of a diplomatic and military nature. During Polk's Presidency, the United States annexed Texas; purchased the Oregon Territory from the British; defeated the Mexican army in numerous conflicts arising from land disputes; acquired the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona; and acquired parts of the states of Colorado and Wyoming. There was, of course, far more to his Presidency than that, but the expansion of American power during his administration was clearly made possible by the cunning and vision of Polk himself as he carefully managed strife within his own party (the Democrats) and the opposition party (the Whigs) while coping with stubborn and hostile foreign forces vying for territory that was, in Polk's mind, destined to be American. For better or for worse, Polk was able to set an agenda for the nation and was able to pursue it to successful completion. He accomplished more in one term than our two most recent Presidents have accomplished in four.

Not one soul among our current Presidential candidates can claim to have a platform based on a distinct plan for America. Tancredo has been pushing his relatively unique (in Washington, D.C. anyway) anti-immigrant position for years, but he has no clearly defined agenda of his own creation outside the realm of immigration issues. Gore, were he to become a candidate, could push his environmentalist agenda, though his only true contribution to the Global Warming debate has been to make more noise from a larger soap box than have others. As for the others candidates, they all have positions crafted by staffers, think-tankers, supporters, and talking-heads. They are bought-and-paid-for politicians whose sole purpose is to push someone else's agenda while wrapping it in a pleasant package of solid values and political gravitas meant to win campaign contributions and votes. To put it simply, they are the status quo. In a day and age when we need decisive action based on masterful planning and dedicated national loyalty, off-the-shelf politicians won't cut it. Who will be our next president with the will to hold power, the ability to use it wisely, and a decisive plan of action? Unless I mistake these men and this woman to be less than they are, it most certainly will not be a current Republican or Democrat candidate for President.

The Nature of the Storm

2007-07-01T01:28:00.000-05:00

Dark clouds loom on the horizon for teens and young adults seeking employment. Recently, negative teen employment trends were examined in a New York Times column by Bob Herbert (Flip Side of the Dream, June 16th, 2007). His commentary about teen employment was certainly intriguing and bore further investigation. It just so happens that lackluster teen employment rates have been a subject of discussion for some time now; the American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) covered this very subject on March 18th, 2005. What interested me most about low teen employment figures is that the trend fit very neatly into a broad prediction about future labor markets I made in previously in past columns.

The AYPF, in their online brief, effectively blamed poor teen employment rates on immigrants (of unspecified legal status) willing to work for low wages. Their rationale seems sensible enough, though it does not do justice to the forces at work that have ultimately deprived many teens and young adults of an opportunity to experience the joys of menial labor. Consider carefully why employers hire cheap immigrant labor in the first place: uneducated immigrants commit themselves to the workforce fully while earning wages historically reserved for "entry level" workers. Why hire teens or young adults prone to high turnover rates and low levels of commitment when you can have a dedicated adult worker earning a child's pay?

Here we are presented with one of many examples of American workers losing value in the labor market. Putting aside all the negative repercussions of teens being taken out of the work market (there are many, well-documented negatives), the widespread unemployment of American teens must lead us to conclude that employers are under mounting pressure to reduce labor costs by any means necessary. Employers are ready, willing, and able to marginalize workers of any age, race, or sex so long as it improves the all-important bottom line. Those corporations who will not behave similarly risk failure in today's hyper-aggressive marketplace. Migrant workers, legal or otherwise, are nothing more than a stopgap intended to keep labor costs down until human workers can be replaced by sophisticated automated systems. The fast food industry, long a bulwark against teen unemployment in America, seeks aggressively to eliminate many of its poorly-paid staffing positions in favor of automated systems designed to take orders, prepare meals, and clean restaurants from top to bottom.

The willingness and ability of Migrant workers to occupy positions formerly held by American teens is merely a byproduct of modern immigration trends mixed with the vulnerability of unskilled labor in the United States. Were migrant workers to demand the same wage that an adult American would require to sustain an acceptable American living, they too would find themselves without jobs. The worldwide trend towards unskilled, underpaid labor is fed by the advent of labor-saving devices in parts of the world previously too destitute and chaotic to maintain sophisticated industrial contrivances, and our continual forward march towards increasingly advanced automation systems will lead us to an economic climate in which labor-saving devices will become sophisticated enough to work on their own, thereby rendering unskilled human labor obsolete.

The process of human obsolescence in the workplace has already begun. Our nation's first casualties happen to be those most vulnerable to elimination, namely our teen and young adult workers who consistently have delivered sub-par results in relatively trivial positions while earning pay suitable only for teens, college students, and destitute foreign laborers. Migrant workers, frequently hailing from South and Central America, have temporarily occupied jobs once held by by teens while fleeing job markets devastated by foreign competition from China which happens to be enjoying an economic renaissance fueled by cheap domestic labor empowered by labor-saving devices. In the end, technology drives this trend towards teen unemployment at every level, and our teens will not be the last to feel the bite before employment equilibrium is reached in our new automated paradigm.

Much Ado About Murder

2007-06-19T00:28:00.000-05:00

"War, war never changes", intones narrator Ron Perlman during the intro sequences to both Fallout and Fallout 2. Widely regarded as classic PC role-playing games (RPGs), the Fallout series places you and your character (your in-game persona) in a retro-futurist post-nuclear apocalypse. As one might expect from a game with such a gritty, nasty setting, there is a great deal of violence and death as you blast your way through armies of mutant monsters, vicious raiders, opportunistic slavers, and religious fanatics. There are plenty of games that seem to trivialize the value of human life, but games like Fallout somehow manage to trivialize all life, if only out of necessity. Killing over 90% of everything that moves is the only way to survive when civilization has collapsed around you and the very wilderness has been warped and twisted into a giant death-trap.

What's funny is that so few of us would consider the killing in a game like Fallout to be amoral. Yes, there are those with negative knee-jerk reactions to all video game violence, but few of them have even heard of the now-defunct Black Isle Studios, much less any of their formerly-edgy productions. To a certain extent, killing creatures, humans, and formerly-human mutants just makes sense when your life is on the line, be it real or virtual. People stop asking questions about the means when the end towards which you are working is survival.

Consider how it must have felt to be alive during the second World War. Few of us remain with any recollection of wartime America during the 1940s, requiring the vast majority of us to rely on history, stories, and our imagination when contemplating such a matter. When seen through the eyes of the victorious Allies, one might be inclined to see the Allied war effort as a moral crusade born of necessity and fought to conclusion with great valor. In a way, it was, though our fond recollection of Allied victory ignores the terrible human suffering inflicted upon the Italians, Germans, and Japanese during the Allied campaign. Even if you ignore the Soviets, who were not exactly great humanitarians when wielding military might during the war, one can still find grim evidence of American and British military actions leading to the injury and death of civilians and non-combat military personnel. There are plenty of reasons why the high-and-mighty English-speaking powers of the Allies killed civilians; collateral damage is a favored term to describe the result of unguided, "dumb" munitions dropped from thousands of feet in the air on factories, fuel depots, railways, and other sensitive Axis targets. But, the reality is that, in order for the Allies to defeat the Axis, it was necessary to destroy more than the Axis military which was often too formidable to be confronted directly. The Allies only found victory by destroying each and every element of German, Japanese, and Italian society that supported the Axis military juggernaut. Or, more to the point, the Allies won their war against the Axis by ripping entire nations, and their people, to shreds.

Certainly the Allied powers should be commended for their efforts in rebuilding war-torn Europe and Japan. However, the fact still remains that so much lay in ruin and so many lay wounded or dead from a war that the Allies knowingly fought to its brutal conclusion. And, even knowing all this, most of us still forgive the Allies, forget the travesties wrought by incendiary weapons upon cities like Dresden where thousands died gasping for oxygen consumed in a firestorm that encircled the city, and rationalize other moral outrages inflicted by Allied powers as having been necessary, back in the day, out of the need for simple survival. At times we still debate the wisdom of "nuking" Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in truth, the death-toll from deploying Little Boy and Fat Man is minuscule in comparison to the number of lives lost elsewhere in Axis territories from Allied carpet-bombing campaigns against military and civilian targets. Both then and now, few seem to want to see the second World War as a colossal tragedy wrought by both Allied and Axis powers. We still lavish praise upon the "greatest generation" that brought victory to America all across the globe. We praise them for good reason; without them, we would likely not exist as an independent, sovereign nation with power and wealth.

Attitudes towards modern warfare have shifted greatly. No longer will the American public tolerate wanton massacres of people in the name of victory, the greater good, or some other lofty goal. World War II was fought under an unspoken presumption that America was worth military service and the ultimate sacrifice. Today, few are willing to sacrifice themselves for the United States, despite the fact that we, as a nation, are fundamentally better than we were sixty years ago. We are more tolerant, more fair, more wise, more technologically advanced, more learned, and more interested than ever in self-improvement both as individuals and as a society. In an age when we should be more ready than ever to bias ourselves in favor of the United States, many of us would rather question every action and motive of the federal government. Given the duplicity, deception, and outright lies the government has foisted upon its citizens (and the entire world) since World War II, perhaps this attitude is understandable. The fact remains, however, that we are a better nation than we were then, yet we see ourselves in a light more negative than that cast by our counterparts decades ago.

One can not rationalize foolish military campaigns and acts of senseless violence against innocent human beings who pose no threat to American society by simply noting that we did some nasty things sixty years ago in order to survive. However, were we lead by a cunning war-hawk of a leader who, unlike Bush, utilized aggressive air campaigns against our enemies in an attempt to extinguish opponents and all those sheltering them in one fell swoop, would we offer support? Our modern foes hide in civilian communities more often than not, sheltered by friends and family who knowingly put themselves in harm's way. Sixty years ago, it would have been acceptable to bomb out an entire neighborhood of German civilians to kill a handful of Nazi leaders or a division of SS troops. Today, it is generally not acceptable to bomb out a mud-hut shantytown in pursuit of Al-Qaeda operatives lurking along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. Even "precision" strikes against homes known to house enemy operatives are seen as unnecessary by some since women and children frequently die in such attacks.

War never changes, just as Mr. Perlman said, but people do change. Sometimes change isn't for the best. If you really want to know why the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still linger or why Iran and North Korea still haunt us to this day, you need only look at our attitudes towards war in the geopolitical theatre to see why. During the Cold War, our willingness to lash out at our enemies was tempered by our fear of an escalating conflict with the Soviet Union. Following the collapse of the USSR, the United States had (or could have had) the freedom to "wrap up" lingering conflicts with its enemies all across the globe, not that men like Clinton were willing to take advantage of such freedom. Today, we are instead plagued by leadership that sees the foreign-policy freedom we still enjoy yet lacks the aggression and intestinal fortitude to use our full military might in the pursuit of victory. Our current administration would rather use infantry and armor divisions to babysit contractors than let our absurdly-powerful bomber fleets destroy our foes in a matter of weeks. Once one makes the commitment to declare war, one must be willing to destroy anything and everything that directly impedes one's path to victory. Without that commitment, one can not reasonably expect to be victorious, calling into question the value of any "limited" military engagement based on civilian-friendly "precision" strikes that only kill a few civilians rather than scores of them.

Illegal Alienation

2007-06-04T04:30:00.000-05:00

How many of you know the name Carl D. Wynn Jr.? If you don't, you haven't been paying attention to a story that may represent a common type of crime in the near future. Wynn posed last fall as a U.S. border agent in an attempt to defame a construction company in Little Rock, AR by falsely accusing them of hiring illegal immigrants. He harassed the same company by placing spike strips outside their place of business. And why, pray tell, did Wynn do these things? One could easily conclude that he did them out of anger, fear, and frustration.

Wynn is but one of millions of American citizens, not all of them natural-born, who hate illegal immigration in all its forms. They hate watching poor, uneducated, disease-ridden people who can not even speak English undermine the sovereignty of a nation capable of killing every human being on the planet several times over. They hate watching illegal immigrants rack up government benefits while legal immigrants and natural-born citizens get nothing. They hate watching pandering politicians lie to placate the increasingly-frustrated masses while they covertly conspire to continue importing illegals to sate their corporate masses, hungry for this century's version of American slave labor. They hate amnesty bills that will rob America of any chance at securing its borders and punishing those who cross them illegally with deportation (or worse). Of course, who can say for sure whether or not their hatred is focused on problems actual or imagined? In the minds of those filled with hatred, clarity of thought is not always guaranteed.

Yet, hate they do. And their numbers are growing. Unlike those who decry hatred against illegal immigrants as racist, immoral fear-mongering, I would encourage a different stance. It is not only your usual mouth-breathing militia member who stands poised to act out against illegal immigrants. Many well-adjusted, normal American citizens are slowly but surely turning against illegals. It might be difficult to understand their frustration until you learn to turn your mind away from the plight of the illegal immigrants themselves and focus upon the forces behind illegal immigration itself. Start with the Reagan amnesty bill in 1986 that prompted illegals to enter the country faster than ever before. Then observe how the Mexican government actually encourages border crossings by issuing false ID cards (matricula consular) supposedly allowing safe border crossings and legal identification in the United States. Observe how the Mexican economy thrives on money wired by illegal immigrants to relatives that remained south of the border. Witness how American corporations callously hire (and abuse) illegal immigrants at rock-bottom wages, forcing said immigrants to drain public coffers by putting pressure on social services, schools, and entitlement programs. Marvel at the increasing crime rates in areas heavily populated by illegal immigrants. Cringe as you see Latino gang graffiti appearing in cities all across America. Fume as illegals march in the streets, greedily demanding rights and privileges they neither earned nor deserve. Then, to top it all off, follow closely the story of two U.S. border patrol agents (Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean) jailed for wounding a Mexican drug dealer at the border during an illegal border crossing incident. Focus your mind on those facts (and they are facts, sadly) long enough and all mercy and love you might have felt for illegals will wither and die. They become enemies, outwardly pathetic and yet protected by the powerful, so numerous and baleful in presence that there would seem to be end to the troubles they might bring.

What is more pervasive about the anti-illegal movement is that most ire born against illegals is provoked by reality rather than fiction. Yes, the plight of the undocumented immigrant is sad. Perhaps some reasonable solution to their woe could have been found years ago. Unfortunately, those who could have affected positive change to U.S. border policy have repeatedly failed to address any of the issues surrounding illegal border crossings. It has become so bad that local governments and private groups have taken the law into their own hand by assisting border patrol agents and passing local laws intended to drive out illegals or punish businesses that hire them. It will not be long before civic action taken against illegals will metamorphose into ugly acts of civil disobedience, crime, and violence. It is not outside the realm of the imagination to expect entire communities of "angry white men" (and angry white women, and angry people of other races) banding together to hound, harass, and drive out illegal immigrants who already suffer from a lack of police protection in the United States. Acts of sabotage against businesses suspected of hiring illegals will flourish. And, if matters are left alone too long, acts of organized violence will follow. Illegals (or even those resembling illegals) will be lynched. No many how many Hispanics there are in this country, the violence will escalate, and the perpetrators will have the upper hand. Anywhere from 12 to 20 million illegals, plus another 20+ legal Hispanic Americans, can not win when faced with hordes of angry, scared, and well-armed American citizens hell bent on enforcing their own brand of vigilante justice. The government has done nothing, so they will do something, even if what they do is morally indefensible.

Make no mistake; I do not encourage this behavior. I only call it like I see it. But, we can not soothe the outrage of the many fearful American citizens whose tolerance for illegals has been pushed to its limits. We are constantly told of how illegal immigration is a reality that we must face due to our border with Mexico, and how we can not reasonably expect to deport any or all of them given our situation. I remind you today that we can not expect normal, everyday American citizens to tolerate such a massive influx of illegal immigrants, including their culture, their foreign language, and the government corruption that keeps them here through deliberate inaction. Pit the inevitable reality of illegal immigration against the growing hatred of lower and middle-class Americans, and hated wins in the end.

It is with a heavy heart that I conclude that a rational response to illegal immigration and the numerous socioeconomic pressures that cause it may no longer be possible. The time for reconciliation is at an end. As the Senate laboriously debates an immigration bill that alienates opponents of immigrant amnesty, faith in our government's ability to reign in border violations plummets. The only possible peaceful solution may come from the undocumented aliens themselves, but only if they are wise enough to see the rising tide of outrage against them and flee from it before it crashes over their heads.

Freedom of Education

2007-05-12T03:31:00.000-05:00

Conventional wisdom holds that the key to our future lies in the proper education of our children. Americans have been guided by this basic principal since the foundation of our country for good reason. An ignorant, complacent colonial America could never have produced men like our founding fathers, much less the determined and dedicated souls that followed them in our nation's war for independence. No matter what the state of our public and private educational institutions, our successes have been heavily dependent upon educated individuals being at the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.

Given our past and present dependency on education, it is troubling to hear news of our public schools' inadequacy. We Americans have struggled to cope with inadequate funding and facilities for years in many of our schools. We are also bombarded with reminders that students from foreign nations with economies much smaller than our own score better in important subjects such as math and science. It would seem as though the American public is given very little cause to be satisfied with our nation's schools.

Fortunately, not every aspect of American education is cause for concern. Other than the fact that our schools are still generating a fairly steady supply of graduates heading for institutions of higher learning, we also now enjoy a host of free educational resources that did not exist twenty years ago, at least not in their current form. Volumes of materials useful to students and casual readers alike exist both in our libraries and on the Internet, waiting to be exploited by those willing to learn. Naturally one must exercise caution when utilizing the Internet as a source of information; however, this does not mean that we are unable to learn valuable lessons from a computer screen. A great example of free curricula on the Web exists at MIT's OpenCourseWare. (OCW) page. OCW exists to grant access to MIT's curricula to anyone with a web browser. They go well out of their way to note that OCW does not grant access to MIT's professors and does not entitle to any participant in OCW to a degree or certificate of any kind. Clearly self-education has its pitfalls even when the source material is known-good.

One can still obtain reliable information on math, science, grammar, spelling, and other subjects all over the Internet. It should be noted that similar information exists in hard copy at your local library (in one form or another). As valuable and essential as public education may be, freely-available educational materials can also play a vital role in the education of our children. It is sad to me that most school children are not required to make use of library resources in research activities until they are well into middle school. Breeding familiarity with and acceptance of publicly-available information resources within our children at a young age could be vital to the educational future of our country. Most libraries hold all the tools necessary for a young person to learn any subject they may encounter in school and many others they may not. The tools and skills necessary to hold down a lucrative job that contributes significantly to society and the economy lie within the pages of library books. Were we better-able to tap into free educational resources, most of our school system could be bypassed entirely. Still, there is the simple reality that good faculty is difficult (if not impossible) to replace.

In order for public education to work for our nation in the future, we must learn to familiarize our children with public sources of information so that they may quickly and easily integrate new information they encounter with existing school curricula. It is a pity and a shame that students of struggling and/or failing schools often seem trapped by their schools when, in reality, supplemental material exists that could easily bridge the gap between an inadequate and adequate education for the downtrodden. Just as 'net activists often claim that "information wants to be free", education also wants to be free, for everyone.

Transfacts

2007-05-06T04:54:00.000-05:00

We can (or should, at least) all agree that those born with serious genetic defects should have full access to every tool medical science can provide so as to mitigate or eliminate the negative effects of related illnesses. I can only imagine how wonderful it would be when individuals will receive gene-therapy treatments to eliminate aberrant genes responsible for said defects, ensuring that none of us will ever again be carriers of genes that could devastate an unfortunate minority of future offspring. Humanity will be much stronger for it. In the short-term, other less-sophisticated treatments intended to reduce the impact of emergent genetic defects should still be seen as highly desirable, provided that they work.

In contrast, most rational people show skepticism towards wholly-superficial medical treatments. Plastic surgery - often used as a way to correct perceived physical flaws that are all intrinsically linked to DNA - has received more and more focus as an increasingly large number of people turn to it as a way to improve their own lives. Thanks to a recent early-morning news broadcast on ABC, however, it became clear to me that there are medical procedures taking place that should be cause for far greater concern than mundane plastic surgery. The news feature centered on what is estimated to be 400 families in the United States with "transgender children". Apparently these children, many of them prepubescent, have come to the conclusion that they are "born into the wrong body". It should be noted that none of the children featured in the news broadcast actually possessed any kind of known genetic aberration that could produce any sexual confusion in the children in question. They were simply individuals who had become dissatisfied with their own genetic expression and wished to change it for "personal reasons". At least one of the featured children - a girl wishing to become a boy - complained of depression before she began her change.

It has become fashionable, particularly in gay-rights circles, to tolerate and even promote the cause of transgender adults. One could assume that similar support would be shown for transgender children. However, I can not imagine why anyone would wish to coddle transgender individuals. It is one thing to seek to correct obvious genetic flaws that can lead to severe disfigurement, illness, or even death. Less obvious is the motivation to correct genetic conditions that have no obvious, genuine drawbacks. Those who use plastic surgery as a crutch to cope with an ugly nose are given the right to do so on their own dime, though such procedures are widely - and rightfully - seen as being rather superficial. Ultimately they are tolerated since such procedures do improve an individual's appearance when used in moderation. Sex-change operations, however, produce no demonstrable improvement in appearance or function of recipients of such procedures. In fact, sex-change operations do not address any known problem at all. The only observable problem is a psychological disorder causing the would-be transgender to become dissatisfied with a harmless and normal genetic condition. There entire idea of someone being "born into the wrong body", I'm sorry to say, is entirely farcical except in the rare instance of someone being born into a body showing sexual traits that can not be wholly identified as male or female.

Those wishing to satisfy their own bizarre need to alter a perfectly normal, functioning human body may wish to do so by way of surgery, but such a choice is even more superficial and shallow than your average case of plastic surgery. Part of being human is learning to accept one's personal flaws and, in so doing, learning to overcome them. Being male or female isn't even a flaw, so it is not clear why anyone would actually accept, much less tolerate, transgender inclinations. It is not to say that those who are or would like to be transgenders should be the subject of constant ridicule and violence as they often are now, but at the same time, they certainly should not be encouraged, especially not by their own parents when they are still minors. As medical science progresses, current procedures will be rendered obsolete by gene therapy that may allow an individual to transform their sex after birth, or they may even receive genetic triggers that will allow them to change sex under certain conditions (such as after taking a specific hormone pill), a capability currently possessed by some amphibians (remember Jurassic Park?). It's bad enough that transgenders are already lying to themselves when they see their body as "wrong", when in reality it is "right" (DNA doesn't lie). What happens when gene therapists begin altering transgenders so that they are able to change sexes so fundamentally that they retain their ability to reproduce and begin passing foreign DNA onto their offspring? Alterations to the human genome might be passed on to future generations and wind up changing the entire human race. And for what? To satisfy the needs of a few confused individuals who hate their own genetic code? Do you want a future in which you will need to ask for medical records and do DNA tests to make sure you aren't marrying and reproducing yourself with a human tainted by unnecessary genetic engineering? And if you think the transgenders are bad, take some time to do research on "furries", individuals who constantly fantasize about being anthropomorphic animals. Most wear suits to live out their fantasies, but a rare few have had major plastic surgery done to attach fur, claws, and pointed teeth to their bodies. Will we allow "furries" the opportunity to transform themselves into human-animal chimera, fully capable of reproducing themselves with other chimera? Will we create entire races of beings to satisfy the whim of individuals too warped to tolerate their own DNA?

Gene therapy will be a major part of medical science in the future. No matter how loudly people complain that we are "playing god", doctors will not hesitate to alter the genetic makeup of individuals, or even the entire human race, to stymie genetic diseases once and for all. However, the power to alter humanity could be misused. We seem ready to take a stand against eugenics, but are we ready to fight against frivolous genetic alterations that could have dire consequences for all of humanity? Given the fact that most critics of transgenders, "furries", voraphiles (individuals who fantasize about being swallowed whole or swallowing other voraphiles whole), and other misfits wield criticism no more sophisticated than that of a schoolyard prankster or a dim-witted thug, I do not believe that we are currently capable of making a well-reasoned and thorough defense against frivolous alteration of the human genome. The time is coming soon when gene therapy will be relatively cheap and effective, so we'd better get on the ball before it's too late.

When Free is Worth More

2007-04-15T02:18:00.000-05:00

Before I broach the subject of the theft of intellectual property by way of file sharing (piracy, for lack of a better term), let me first state that breaking laws is a bad idea regardless of how one might feel about said laws. Deliberately engaging in unlawful behavior comes with certain legal risks and ethical complications that most of us would rather not face. Furthermore, while I’m sure you’ll discover that many artists have a wide variety of opinions about how they wish for their own work to be distributed, all those who expect to make a living off the sale of their own work will agree (to one extent or another) that you should adhere to whichever content distribution method artists feel is appropriate for their own work.

Why, you may ask, am I going so far out of my way to issue warnings and disclaimers? I do so because I feel compelled to touch on a rather touchy subject, namely that of illegal filesharing. Anyone who has ever used a computer has likely faced the temptation to copy and/or distribute copyrighted work without the consent of the copyright holder. My first violation probably went back to when I owned my 386dx40, and I was a beneficiary of “pirated” software as far back as the family’s Apple //c in the 1980s. It is rare to find anyone who does not “pirate” software, music, or mouvies, de primarily to the nature of computers themselves. Computers are meant to store, create, and copy data ad infinitum, and networked computers are meant to distribute said data to all other computers on the network as desired by users. To computer users, there is no power greater than the ability to share something wonderful with your friends, be it a new game, some new code you wrote, a new app, or anything else you can store on a harddrive. Any software that can not be legally copied instantly loses practical value to computer users, which is why computer users have sought for years to add value to their data by making it distributable, even at the risk of facing fines and imprisonment. This does not even begin to touch on the subject of the sale of bootlegs at discount prices, which is a different ballgame entirely (at least in my opinion).

For whatever reason, computer users, as a whole, seem to have come to the conclusion that the sharing of copyrighted music is a less egregious offense than sharing copyrighted movies or software, not that it stops people from downloading all of the above. With music, the connection fans have to the band is much stronger than any connection downloaders have to programmers, game designers, producers, studio execs, and so forth and so on. Music is a much more intimate matter, and as such, the debate over what effect illegal music downloads have on bands and the music industry as a whole has become rather fierce. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has stridently defended the right of IP holders (typically labels, occasionally artists) to sue downloaders, uploaders, and filesharing services in order to stymie the ever-increasing flow of “pirated” music over the Internet. Realistically, however, most fans and artists know that the core argument against illegal file sharing – that downloading a song effectively removes the downloader as a potential buyer of a CD or single – is flawed or completely bogus, given the fact that the behavior of downloaders is never actually taken into account by the RIAA. Some studies and plenty of anecdotal evidence suggest that people still buy about the same amount of music regardless of how much they download. Furthermore, most bands trying to make a buck off their work usually make their best money off merchandise and ticket sales from concerts. Small-market bands have a hard time getting wide enough distribution on their albums to make considerable (or any) profits selling them, while bands signed with larger labels find their profits eroded by promotion fees and other costs associated with doing business the Big Label way (if you don’t believe me, read Courtney Love’s piece on Salon.com. Long story short: to most artists, downloads do not represent lost revenue. What they do represent is something that may impugn a band’s ability to sign with a label in the future if their work is over-“pirated”. If, by some odd chance, the band should become famous and retain the full rights to most or all their own work (ala Metallica), downloads suddenly represent a huge potential loss in revenue, but only if one believes that downloaders are being converted into non-customers after every illegal download. The issue is far more complicated than the RIAA would like to let on, even if the legal issues involved are not complicated at all.

What I would recommend as a remedy to the download confusion is to investigate Creative Commons, both from the perspective of the artist and the fan. For the artist, it represents the ability to reach out to tech-savvy fans and self-promote in a legally-conscious way; labels may or may not favor the activity, but at least they’ll know what page you’re on (versus big-name artists who routinely leak their own albums before launch as a favor to fans, much to the chagrin of labels). In the event that studies and anecdotes alike prove to be true (in that downloads do not actually harm revenue), Creative Commons will give bands with the guts to distribute some or all of their work under a CC license a major edge over those who (over)protect their work with traditional IP restrictions. For fans, Creative Commons works are almost universally distributable over any filesharing network without legal complication. Any desirable data, such as music, that can be reproduced, stored, and distributed freely has more value than data that can not be copied. Therefore, Creative Commons adds value to music in a legal and consumer-friendly way. Obviously, Creative Commons isn’t going to work for everyone, and many artists will want to stick to traditional IP protections in the event that they simply do not trust filesharing networks to be anything other than hives of scum and villainy. I respect that viewpoint, especially considering the hard work that goes into the production of quality music. However, we would all do well to at least investigate what Creative Commons has to offer, just as it would be wise of us to think twice before we allow groups like the RIAA to completely dominate the filesharing debate and, in so doing, dictate morality to us all.

Parenting, the Elephant Way

2007-04-08T02:19:00.000-05:00

As the pre-primary season heats up (I feel sick even saying that), socially conservative candidates from the right search for meaningful ways to set themselves apart from their opponents. Men like McCain and Giuliani have a long way to go if they intend to win over the Religious Right. It’s only a matter of time before one, the other, or both go public with a campaign to strengthen the American family, the instability of which is a major talking about among social conservatives. High divorce rates and their effects upon American society have been at issue for some time, not that this stops political candidates from conveniently rediscovering the issue whenever it proves to be politically expedient.

One old tale I fully expect to hear again is the story of the juvenile delinquent elephant. First popularized (to my knowledge) before the 2004 campaign cycle, the story surrounded studies from parks in South Africa (and elsewhere) that supposedly indicated that juvenile male elephant behavior was erratic and violent when the male juveniles lived without the influence of larger male bull elephants. It was reasoned by politicians and pro-family groups that, if even elephants needed males around to keep male children in line, the same must hold true for humans. It seemed like a clever enough tale, and there was ample evidence to suggest that human children benefited from the presence of a father (even bad ones, in some cases), so few critics emerged to question the television ads showing unruly young males apparently being disciplined by stern, loving fathers. Of course, as with most political advertising, the whole story never came out.

The most striking omission from the pro-family elephant ads was the true nature of elephantine social structure. Elephants are not monogamous creatures given to nuclear family units as the ads might suggest. Female elephants maintain their own herds that protect its members, including children who remain with the herd at least until late adolescence. While females are generally retained (unless they form their own herd or join another for whatever reason), males are forcibly exiled from the herd at a fairly young age and are left to fend for themselves. Throughout their childhood, neither male nor female elephants receive much exposure to bull males.

Exiled adolescent male elephants roam nomadically in the company of other males. The eldest members of the loosely-knit herds exert dominance over younger members through combat (play and real) intended to intimidate younger members of the herd into submission. This behavior actually suppresses the sex drive of younger males (preventing them from staying in “musth” for very long), thereby giving older, dominant males almost exclusive breeding rights when in contact with females in heat. Aside from breeding, the male herds have virtually no contact with female herds or their children.

If humans lived like elephants, women would never marry, and they would mate indiscriminately with males who had established their right to breed by beating the stuffing out of younger, less-experienced males in the area. Think of it as a 40-something bodybuilder cracking the heads of a few 14-18 year-old upstarts in your neighborhood and then having sex with their girlfriends, their mothers, their girlfriends’ mothers, and other random females in the area. Females would stay in matriarchal groups and would exile their sons at ages 12 to 14 by slowly pushing them out of the extended family. Elder males would have no contact with their children except for exiled males whom they would welcome with intimidation, threats, and physical violence (all in good fun, of course!). Now how’s that for family values?

Perhaps I judge the social structure of elephants too harshly. It seems to work for them, and I can think of a few guys out there who probably would have made better temporary mates for small groups of women than full-time husbands for traditional wives. I just don’t see their system of child-rearing to be particularly wonderful, at least not by human standards. Dominant bull elephants do very little to raise their sons outside of play-fighting and bullying. They do nothing for their daughters. There is ample enough evidence to suggest that father figures can aid in the development of children starting at an early age that we need not observe elephantine behavior to justify a call for paternal involvement in the lives of children. It would be nice of politicians and conservative social activists would remember this before using male bull elephants as evidence that father figures are good for children.

The Magical Barack Obama

2007-03-31T01:33:00.000-05:00

Yet another inglorious chapter in Barack Obama's Presidential adventure has unfolded before us. Widely unheralded columnist David Ehrenstein, a writer more known for writing critique of the arts (cinematic and otherwise) than anything else, wrote an op-ed piece for the LA Times lambasting Sen. Barack Obama for being a “Magical Negro” (I kid you not). The term “Magical Negro” is apparently used within the circle of film critics to describe hollow, empty characters of the “token black person” variety. Not all film critics care for the term, and personally I find its use to be mildly offensive in the critique of film, even when used by African-American writers such as Ehrenstein (no, he's not Jewish). It should be obvious to most that Ehrenstein used the term in his op-ed to draw attention to an otherwise-bland column. This isn’t the first time that a left-leaning commentator has taken Obama to task for not being a “real African-American”, but it is one of the pettiest and nastiest hit pieces out there.

Ehrenstein’s forgettable work would have remained largely-unnoticed (thanks to the LA Times’ imploding reader base, among other things) were it not for the additional publicity generated by an apparently-outraged Rush Limbaugh. Rush, taking it upon himself to expose the racism inherent to the idea that a liberal media outlet can utilize blatantly racist epithets unavailable to any moderate or conservative commentator, has decided to repeat the term “Magic Negro” as often as possible on the air when describing Barack Obama. Normally, Limbaugh would last all of ten seconds on the air after repeatedly uttering the word “Negro” for any reason; thanks to the LA Times and David Ehrenstein, Limbaugh has an excuse to repeat it ad nauseam like an obnoxious school child. He has declared openly that he wants to see how many people attribute the term to him without stopping to read Ehrenstein’s column or to recognize that LA Times’ ultimate responsibility for labeling Obama a “Magic Negro”. To assist him in his task, Limbaugh has enlisted the talents of Paul Shanklin who produced a parody of Ehrenstein’s column featuring a fake Al Sharpton singing “Barack the Magic Negro” to the tune of Peter, Paul, & Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon”. This tactic is pretty low-brow even for the ever-impish Limbaugh who delights in tweaking his opposition with childish antics.

Despite the fact that Ehrenstein’s op-ed piece was little more than a piece of editorial fecal matter and that Limbaugh’s fixation upon the column was the intellectual equivalent of grabbing hold of Ehrenstein’s mental defecation and parading it around in front of his elementary school classmates, those reacting to this absurd fiasco seem to be taking it quite seriously. Limbaugh’s calculations were nearly perfect as his most ardent critics could not help but come to Ehrenstein’s defense, proclaiming his use of “Magic Negro” to be legitimate due to the term’s frequent use by film critics (and Ehrenstein is himself a film critic). They then assailed Limbaugh with their usual brainless diatribes labeling him an oxycontin-abusing, overweight, immature political shock-jock. In other words, they played directly into Limbaugh’s hands after deliberately stepping into his trap even as he laid it at their feet and essentially dared them to do so. No matter how immature Limbaugh may be for parroting Ehrenstein like an obnoxious grade school huckster, his critics have shown themselves to be petty, small-minded twits having yet again ceded moral high-ground to a man who has baited them with little more than school-yard taunts. Interestingly enough, many of Limbaugh’s loyal listeners (whom his critics deride as slobbering idiots that love “racist” parodies like “Barack the Magic Negro”) have become so sick and tired of hearing a racial epithet repeated on the air that they have called Rush on his program and requested he cease repeating the slur regardless of its ultimate purpose. Limbaugh’s audience deserves credit for showing more common sense than anyone else.

It is clear that we can dismiss Ehrenstein’s brainless diatribe as yet another attempt by a self-styled expert in African-American identify to deride Barack Obama as being something other than African-American. While I am no Obama supporter, and while I find that his credentials to be insufficient to justify his nomination as the Democratic candidate for President in 2008, there is no reason to question the legitimacy of his public racial profile regardless of how many guilty white liberals support him. It is appalling that Obama’s race has been called into question yet again by those who should be defending the right of all people, regardless of racial background, to pursue public office. It is also clear that the LA Times couldn’t run a decent editorial if its life depended on it (and it does).

All the News That's Fit to Print?

2007-03-24T22:34:00.000-05:00

Normally it is unwise to issue complaints about a specific activity only to engage in such activity in the process. Unfortunately, circumstances require that I do so in order to state my case. Any consumer of mass-market media should be familiar with "shock" stories included only for their gruesome details regardless of the actual content. Case in point: a story went out across the AP wire about a week ago (March 15th) about a gruesome incident in Minnesota involving a kidnapped dog and an as-of-yet unidentified kidnapper who returned the dog to its owner in terrible condition (to say the least). Because the story has been published in many news outlets, including a few touted as "family-friendly", I will hesitantly share the available details of the case. A 17-year-old girl in St. Paul, MN lost her 4-year-old Australian Shepherd about five weeks ago. Two weeks later, she received a package on her front doorstep that contained the severed head of her lost dog plus Valentine's Day candy. Batteries were attached to the package with a "clever" quip about batteries being included written on an attached note. The girl was understandably not pleased by her discovery. Fortunately, she seems to have recovered from her loss and gotten a new puppy. Authorities are searching for the perp to make sure he poses no further threat to the girl, her family, or anyone else.

Can anyone explain to me the reason for running a story like this in any news venue, much less sending it out over the AP wire? The whole incident reeks of dismaying stalker behavior, yes, but why does the public have to be made aware of one ugly episode in what may be the life of a dangerous stalker? Perhaps this was a sign of more to come, or maybe it's an isolated case. Either way, the story has no real merit on its own. It isn't news. Somebody's dog died. I feel terrible for the girl, but the death of a dog, no matter how awful, is not newsworthy unless it is a part of some larger story, which this story is not (at least not yet, and possibly not ever). Pointless reporting like this going out over the wire only publicizes the exploits of one very sick, twisted individual who has yet to be apprehended. He (assuming the perp is a man) is probably enjoying the exposure his work has received. Whether or not the publicity will egg him on to commit other crimes is a matter best left to criminal psychologists to debate, but it does seem clear to laymen such as I that the exposure can do no good. The police already have most (if not all) of the useful leads available and will likely receive no further help from the public despite the wide distribution of a news story covering the crime.

The story was printed for no reason other than its sensational contents. I have complained about this before, and I find myself complaining about it again. The death of a dog is not news; it does not affect our lives; and it does not aid in our understanding of the world in any way, shape, or form. We can not force news outlets to censor themselves to satisfy those of us upset by coverage of inconsequential gore and mayhem, but it would speak well of them as institutions if they would (or even could) self-censor to a degree. Common sense should dictate that running a story like this outside of Minneapolis/St. Paul could do no good and could possibly cause harm. However, in this modern era of shrinking subscriber bases and shortened attention spans, deliberate avoidance of graphically violent non-news stories could spell doom for publishers and broadcasters alike. Even though I openly decry the practice, I expect to find stories like these in papers all across the country. Even the TFP carried it in their Friday edition, though to their credit, they buried it on the back page. Why they even ran the story in the first place, I do not know, but that is a question only Griscom and crew can answer.

Sadly, by even discussing the dog mutilation case, I am drawing further attention to it even as I attempt to criticize the practice of reporting sensationalized gobbledy-gook. In a way, I am no better than the publishers, editors, and reporters who ran the story sans commentary. There is no way to comprehensively critique their reporting without first calling attention to it, which in turn generates publicity for them. These days, any kind of publicity is useful, even the bad kind.

Chocosnobs

2007-03-11T01:35:00.000-05:00

There is a new breed of aficionado spreading out across our fair land that I have dubbed the Chocosnob. While Chocosnobs would be an excellent name for a store-brand knock-off of Count Chocula or Cocoa Pebbles, today I shall use the term to describe those who fancy themselves to be chocolate connoisseurs. They obsess over single-origin chocolates, cacao percentages, and other nonsense. Why they awoke one day to find themselves discontent with Hershey and Dove bars, I do not know. The simple, guilty pleasure of chowing down on massive amounts of cheap, tasty chocolate in the form of bars, smores, peanut butter cups, bunnies, Santas, and other confectionary delights has been ruined for these people. I am no chocoholic, but it does strike me as being a tad ridiculous that these chocolate fanciers are trying to lump candy into the same unenviable category as wine, cigars, single-malt whiskey, and other overrated luxuries.

By this point, I’m sure some of you are quite upset that I’ve labeled one of your favored vices as overrated. Clearly anyone can enjoy some booze or cigars if they so choose, but it does not necessarily mean that such products serve any real purpose beyond pure enjoyment (and even then, not everyone enjoys them!). In certain quantities, such consumables can even pose serious health risks to those who partake of them. Yes, wine does have antioxidants (so does chocolate), though there are other ways to get one’s daily dose of antioxidants without swilling booze and eating candy. I’m sure the wine snobs out there would bristle at the mere notion of their favored beverage being mere “booze”, but when you strip away the wine culture and look at the end product itself, you’ll find very little difference between fine wine and Mad Dog 20/20. Don’t get me started on whiskey and cigars.

But now, in addition to the tobacco and liquor fiends, we have Chocosnobs. It’s bad enough that gullible socialites pay good money to learn how to enjoy “the finer things in life”. Chocolate has never been so foul that anyone ever needed training to enjoy it, at least not until now. When you have enough people with more money than common sense in search of irrelevant ways to set themselves apart from the “common man”, the Chocosnob is not far behind.

While lampooning the Chocosnob is certainly permissible, it should be noted that those with disposable income are entitled to do with it as they wish. Taxing worthless luxury items to discourage their consumption is easily as obnoxious as the luxury items themselves. It would be nice if our nation’s moderately-wealthy could find more original, interesting things to do with their money. One friend of mine once remarked that, were he to become wealthy, he would arrange a race between an M1A1 tank and a Toyota T100 pickup truck through an Olympic-sized swimming pool filled with motor oil and ball bearings. I can’t exactly remember why he wanted to stage such a race, but the competition would certainly be more interesting than sitting around sipping liquor, smoking cigars, and eating dark chocolate harvested solely from an obscure plantation in Madagascar.

Tacky, lower-class “redneck” and “ghetto” cultures are often no better, but the current trend of wealthy upper-middle classmen (and women) seeking to enhance their sense of cultural self-superiority through superficial behavioral refinements is getting to be a bit much. What comestible will be the next victim of the culture gurus? Spam? Chewing gum? Breath mints? Necco candy? It’s hard to say what will be chosen next. Life would be much improved for all of us if those with large sums of disposable income could find better, and perhaps nobler, causes to fund than their own descent into overwrought vice.

Waging War on the Minimum

2007-03-03T05:49:00.000-05:00

The following article first appeared in the Enigma on July 13th, 2006.

Throughout the incessant ranting from anti-minimum wage pundits over the years, one central case against the minimum wage has always made sense: open job markets are self-regulatory by design. It’s difficult to believe in such a notion until one witnesses the phenomenon in action. The main reason why the federal minimum wage has not been raised since 1997 is that the minimum wage has proven to be laughably unnecessary. Low-end wages are rising without government interference. Granted, they may not be rising as fast as we’d like, but this has something to do with the fact that the value of menial labor is not rising as fast as other, more skilled labor types (due largely to foreign competition and technology). Typical reactions to lagging low-end wages are to stifle foreign competition, prevent the deployment of labor-saving devices that marginalize unskilled laborers, or artificially inflate low-end wages to enrich those deemed incapable of performing any other work. The former two reactions merit their own discussion and can not be discussed adequately here; however, the latter is of central importance to this column.

That which is most wrong with superficial wage inflation is that you’re paying unskilled laborers more than they’re worth. Consider the case of an unskilled employee working in a city that lies near a state border. His home state has an in-state minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, while the state to the south of his home city has no in-state minimum wage (and therefore uses the federal minimum of $5.15 per hours). The respective economies on both sides of the state border are about the same (for unskilled laborers anyway), but a fast food job south of the border will only net you $6.00 per hour. Obviously an identical job north of the border will get you at least $7.25 per hour due to the in-state minimum. Both jobs, however, are worth about $6.00 per hour, meaning the employee gets paid an extra $1.25 per hour for working north of the border for no valid economic reason. This would have about the same economic effect of paying unskilled laborers north of the border $1.25 per hour to do nothing at all. One might be inclined to disagree with my point until one realizes that the main reason why low-end wages are rising at such as slow pace is that their worth relative to the rest of the job market is declining rapidly. Most of these jobs exist because employers haven’t yet figured out how to eliminate the need for unskilled laborers. Such employment is fast becoming a joke rather than the “honest work” it was once considered to be. I should know; I’ve been working jobs like these for years, and most of what I’ve done has been only marginally useful. It’s busywork with an attached paycheck. Eventually, such employment will be eliminated by machines. Even my current job that pays more than twice the minimum wage per hour is threatened by advancing technology; I am fully aware of the fact that I will eventually be replaced by automated systems.

Yet, we still struggle day in and day out to make excuses for people making their livings cleaning out grease pits and mopping floors. The classic notion that “well, somebody’s gotta do it” is either false now or will be in the near future. Trying to prop up unskilled laborers will produce a ridiculous situation in which minimum wages continue to rise while the absolute value of menial jobs continues to fall. Hiring unskilled laborers may become (and may have already become) an absurd form of charity requiring us to pretend that we still need people to perform menial tasks and that those performing said menial tasks should expect to make a decent living in the process.

Simply put, if the existing wage increases caused by our open job market aren’t enough to sustain those occupying the bottom rungs of our economy, it may be time to find a different way for them to live. Artificial wage increases can not hide the fact that we simply do not need them as much as we once did. They either need to move up to a higher level in our economy or find a lawful, honest way to live from one day to the next without maintaining steady employment. If a way is found for these people to live without doing relatively useless jobs each day in exchange for their daily bread, I’ll be the first to let you know. I hope you’re patient.

Repercussions of Rumsfeld’s Resignation

2007-02-23T02:58:00.000-05:00

Three months ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned after six years of serving the Bush administration and his country. His resignation was taken as a sign by many that his supposedly-bellicose stance on Iraq would be reversed, leading to an eventual withdrawal of troops. Then the bipartisan Iraq Commission’s report came and went as our president unflinchingly ratcheted up the war effort by committing an extra 21,000 troops to the war effort. You would think that, with Rumsfeld gone, the war would wind down . . . and yet the opposite has occurred. Why would this be? Did any of us really understand Rumsfeld and his policies?

I can not claim to be an expert on the life and times of Donald Rumsfeld, but it does seem obvious to me that we may have misinterpreted the man’s actions and misunderstood his role in the Bush administration. The war in Iraq was never expected to lead to such a lengthy and complicated occupation, and this viewpoint was likely fostered by Rumsfeld’s apparent optimism. Rumsfeld obviously wanted a “cheap and quick” war that would be easy on American taxpayers and soldiers alike, though why anyone expected the horrendously-dysfunctional political environment of Iraq to stabilize quickly is anybody’s guess. Rumsfeldian theory also seemed to completely ignore the possibility that nations bordering Iraq might interfere with our occupation. Various allegations have flown that Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran have all had a hand in fomenting violence by supplying independent Iraqi militias with arms and training, not that Rumsfeld’s DoD ever did anything substantial to isolate Iraq from its neighbor’s influence. This all seems very strange in that many writers (myself included), thinkers, and even policy-makers suspected that the Bush administration plotted to use the Iraq war as a lead-in to a larger campaign against Iran and possibly Syria. It could be that Rumsfeld was contributing to the agenda in his own way by steadfastly attempting to secure Iraq as a staging area for future hostilities against Iran. Even still, he seemed to pursue his goal without ever exploring the possibility of expanding security operations to encompass actions against foreign agitators. That may have been one of his greatest failures; he was not so much a determined warmonger as a dedicated servant locked into the mindset of a policeman restricted to a jurisdiction of his own imagination. The man could not think “outside of the box”, or at least not far enough outside of the box to consider the possibility of taking the fight to Iran. He was also so intent upon precision in all his operations that he was allegedly even willing to torture captives for information to avoid using broad military force in the process of eliminating insurgents hidden in civilian areas. Ironically, Rumsfeld’s alleged campaign of rendition and torture may have saved the lives of many innocent Iraqis from carpet-bombing and nighttime raids.

Defense Secretary Gates is now showing us that Rumsfeld’s worst opponents may soon wish for the halcyon days of Rumsfeld’s tenure. Unlike Rumsfeld, Gates is clearly willing to commit more resources and men to the pursuit of victory. We are also now seeing signs of a coordinated PR effort from the Bush administration to sell the American public on the idea that Iran has been arming Shiite Muslims; this PR campaign is in all likelihood intended to prepare us for hostilities with Iran. Rumsfeld never openly entertained the notion of waging war on Iran while simultaneously pacifying resistance in Iraq, but Gates apparently has no problem with moving the crosshairs. Gates may also be one of many brain-children behind an insurgency in Iran that has grown in violence and furor in the past few months. Officials in Tehran have already accused the United States of aiding insurgents that recently killed 18 soldiers near the city of Zahedan, Iran. That bombing will likely not be the last to bear our fingerprints.

I predicted months ago (Reading Ahead, May 18th, 2006) that the Bush administration was jockeying for position in Iraq to stage an assault on Iran at a future date, but it seems clear now that Rumsfeld had laid out a strict set of criteria under which war with Iran could safely be pursued. Without meeting those criteria, it is unlikely that Rumsfeld would have ever agreed to either waging war on Iran or harassing Iran by way of fomenting insurgency. The man whom many once considered to be a callous warmonger may have been the only barrier against further American aggression in the Middle East. Gates and his supporters may well be under pressure to wrap up the entire war in Iraq in the next two years. If so, things could get ugly in the Middle East in the days and weeks to come.

The New (Old?) Racism

2007-02-18T00:11:00.000-05:00

Enlightenment does not come easily to humanity despite our melting-pots and civil rights crusades. Try as we may and try as we might, we can not seem to stamp out racism once and for all, which is unsurprising given the common human tendency towards xenophobia. It would not be entirely fair to claim that we are genetically predisposed towards racism, but we are genetically predisposed to be wary of things and people that are different from ourselves or are otherwise unfamiliar. Many modern racists, being the interminably-flawed humans that they are, seem to have veered away from morally-reprehensible racism and towards racist cultures that are more embarrassing to the racist than anything else. Yet, racism is still racism, and there’s no telling where such notions could ultimately lead. Here’s a small cross-section of the many types of racism I have witnessed that I did not necessarily expect:

Anti-immigrant Racism: This isn’t new, but I didn’t really expect to see so many anti-immigration types get fired up about the racial or cultural background of immigrants. The whole 9/11 disaster has helped bring about anti-immigrant racism to a certain extent, but that still doesn’t explain why so many people have focused their ire on specific immigrant groups (mostly Mexicans) that have few if any links to international terrorist organizations. There seems to be an enormous amount of stress building up among “the natives”, and its cause may be the ceaseless influx of South/Central American immigrants and the cultural differences they bring with them. Sometimes even I feel like Mexico is transposing itself onto the United States, which, given Mexico’s horrendous political and economic climate, is not exactly a welcome development. However, focusing one’s ire upon illegal Mexican immigrants on account of their race or their culture is idiotic, when their only significant transgression against the American Dream is their blatant disrespect for American law. The same can be said for illegal immigrants from any nation. You don’t have to be racist to want strict enforcement of existing border controls, but these days, the two seem to go hand in hand.

Racism by Exclusion: Some would argue that isolated racial/cultural/religious groups have practiced racism by way of exclusion for centuries, but most groups fitting that behavioral description have been so isolated that whatever racist tendencies they might have had (or might still have) were largely irrelevant. Today, particularly in certain segments of the African-American community, you can find numerous signs of racism disguised as racial pride and/or celebration of one’s own racial identity. Whether you have African-Americans gleefully referring to one another while using the dreaded ‘n’ word (and bristling at the mere thought of anyone else using it), mono-racial groups deliberately self-segregating themselves in public social settings to achieve minimal contact with people of other races, or self-appointed caretakers of racial identity controlling whether specific individuals can be considered to be of a particular race based on biased analysis, racism by way of exclusion is alive and well. Author Debra J. Dickerson recently appeared on the Colbert Report and declared that Barack Obama is not black because he is the descendant of a free Kenyan man rather than a descendant of slaves. What being a descendant of slaves has to do with “blackness” and why Dickerson feels empowered to make such declarations on her own is beyond me, though Dickerson’s own racism is likely to blame for her arrogance.

Fashionable Racism: Most white Americans have been bombarded with all manner of politically-correct messages encouraging us to be broad-minded individuals so that we may live in racial harmony. Promoting racial harmony is a good thing, but reducing the message to repetitive doctrine reminiscent of brainwashing is not such a good thing. Rebellious adolescents and young adults who have become disgusted with the endless onslaught of politically-correct indoctrination in mass media and public schools often fight back by adopting some sort of racist counter-culture. These counter-culturally-motivated youths seem to see nothing wrong with adopting racist attitudes, never mind that the vocabulary they acquire in the process is nothing more than recycled garbage that racists and white supremacists have been spewing for decades. Could it be that these rebellious youths have noticed actual differences between distinct racial groups and have lost confidence in moralistic messages encouraging us to treat all human beings as being the same? It may be that they wish to open up some sort of dialogue about racial issues in their own communities, yet they routinely mistake racist banter for meaningful discussion. Our collective fear of discussing race and the differences between races seems to have deprived white America of any sensibility when it comes to discussing matters of race.

Attack of the Mooninites

2007-02-11T04:22:00.000-05:00

By now, you’ve probably heard about Boston being invaded by rogue Mooninite lightboards meant to promote Cartoon Network’s upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. If you haven’t, the story goes a little like this: Cartoon Network (subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting Systems) has been showing a popular cartoon known as Aqua Teen Hunger Force aimed at the coveted 18-34 demographic. It’s cheap to produce (like most of their originals) and has off-beat humor. Two of the characters are the Mooninites who resemble pixilated foes from an old 80s arcade game (think Space Invaders). To promote an upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force feature film, TBS hired contractors to come up with an “edgy” ad campaign to grab the attention of the public. The result: cheap lightboards (think Lite-Brite, only with LEDs) with lights configured to resemble a Mooninite giving viewers the middle finger (Mooninites don’t actually have discernable digits). Attached to the lightboards were various boxes with wires coming from them, which were presumably batteries or power supplies of some kind.

The lightboards were planted in several odd locations without any apparent approval of municipal authorities or private landowners (so far as anyone knows). However, nobody seemed to mind the lightboards until a transit worker noticed one at Boston’s Sullivan Square commuter rail station. Then all hell broke loose. After stopping rail traffic, blocking vehicular traffic over the Longfellow and Boston University bridges, and halting all boat traffic from the Charles River to Boston Harbor, Boston’s emergency responders began to hunt down the rogue “electronic devices” under the assumption that they were bombs. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, thanks to one very alert and seemingly paranoid transit authority employee, the devices were treated as potential explosives rather than promotional gimmicks by authorities.

Even after the lightboards were determined to be harmless, Boston’s Mayor Menino continued to push the issue by openly criticizing Turner Broadcasting Systems for doing such a poor job of responding to the situation. Charges have been filed against the contractors who were responsible for installing the lightboards, and Turner Broadcasting Systems has agreed to pay a sum of $2 million to the city of Boston to cover emergency response expenses. Nobody was hurt, but one can reasonably expect that Turner Broadcasting Systems could easily have gotten a better ad campaign for their money.

While the story may be little more than a source of amusement to most, it also serves as an example of how skittish we have become in our “post 9/11 world”. The devices were treated as potential threats before any attempt was made to ascertain their function, much less their origin. We certainly should be cautious when it comes to unknown devices, but we must also show caution before declaring them to be public safety hazards. Unfortunately, this entire incident also serves as grim evidence of how easy it would be for terrorists to smuggle explosives into a number of sensitive locations in cities across the country should they be so inclined; furthermore, it shows that decorating the devices with pop-cultural icons would likely dissuade casual observers from being alarmed by their presence. We can only hope that those planning to plant explosives in a similar fashion would be detected during the planning phase of their operation; anyone seeking to acquire explosives or components necessary for the manufacture of explosives would likely be noticed by authorities, while two “guerilla advertisers” acquiring the necessary components for LED lightboards would probably fly under the radar.

A number of lessons can be learned here: Don’t display ads in public without prior approval from landowners/controlling authorities, don’t turn your city upside down in a panic every time you run across an anomalous device in public without having some idea of what the device actually is, and don’t let two sneaky twenty-somethings plant electronic devices of unknown nature and origin in sensitive locations around your city unnoticed. Despite all the chaos surrounding their invasion, the Mooninites did nothing more than give us the finger. Next time, we might not be so lucky.

Reading Ahead

2007-02-02T01:34:00.000-05:00

This article originally appeared in the Enigma on May 18th, 2006. Consider the date carefully before reading; recent events have cast new light upon the subject matter.

For those of you not familiar with the game of Go – an ancient board game that originated in China four thousand years ago – the concept of “reading ahead” is vital to victory when playing the aforementioned game. Reading ahead allows experienced Go players to accurately anticipate which moves their opponent will probably make in response. By doing this, one can not only accurately predict one’s opponent’s moves but effectively control them. Being able to read ahead is a useful skill outside the world of Go as well; it might surprise even me to consider how many people in important positions of leadership are able to read ahead successfully despite having no experience with the game of Go.

As much as I hate to say it, one such leader may well be George W. Bush. Mr. Bush has managed to disappoint even his most staunch supporters in some respects while occupying the White House. There are precious few occasions on which I find myself thinking, “That George W. Bush is a clever and insightful man!” Even despite the scorn of his critics, he still has the appearance of a buffoon and a policy track-record deserving of the same grade as he earned in college (a C average, for those of you who have forgotten). Has he actually been maneuvering towards hidden goals while playing the role of lame-duck patsy?

It is with some trepidation that I answer “yes”. He has, somehow or another, maneuvered our nation into a position to strike at and cripple (if not destroy) one of our most hated enemies. Iran, one of two nations lumped into the infamous Axis of Evil by Bush himself, is now squarely in the sights of our military. Israel has publicly declared that it will support any international effort against Iran which is a rather circuitous way of saying that they will back any military strike against Iran initiated by the United States. How did this happen?

What is unknown (to me, at least) is the extent to which American foreign policy has caused this most recent degeneration of diplomacy between Iran and the West. It could be argued that our relatively successful campaigns against radical terrorist groups worldwide have pushed Iran into a defensive position. All things considered, military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have certainly forced terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda, to change tactics and targets alike. Terrorism worldwide has suffered many defeats of one sort or another. Combine that with current Western hostility towards the new Hamas-lead government of Palestine and a promise of future American aggression against any and all terrorist groups worldwide, and one could reasonably conclude that radical Muslim fundamentalists who identify with all that is both of Islam and opposed to the West feel both threatened and invigorated by recent events. Was Iran’s reaction anticipated? Were policy decisions made with the intent of spurring Iranian bellicosity? It’s hard to answer such questions given the absence of hard evidence.

What is known is that American military operations abroad had conveniently put nearly 140,000 troops and a substantial portion of our naval fleet within striking distance of Iran. Long-term military installations have been planned for Iraq which should serve as an indicator that we intend to use Iraq as a launchpad for attacks against any nation in the Middle East we dislike. One could rationally argue that our entire reason for entering Iraq in the first place may have been as a precursor to military action against Iran. We didn’t get into Iraq for the oil (oil production capacity in Iraq has been low since the first Gulf War and has never recovered to pre-Gulf War levels), we likely didn’t go to eliminate WMDs, and we certainly didn’t go for humanitarian reasons (even though that was a legitimate reason for us to do so – we owed the Iraqi people that much). Furthermore, nobody seems to be able to articulate exactly why our troops are still in Iraq. The only purpose they purportedly now serve is to prevent civil war. To be honest, I don’t think that the American military is willing to do what it takes to stop large groups of civilians from fighting with one another should they be so inclined. Stopping a civil war means slaughtering large numbers of civilians and intimidating those who remain. Take a look at what the old Soviet army did to Hungarian rebels in 1956. Take a look at what the Chinese military did to their own citizens in Tiananmen Square. That’s how an armed, armored military prevents revolution. Is that what we want our army doing? No, it is not. The Bush administration knows this and has no intention of stopping civil warfare. Our army remains in Iraq for other reasons, most likely to give Bush the option to invade Iran at the drop of a hat.

When you consider our curiously prolonged stay in Iraq and our global policy of irritating all radical Muslims whenever possible, it is somewhat logical to conclude that all of our policy decisions have been geared towards forcing a massive confrontation between the civilized Western world and Iran. We have conveniently positioned ourselves to attack them on a moment’s notice and have deprived moderate Muslims of any real chance of gaining a political foothold in Iran by offering little or no support to their cause. It is blatantly obvious that the Bush administration is not interested in a peaceful resolution with Iran – we would not be hastily testing advanced bunker-busting bombs 80 miles north of Las Vegas if we expected to use diplomacy and/or support of moderate Iranian student groups to undermine Ahmadinejad’s regime.

There is no direct evidence to support the notion that our nation’s foreign policy has been carefully configured to result in a final confrontation with Iran, but the idea certainly makes sense. In fact, the entire Bush administration’s goal seems to be to identify past enemies of the United States that have not yet been pacified or destroyed and deal with them accordingly. Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and possibly even China are probably on Bush’s “to kill” list. Hugo Chavez has probably earned Venezuela a spot on the list as well. How many regimes will he topple before January of 2009? Only time will tell. That sneaky bastard.

Ted Nugent vs. the Exploding Pigs

2007-01-26T05:21:00.000-05:00

This article first appeared on Jan. 25th, 2007 in The Enigma.

One wonders if Gov. Rick Perry of Texas knew what he was getting into when he invited his good friend Ted Nugent to perform at his gubernatorial inauguration earlier this month. According to the Associated Press Nugent appeared onstage while wielding machine guns as props and wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag. He then launched into a routine that involved shouting offensive remarks about non-English speakers (what specific remarks were made is not currently known). While Mr. Nugent has done some kind and charitable work in the past, his appearance at Gov. Perry’s inaugural hardly does anything for his image. If anything, it shows that Nugent and a growing number of like-minded individuals who oppose illegal immigration have begun to assume political language and behavior that mirrors that of ultra-conservative nationalists, white supremacists, and other unsavory racists. What the Confederate battle flag, fatigues, and machine guns have to do with sensible immigration policy is anybody’s guess, but most casual observers of Nugent and his ilk are likely to come away thinking that some (or even most) individuals who oppose illegal immigration are racist wing-nuts.

The United States is not the only country playing host to growing anti-immigrant fervor. France has suffered the presence of its own ultra right-wing nationalist party, the Front National, since 1972. Front National’s leader Jean-Marie Le Pen garnered a politically-significant 18% of the popular vote in France’s 2002 Presidential election, showing that Front National has a remarkably large and vibrant base of popular support considering the extreme nature of the party’s platform and membership (it should be noted that Front National promotes itself as a more moderate right-wing group than it really is). Like Nugent, Le Pen and his Front National have been active in the public eye as they prepare for the next French Presidential election in June. They have even gone so far as to establish an online presence for their party, not only by producing a website but also by establishing a virtual headquarters in Second Life (an online virtual community featuring 3d graphics and customizable property). Or, at least, they tried to establish a virtual headquarters in Second Life only to see it besieged and ultimately destroyed by protesters. The exact fate of Front National’s headquarters is not entirely known since Second Life normally prevents attackers from completely destroying property such as buildings and objects, but exploits do exist in the game that might allow the hostile annihilation of user-created content. Nevertheless, the building was besieged by numerous attacks designed to overload Second Life’s servers in an attempt to ruin gameplay near Front National’s headquarters or to simply crash the servers outright. Protestors reportedly used a variety of virtual weapons ranging from miniguns to exploding pig munitions. I can only imagine how Ted Nugent and his machine gun props would have fared against the might of exploding pigs, but apparently Front National was no match for the porcine explosives.

It is no great leap of logic to assume that Ted Nugent has been driven to greater heights of madness by some of the same political and social pressures that have sent an alarmingly large number of French voters into the waiting arms of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Just as many Americans fear the growing tide of illegal immigration and the expansion of pro-Mexican Latino nationalist groups (such as MEChA), a proportionately larger number of Frenchmen fear the Islamification of Europe at the hands of Muslim immigrants who reproduce at rates much higher than native (read: white non-Muslim) Europeans. In reality, the threat of demographic warfare is quite real, though it is often overstated by reactionary anti-immigration groups, white supremacists, and other various and sundry ne’er-do-wells. It is no more desirable to import racist foreign agitators than it is to coddle domestic racist agitators; sadly, irresponsibly permissive immigration laws and lax law enforcement have created situations in many Western countries in which mass immigration movements have not only served as a cover for radical foreign nationals but have also inadvertently stoked the fires of outrage within native-born citizens who know no better than to be threatened by an onslaught of unchecked immigration. Liberal border policies have empowered men like Le Pen who otherwise would find few supporters for his radically nationalist views. Sadly, due to the fact that right-wing extremists are moving to co-opt the issue of border control in the United States and abroad, it may now be impossible to approach the issue of responsible border control without incurring the wrath of leftist activists and their exploding pigs.

Crips, Rockets, and Emperors

2007-01-21T00:45:00.000-05:00

This article originally appeared on Dec. 21st, 2005 in The Enigma.

Stanley “Tookie” Williams is now nothing more than a memory in the annals of American courtroom drama. There is little to add to his story other than to say that the state of California was well within its legal bounds to carry out his execution. He was tried, convicted, sentanced, and killed in the name of justice. The debate over whether or not the death penalty is acceptable is best left for another day. What is of most interest to me is the question as to whether or not we have lost something more than a man on death row.

Consider Wernher Von Braun, the mind behind nearly every successful rocketry program at NASA. Von Braun got his start as a rocket scientist in Germany in 1930 when he enrolled at the Berlin Institute of Technology. He worked on a variety of rocketry projects that culminated in the development of the liquid-fueled V-2 rocket in 1942. For those of you unfamiliar with the V-2, this rocket was used by the Nazis to attack English positions from long range with explosive warheads. Hitler saw weapons such as the V-2 as being of vital importance to the Nazi war effort due to the stalwart defense provided by Britain’s RAF (Royal Air Force); thanks to weapons like the V-2, the Germans could effectively bomb British positions without having to tangle with the RAF or put Nazi bombers at risk. Of course, the V-2 had the same basic flaw as the V-1 (aka the “buzz bomb”) in that it wasn’t terribly accurate. Any assault made against English soil with the V-2 was as likely to inflict civilian casualties as anything else.

Fortunately, the Nazis were defeated in World War II. This left many German scientists, including Von Braun, with not much to do other than await judgment at the hands of the victorious Allies. If we were to judge Von Braun’s actions today, we might easily come to the conclusion that Von Braun was guilty of indirectly killing many innocent British civilians. The V-2 was obviously a weapon of war, its research was entirely funded by the German military, and it was so inaccurate that it could not realistically be used without Von Braun knowing it would eventually (if not repeatedly) hit civilian targets. In light of these facts, Von Braun could easily have been found guilty of war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. However, thanks to the US Secretary of War and a project known as Operation Paperclip, Von Braun’s treatment was quite different.

Operation Paperclip was enacted to bring valuable German scientists over to the United States following World War II to use them for their technical knowledge. Von Braun worked closely with the US military in the development of various missiles and rockets before becoming a part of the newly-founded NASA program in 1960. He lived on in the United States as a citizen until his death in 1977, and he was never punished for any of his work on the V-2, even though historical records show that concentration camp laborers were eventually used to build V-2 rockets in horrendous work conditions.

Next consider Emperor Hirohito, former Emperor of Japan. He assumed the throne in 1926 and remained Emperor until 1989, though his role as Emperor had been reduced to that of a ceremonial figurehead by the time of his death. What is most remarkable about Hirohito is that he remained Emperor as long as he did, and that he escaped punishment for his actions during World War II.

Many have claimed that Hirohito had been reduced to a mere puppet of Japan’s civilian government well before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but this perception is nothing but an illusion. Hirohito approved of the attack against Pearl Harbor, having been assured by his ministers that Japan would enjoy a swift victory over the Allies. As we all know, Japan lost the war by surrendering unconditionally to the Allies following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The unconditional surrender was expected to bring an end to the Japanese monarchy entirely, with many Allied leaders wanting to try Hirohito as a war criminal, but General Douglas MacArthur, then Supreme Commander of Allied Powers, had other ideas.

After receiving formal surrender from Japan, MacArthur allowed the Japanese to retain their monarchy and their Emperor. A smear campaign against Japanese General Tojo was initiated in order to place blame on Tojo for the attack on Pearl Harbor (among other things) while making Emperor Hirohito appear innocent of any wrongdoing. Hirohito was portrayed as a mere puppet, and Tojo played along, knowing that to do otherwise would bring about the death of his beloved Emperor whom he still served loyally. Tojo was punished with execution as a war criminal while Hirohito was used as a political tool to ease public tensions during the Allied occupation of Japan. The defeated Emperor was dressed in Western clothing and paraded about the countryside, greeting his people as he asked them to surrender peacefully to the Allies. To MacArthur’s credit, the plan worked, and the Allied occupation of Japan was successful. Hirohito died of illness in 1989, and, to this day, many Japanese deny that he was ever guilty of any war crimes.

So what does all this have to do with Tookie Williams? If you compare these three men, you’ll see that each was guilty of heinous acts that lead to needless death. By all accounts, each man could have, and probably should have, been put to death. Each man also had the potential to contribute to society despite their crimes. Von Braun built his rockets for NASA, Hirohito prevented rebellion against Allied occupation in Japan, and Tookie Williams fought against gang recruitment from death row.

I personally do not know how successful Williams was at fighting the good fight against street gangs, but given his many supporters, I’d say the guy would have made a useful tool in the State of California’s arsenal. California has a terrible gang problem, and any method of slowing or stopping gang recruitment should come as a relief to Governor Schwarzenegger. Apparently Schwarzenegger didn’t agree; Tookie Williams became little more than a corpse and a memory on December 13^th, 2005. Would Tookie have made a difference were he granted clemency? It’s hard to say for sure, and now, we’ll never know. I hope you made the right decision, Arnold, but I have my doubts.

Allergic To Islam

2007-01-12T00:18:00.000-05:00

The following article appeared in The Enigma on Jan. 11th, 2007.

Before I begin, please consider the fact that I am far from a reputable authority when it comes to knowledge of the Qu’ran/Koran/howeveryouwannaspellit (we’ll just call it the Koran). Most people in the United States are in the same boat; not only are we generally ignorant about the majority of the Koran’s contents, but we are also largely unaware of what constitutes the religion of Islam. News reports and opinion pieces that have been readily available to the public since 2001 (when many Americans suddenly became interested in Islam) have projected an image of Islam that many would argue is sensationalized. Most defenders of Islam claim that Islam is a religion of peace that is not well-represented by suicide bombers, assassins, extremists, and other ne’er-do-wells. Whether a majority of Muslims are truly peace-loving people or passive supporters of a violent, expansionist Muslim minority is largely irrelevant to most Americans who seem to have forged their own preconceived notions of who Muslims are and what Islam represents.

Predictably, those who tend to be reactionary, xenophobic isolationists have jumped to the conclusion that Islam represents at least a potential threat to the Western world. They may have a point given that approximately 80% of American mosques are now reportedly Wahhabi mosques (Wahhabi Islam isn’t exactly moderate in nature). However, those who seem to have had the most success in spreading Islam to the gates of the West and beyond have done so with wealth rather than violence. Suicide bombings aren’t winning as many converts as are large sums of money. Combine spending towards the establishment and expansion of foreign Wahhabi mosques by the Saudi Arabian government (reportedly $87 billion in the US alone since 1973) with relatively high immigration rates of Muslims into traditionally non-Muslim Western countries, and you have a formula for a completely non-violent takeover of many Western nations that have suffered from steadily declining rates of reproduction and church attendance. Given the large number of similarities between ultra-conservative Christians and radical Muslims, it is curious that conservative Christian Americans would be foremost among those interested in pursuing a victorious cultural counter-offensive against Islam’s supposedly inevitable rise in demographic power. While some Christians do not like the prospect of tolerating the worship of a “false god”, the fundamental doctrines of Islam would likely be more soothing to conservative Christians than would any sort of moral relativism common to left-leaning atheists. Furthermore, most Muslims are peaceful bystanders of the non-Wahhabi variety who are not exactly marching on the gates of Vienna nor colonizing your neighborhood, though those who choose to fear the expansion of Islam (peaceful or otherwise) continue to fear it for their own reasons.

While American conservatives seem to be gearing up for an arguably unnecessary culture war with Islam, their leftist counterparts appear to be obsessed with the notion that Islam is either benign or only threatening due to American foreign policy. How or why some liberal Americans have become so entranced by their philosophy of multiculturalism that they would serve as unwitting apologists for radical Islam is beyond me. Based on its religious and cultural tenets, even relatively moderate Islam should be repulsive to most liberal Americans; widely-available reports of human rights abuses in majority-Muslim countries, particularly those ruled by more-radical sects of Islam such as Saudi Arabia, should upset liberals to no end. Strangely many American liberals do not identify Islam as a significant threat to American civil liberties; they would prefer to point their fingers at conservative Christians. Many liberal civil libertarians would prefer to see the current conservative crusade against radical Islam as a ruse meant to blind Americans as their civil liberties are taken away. Few who rail against the Bush administration consider Islam’s rapid oil-fueled expansion into Western countries to be a threat of any kind.

It would be an understatement to say that our reaction to Islam has been peculiar in the wake of the “war on terrorism”. Those who would logically be most threatened by its substance welcome it with open arms, while those who fought so ardently against godless Communists in the 20^th century now find themselves fearing and loathing a monotheistic religion with a strict social doctrine that at least recognizes Christ in passing. If Islam does gain a foothold in the United States by relatively peaceful means as it has in Europe, will our domestic liberals savage it as brutally as they have Christianity? I wouldn’t count on it.

Legalize It?

2007-01-04T22:44:00.000-05:00

This column originally appeared in The Enigma on Jan. 4th, 2007.

I never thought I'd hear words even vaguely reminiscent of Bob Marley lyrics on ESPN's Quite Frankly. It was not Steven A. Smith who made the remark, but rather one of his guests whose name escapes me at the moment. The guest gave several reasons why Shawne Merriman of the San Diego Chargers should not face suspension after testing positive for steroids, one of which was that football is a high-impact sport that essentially requires its players to use performance-enhancing chemicals in order to remain healthy and heal from injuries at an acceptable rate. That is a very interesting point, one which crossed my mind months ago following the suspension of a different athlete in a different sport for similar reasons. The aforementioned guest would have advocated lifting all bans on performance-enhancing substances in the NFL (and possibly other sports) had he followed his own line of reasoning to its logical conclusion.

I personally pondered the possibility that steroids might have a positive influence on professional sports when Rafael Palmeiro, formerly of the Baltimore Orioles, tested positive for steroids. Palmeiro was a quality player with a long career marred by very few serious injuries. Injuries can cripple teams by reducing their ability to compete at the highest levels of play, so it is logical to assume that any and all steps should be taken to reduce injuries in order to level the playing field for athletes more prone to injury than others. It was rumored some time ago that Palmeiro tested positive for at least one particular substance reputed to provide very little in the way of performance enhancement while offering significant resistance to injury. Though Palmeiro denied ever deliberately taking steroids at all, it is theoretically possible that he took specific substances to reduce instances of injury or recover from injuries more quickly in order to deliver a consistently higher level of play than his more-fragile peers. Such speculation flies in the face of the usual assumption that steroids cause severe damage to organs, joints, and bones if used for any significant period of time.

Imagine, for a moment, an array of highly-sophisticated steroids or steroid-like substances engineered to reduce injury and accelerate healing from all manner of tissue and bone damage. Now imagine that these substances had few, if any negative side effects (and were non-habit-forming). Would we still ban these from sports, be they at the professional or amateur level? Would we mark them as Schedule III controlled substances? If so, why? Being "tough" has been an integral part of many sports, particularly contact sports like football, but this nebulous trait we call "toughness" has generally referred to an athlete's ability to sustain prolonged exertion without faltering or suffer serious blunt force trauma without succumbing to shock or pain. Only those replete with schadenfreude enjoy watching athletes suffer injuries resulting in time spent on the dreaded disabled list. If injuries were reduced by even a small percentage, and if time spent on the DL were shortened for players in most cases, wouldn't these hypothetical super-substances be a boon to sports worldwide? You'd think so, but few people look at it that way.

"Better living through chemistry" is not a popular concept in the world of sports, a fact that is not likely to change soon in a sporting culture that decries steroid use as cheating. Few sports fans want a world in which a pharmaceutical regimen can trump natural talent. For the most part, this position is understandable, but certain lines must be drawn. Nearly every major American sports league (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, etc.) along with minor leagues and NCAA divisions are plagued by injuries, and in the case of the NFL and MLB, one could easily argue that injuries are throwing competition wildly off-balance. It is no longer an issue of "tough" players rising above the fray so much as it is lucky players avoiding injury through good fortune. Or, at least, that is how it seems to fans on the outside who have no knowledge of precisely what substances are going into which bodies. It may be that there are numerous other athletes following Palmeiro's alleged example of favoring chemically-induced resilience over natural toughness.

Should we legalize steroids, or at least legalize substances that prove to be "injury-reducing" rather than "performance-enhancing"? I tentatively argue that we should. Before we consider legalizing recreational substances as the late Bob Marley recommended, we should scrutinize chemicals that offer "better living through chemistry" for athletes at all levels of competition. Who knows, some of these substances might prove to be useful for manual laborers in fields that require high levels of exertion, such as loading dock workers using little more than lifting belts for assistance. One less injured back could mean one less ruined career.

A Minor Problem

2007-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

This column originally appeared in The Enigma on Aug. 24th, 2006.

Hopefully we can all agree that pedophiles – and by pedophiles I mean those who lust after children so young as to be devoid of almost any trace of physical and/or mental adulthood – are disturbing individuals who pose a significant danger to society. They’ve been getting quite a bit of press lately thanks to Dateline NBC and their routine busts of online predators. The trap is simple: an adult decoy poses as a thirteen or fourteen-year-old girl in online chatrooms and waits for men to approach her with sexually-charged conversation. The decoy plays along patiently, waiting for the aggressor to request a face-to-face meeting. Only when they meet, instead of finding a young, willing teenage girl, the aggressor finds a cast member of Dateline NBC and several police officers. The duped pedophile is then lectured, detained, and sent off to prison (more or less).

What is most disturbing about this constant parade of pedophilic nonsense is the sheer number of the duped. The number of men out there that can be both aroused by a minor (even a fake) and induced to solicit said minor for sex is staggering. In fact, there are so many that they form social groups, form political parties (in Denmark anyway), and even fuel international child prostitution rings. Child prostitution has become such a big business overseas that entire national governments will defend it with the force of arms if necessary. It’s big business, and it will continue to be big business so long as there is money at stake.

Domestically, however, pedophiles have a much harder lot in life. Their passions are neither sated by prolific prostitution rings nor sanctioned (much less tolerated) by American government officials. To ease their lots in life and perhaps justify their desires to themselves, they often form loose social groups (frequently gathering on the internet) to promote their own “lifestyle” as some sort of valid social movement. Consider some of these gems, both foreign and domestic (note that these sites are not explicitly pornographic, but may still be disturbing to readers of all ages):

GlWiki : This is like a pedo-portal to other websites aimed at the pedophile activist. It uses software similar to that used on the famous Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), most likely to give itself an air of legitimacy. Sadly, there is little that is legit about this site or the sites to which it links. The “founding” site for GlWiki, tkGL.net, seems to have been shut down. Given the wretched content of that site’s forums, I’m not surprised.

Update: tkGL.net seems to be attempting some sort of return. Ugh.

My Silent War: Some pedophile’s blog. Oh look, he treats us to a pedophile’s perspective on recent findings in the JonBenet Ramsey case. Judging by the contents of this blog, all he does is promote pedo websites or feign confusion whenever he reads about a pedophile hurting a kid or about people wanting to harm pedophiles. Joy!

Update: At least according to the author's Nov. 25th, 2006 post, My Silent War is no longer receiving updates.

Pedofilia: Pravda vs. Mytus : This jolly website explores the many “myths” of pedophilia in both English and Slovensk. It paints a very rosy picture of who pedophiles are and what they present to society.

Update: This site may be shut down or temporarily out of commission. Currently it is not available except via Google cache or other site-caching services.

The list goes on and on. There is a movement, or I should say several currently-separate movements, to legitimize pedophilia as a natural state of sexual inclination similar to homosexuality. Obviously, such a movement (or agglomeration of movements) can not be seen as a good thing. For starters, it is predominantly illegal for adults to copulate with minors or even WANT to copulate with minors. That will not change. No matter how much minors of various ages might want to explore their own sexuality, or how much they might actually deserve the chance to do so, the rising tide of pedophilia will all but ensure that age-of-consent laws in this country will become stricter with the passage of time. Now is not a good time to be a pedophile, much less an activist fighting for their “cause”. For those of us not living in their world of self-inflicted delusion, we would do well to be warned that there are numerous organized pedophilic organizations out there fighting for the rights of pedophiles to distribute child pornography and molest children, even within our own borders.

I, Peacemonger

2006-12-30T02:59:00.000-05:00

This column originally appeared in The Enigma on Feb. 9th, 2006. It refers to a shooting-spree at a postal facility.

As of Thursday, February 2^nd, the death toll resulting from Jennifer San Marco’s shooting spree in Goleta, California rose to eight. This includes one of San Marco’s former neighbors found dead a day after San Marco opened fire upon her former coworkers at a postal sorting facility. I’m sure that, somewhere, pro-gun-control advocates will seize upon the opportunity to use San Marco’s murderous rampage as an excuse to call for stricter gun laws. Second Amendment supporters will retaliate by claiming that San Marco bears full responsibility for the crime, that tighter gun controls would have made no difference, and that her victims should have been armed for their own immediate defense. Both arguments are flawed in one way or another. All that can be said for certain is that Jennifer San Marco was rather unhinged and in need of serious medical help.

Interestingly enough, the “pro-gun nuts” might have a few points in favor of their argument. It is unlikely that San Marco could have continued firing upon postal employees had she faced fully-armed targets capable of defending themselves with lethal force. Not only is it horrifying that someone would even want to infiltrate a peaceful work environment for the sole purpose of killing people, but it is equally frightening that one person armed with nothing more than a gun and bullets could become such a deadly force amidst dozens of postal employees. Contrary to popular belief, postal workers do not often “go postal” and are typically barred from carrying any kind of lethal weapon onto federal property. In fact, few can legally take guns into postal facilities, federal buildings, federal courts, or other properties owned by the government. Even if the employees of Goleta, CA’s sorting facility had wanted to defend themselves with firearms or other weapons, it would not have been legal for them to do so.

Conventional wisdom dictates that guns are dangerous in and of themselves, that their presence begets violence, and that reducing their number in a workplace environment helps reduce injury and death. However, I have yet to see any convincing evidence that proves such assumptions to be true. Whoever perpetuated such beliefs so convincingly that they became accepted fact is ultimately responsible for ensuring that such a large number of common citizens would (and must) remain unarmed in public and private settings. Among “gun nuts” and other Second Amendment advocates, it is commonly held true that overbearing politicians have portrayed guns and gun-ownership as inherently barbaric as a means of disarming the public to further government control over people’s lives. That has a ring of truth to it, but I find it more likely that we citizens may be more responsible for modern notions regarding gun-control than is commonly accepted.

If I had to pick any one individual who best personified the driving force behind modern gun-control, I would be forced to look in a mirror to find my answer. People like me do not own firearms, do not know how to use them, have very little practical knowledge of them, and were not raised around them. We have not been taught to respect or understand them on a personal level. We are completely and utterly dependant on security forces, be they private or public, for our protection. We are little more than a liability when threatened. Complacent in our world of personal pacifism, we see violence as something only to be used by the state (if at all). In our minds, those who choose to arm themselves legally are barbaric throwbacks who spend their weekends putting holes in Bambi. There are quite a few of us, and it is my general impression that the pro-gun-control politicians have assumed their stance not to further pacify us or create more “peacemongers” like us, but to satisfy our over-civilized notions regarding self-armament.

Regardless of what you might think about guns, the mere fact that so many of us must remain unarmed creates an enormous problem when we are faced with criminals willing to break the law. All it takes is one mad gunman (or gunwoman) to make national headlines. We should at least consider the possibility that widespread gun ownership among peace-loving, law-abiding citizens could help reduce violence and crime in public settings. Guns have already been shown to be useful in defense of the home. However, before that issue can be addressed, people like me are going to have to wake up to the fact that we can not continue to live as pacifists and “peacemongers” without threatening the safety of all. Even if we do not elect to become responsible gun owners ourselves, we must step aside and allow those among us who can and will own firearms to do so for our public defense. What good do we do when we force everyone to become sitting ducks?

Wealth of Nations No More

2006-12-30T02:34:00.000-05:00

This column originally appeared in The Enigma on Feb. 23rd, 2006

Despite modest gains in the stock market and overall good fiscal numbers for American businesses, critics of unrestrained capitalism continue to bemoan the widening gap between “haves” and “have nots”. Those who issue such criticism obviously have no faith in capitalism or its underlying premises. Theoretically, the “have nots” should be able to enrich themselves through hard work to the point that even said society’s poorest citizens would live lifestyles fundamentally better than those of kings in bygone days. According to some, that is the case for America’s “have nots”.

Even still, those who want a better, more secure lifestyle for the “have nots” bemoan a falling median wage in contrast to a rising average wage. It is typically reasoned that this effect is due in large part to fat-cat politicians in bed with big businesses that ship jobs overseas so that their corporate masters can profit off the backs of cheap foreign laborers. This observation is at least partly accurate; foreign competition from nations such as China has become especially fierce. Their citizens will work for low wages, and, in some cases, prison laborers can be forced to work for no pay whatsoever. Free trade with such nations inevitably drives the value of uneducated labor into the toilet. Sadly, the prescribed cures for this effect are more poisonous than the problem itself. Any student of history who remembers the Hawley-Smoot tariff should know that protectionist policies intended to safeguard domestic markets only induce reprisal from foreign trade partners.

Even more foolish is the notion that it is merely low foreign wages inflicting such misery upon American workers. Foreign countries have long often offered wages much lower than those in the United States, and even though the median wage of unskilled American laborers hasn’t really gone up since the 1970s, corporations continue to move operations overseas through plant closings and outsourcing. The reason for this phenomenon lies within the granddaddy of all capitalist source-texts, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Amidst other observations, Smith points out that productive nations often enhance the value of each common laborer by way of efficient division of labor and mechanical aids. Because modern corporations are able to successfully employ even destitute laborers in the manufacture of quality goods, it stands to reason that poor nations are now attracting all manner of manufacturers. The value of American labor has been undermined by the power of machine-assisted labor combined with rock-bottom wages.

What most would not expect is that neither Adam Smith nor modern capitalists seem to have taken into account that continued advances in automation will eventually make unskilled laborers obsolete. Modern machines allow one worker to do what thousands did decades ago, but eventually, that one worker will become more of an impediment than an asset. Such a scenario might seem as a boon to nations able to build such futuristic factories until one considers the problems inherent to the advent of full automation. Automation will not stop at factories; machines of one sort or another will take over many tasks assigned to those making rock-bottom wages in this country, laying waste to employment opportunities within the industrial and service industries. The advent of wide-spread automation should be celebrated on account of the fact that it would save so many common people from the drudgery of mopping floors, waiting tables, tending cash registers, moving pallets in a warehouse, etc. Unfortunately, thanks to glorious capitalism, saving people from such drudgery also means taking away their only means by which to earn a living.

Capitalism has no real answer to the problems posed by full automation. In a capitalist system, everyone must work to earn their own living; if there are no jobs available, those who seek employment go without. Future automation presents us with the distinct possibility, if not the likelihood, that most people worldwide will not be educable to the level necessary for them to gain employment or start businesses of their own. Technology is already driving up the basic level of education necessary for American workers to seek lucrative employment, and it’s only going to get worse. I predict that within the next fifty years or so, we will get to the point that the majority of humanity will be deemed unfit for employment of any kind. It is doubtful that even the intrepid American workforce will be able to keep up with the pace of technology, especially once corporate big-wigs do away with middle-managers and other worthless bureaucratic pawns. Once the majority of us become useless as units of work, what will we do?

Some would argue that such a scenario would present us with the opportunity to enter into a true paradise. Machines would provide us with so much raw wealth through their tireless labor that we could all enjoy lives of luxury. The majority of us, being totally useless as laborers, would finally be able to cast off the yoke of the Puritan work ethic as we collectively realized that we humans are more than laborers. Unfortunately, if we reach this level of technology while still beholden to capitalist economic theories, how will we ever help the unemployable masses enjoy the fruits of automated labor? Redistribution of income has historically proven to be detrimental not only to national economies but basic social structures such as marriages and families. It is, understandably, not terribly popular outside of socialist circles. It is also questionable as to whether or not socialist policies would offer any real solution to the problem of massive unemployment brought on by automation. Socialism might not lead to an age of enlightened leisure but instead lead to one of dependency and ignorance. The public might well become puppets of power-brokers controlling our gloriously productive machines. In fact, if you were to take a walk through any of America’s worst housing projects, you might conclude that we’ve already taken steps in that direction.

Squabbling over jobs lost to overseas competitors seems petty and foolish in light of our automated future. The time is ripe for us to sort out what we’ll do with the unemployable masses once they’ve all been rendered useless to industry. Capitalism as we know it will be forced to change dramatically or die in the attempt. Are we ready to face this brave new world? Are you?

Welcome

2006-12-29T05:45:00.000-05:00

Just what is an uncolumnist? I haven't quite determined that myself. It is not a blogger; the traditional blogger recounts events of his/her/its daily life or otherwise muses in a free-form fashion about the world about them. Blogs can be anything: rants, raves, news, you name it. A columnist is a more focused creature that opines on matters of societal, economic, or political importance to the intended audience from a distant, generally detached perspective. The uncolumnist might be a columnist who seeks to find a new home in a world with shrinking newspaper subscriptions. Honestly, I would like to become a syndicated newspaper columnist of renown, but somehow I doubt that attempting to do so would be a good idea given current trends. Can anyone make it as a columnist in the blogosphere? Many have, and many others will. I intend to find out if I have what it takes to make the grade. If not, well . . . I always have my day job. I also write pro bono for the Enigma, a weekly "alternative" paper in my hometown of Chattanooga, TN. In fact, I do two features a week for the Enigma, though the tech column is intended strictly for the local audience that might not read tech sites on their own (where they presumably can find content superior to my own).

Some of the material that will appear here may also appear in the Enigma, which shouldn't be a problem considering the potential audience for this . . . uncolumn. Local features will be edited for mass-market consumption or omitted entirely as per my whim. In any case, I hope you read and enjoy the content on this site. Maybe my dream of becoming a successful columnist will come true without ever seeing one of my columns featured in a major market newspaper. Or maybe not. Let's find out, shall we?

note: comments are welcome, but please keep it clean and mild (no worse than PG-13 if possible, if that means anything to you). Also, some older content may appear here from time to time. This content comes from past editions of the Enigma that most of you have likely not read. I will put things into context when necessary. Thanks!