The Katrina Death Toll was at 1078 when efforts to recover the dead were suspended today. New Orleans has now flooded again from the effects of Hurricane Rita. The levee is breached in three places.
Hurricane Rita is bearing down on the Gulf Coast and will hit late tonight around Port Arthur, Texas. The evacation is chaotic and not functioning well, with residents who have not already fled Houston advised to return to their homes to weather the storm. At least 24 people have died in the course of the evacuation in advance of Hurricane Rita. The greatest concerns related to Hurricane Rita are the prospects of people left unsheltered on the roads trying to evacuate when Rita hits, and massive distruption of the oil and gas industry which one radio commentator this morning suggested could bring gas prices to a record $4 a gallon. Property damage from Rita is expected to be massive, with the entire town of Port Arthur expected to be flooded.
23 September 2005
Naval Power Overkill
From the Strategy Page (September 22, 2005 entry):
The post goes on to note planned expansions in the number of U.S. ships, most notably, a large planned buy of small "littoral combat ships."
The Navy is probably the biggest source of fat in the current Defense Department budget. I'm not opposed to all war or the military in general, although we have made some poor choices regarding which wars we should choose to fight. But, every military has to set priorities, and there are more urgent needs within the U.S. military than maintaining this large a fleet of billion dollar warships.
Today, the USN enjoys a "17 Navy standard"; that is, the total tonnage of Uncle Sam’s fleet is equal to the combined total tonnage of the next 17 smaller navies. Even combining the two biggest potential naval competitors (the Chinese and the Russians), the USN still outclasses them by over 3:1 in tonnage, and it has substantially more combat power. Of the world’s 34 aviation power projection platforms (i.e., vessels capable of operating combat aircraft), the US owns 24 (71-percent), eight times more than the second leading navy, the decidedly friendly Royal Navy, which has with three V/STOL carriers. In addition, the US surface fleet carries four times as many VLS (vertical missile launchers) cells as the rest of the world navies combined. The US submarine fleet enjoys better force ratios against the next two most numerous underwater fleets than it did against the Soviets during the Cold War.
The post goes on to note planned expansions in the number of U.S. ships, most notably, a large planned buy of small "littoral combat ships."
The Navy is probably the biggest source of fat in the current Defense Department budget. I'm not opposed to all war or the military in general, although we have made some poor choices regarding which wars we should choose to fight. But, every military has to set priorities, and there are more urgent needs within the U.S. military than maintaining this large a fleet of billion dollar warships.
Saudi Arabian Slaves.
The United States acts like Saudi Arabia is its ally. We sell them lots of very high tech military equipment. We do a lot of business with them.
It is worth remembering a few things about this country from time to time, however. Saudi Arabia is the world leader in the number of executions it carries out relative to is population and its standards of due process are almost as bad as Texas (unlike Texas, however, it does listen to pleas for mercy from the parents of murder victims). It is the only major Islamic country in the world that doesn't allow women to drive. It is an absolute monarchy. It does not have freedom of religion. It tortures people (indeed, the United States under President George W. Bush has sent Americans there for the purpose of being tortured). It was the home of 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11. It produced Osama bin Laden (who has also been a CIA asset), and some of the 9-11 hijackers got money from the Saudi Arabian royal family in the United States. It financed the madrasas that gave rise to the Taliban who we had to go to war with in Afghanistan and was a major financer of the Taliban. Most of the suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudi Arabians.
Oh yeah, and they have this little problem, one familiar to American history. They keep slaves and our State Department knows it. Despite this fact:
Kuwait, another slaveholding monarchy that owes its very existing to U.S. led military intervention under the administration of George W. Bush's father, was also given a pass.
The United States needs to stop prostituting its national security and its integrity with respect to human rights and democracy to its thirst for oil. Our nation is too great to be an oil whore.
It is worth remembering a few things about this country from time to time, however. Saudi Arabia is the world leader in the number of executions it carries out relative to is population and its standards of due process are almost as bad as Texas (unlike Texas, however, it does listen to pleas for mercy from the parents of murder victims). It is the only major Islamic country in the world that doesn't allow women to drive. It is an absolute monarchy. It does not have freedom of religion. It tortures people (indeed, the United States under President George W. Bush has sent Americans there for the purpose of being tortured). It was the home of 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11. It produced Osama bin Laden (who has also been a CIA asset), and some of the 9-11 hijackers got money from the Saudi Arabian royal family in the United States. It financed the madrasas that gave rise to the Taliban who we had to go to war with in Afghanistan and was a major financer of the Taliban. Most of the suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudi Arabians.
Oh yeah, and they have this little problem, one familiar to American history. They keep slaves and our State Department knows it. Despite this fact:
President Bush decided Wednesday to waive any financial sanctions on Saudi Arabia, Washington's closest Arab ally in the war on terrorism, for failing to do enough to stop the modern-day slave trade in prostitutes, child sex workers and forced laborers.
Kuwait, another slaveholding monarchy that owes its very existing to U.S. led military intervention under the administration of George W. Bush's father, was also given a pass.
The United States needs to stop prostituting its national security and its integrity with respect to human rights and democracy to its thirst for oil. Our nation is too great to be an oil whore.
Christian Hate in California
A fourteen year old girl was expelled from the Ontario Christian School because her parents who had been together for 22 years and also have a 9 year old and 19 year old daughter, are lesbians.
I'm waiting to hear American Christian leaders, and politicians who claim to be Christian, condemn this action. I haven't heard a word yet. By their silence, they seem to be signaling their agreement.
(I inaccurately placed Ontario Christian School in Canada in a prior version of this post. It is, in fact, in Southern California. Somehow, this is less surprising.)
"Your family does not meet the policies of admission," Superintendent Leonard Stob wrote to Tina Clark, the girl's biological mother.
Stob wrote that school policy requires that at least one parent may not engage in practices "immoral or inconsistent with a positive Christian life style, such as cohabitating without marriage or in a homosexual relationship," The Los Angeles Times reported in Friday's edition.
I'm waiting to hear American Christian leaders, and politicians who claim to be Christian, condemn this action. I haven't heard a word yet. By their silence, they seem to be signaling their agreement.
(I inaccurately placed Ontario Christian School in Canada in a prior version of this post. It is, in fact, in Southern California. Somehow, this is less surprising.)
22 September 2005
Country Music.
After nine years living in the West, I have finally reached the point where I can listen to country music on the radio without immediately changing the channel. Growing up in Ohio, there was a cultural divide. City kids listened to rock. Rednecks listened to country. The divide, like the cultural divide that splits our country, ran deep. I grew up as a city kid. But, just because I can stand to listen to it now, doesn't mean that I understand it. I don't.
Everyone has their ups and downs. There are optimistic days, and days when the future seems dark. How dark is hard to quantify. Rating emotions on a scale of one to ten is horribly subjective. The English language doesn't have very quantitative measures either. At times, I've tried to track my own emotions, but I've wanted to do it in a manner that I could communicate to someone else if I ever wanted to do so. So, I formulated what I call the "Despair Index". The notion behind the Depair Index is to compare the extent to which negative feelings are impairing your judgment and ability to function, to the extent to which consuming a comparable number of beers in a single setting would. If you score four or five beers on the Depair Index, you are probably not safe to drive, even if you are stone cold sober. A bad day at the office might rate two or three beers. When you start hitting the double digits on anything like a regular basis, you need professional help.
Anyway, the point of this diversion is that the Depair Index provides a means to compare different genres of music. Most of rock music (with some notable but not very common exceptions), is safely in the one to three beer zone, if not stone cold sober and actually happy. Country music is different. Can you even make it onto the radio if you haven't, at least, hit the six or seven beer level on the Depair Index? Are there protaganists in country music songs who haven't been abandoned by wives, lovers, children and dogs? Even the "happy" songs come across as such a squalid existence that you get the impression that everyone involved has passed the "just don't care" threshold long ago. County music DJs absorb more misery in a day than most psychiatrists see in a year. Is that an occupational hazard or something? What do you have to have going on in your life to feel the need to listen to this stuff all day long? No wonder rural people and Southerners are prematurely cynical, vote for Republicans and can stomach the cruel cynicism of talk radio. No one with compassion and empathy circuits still in tact could bear to listen to it for more than a couple of hours a month.
A friend of mine lost the use of her taste buds and as a result kept trying to make her cooking more and more spicy, until she served a meal that made everyone else at the table almost keel over and diagnosed the real problem. Maybe country music is going for a similar effect, trying to find something that will break through otherwise numbed emotions.
I'm sure that there must be more to the genre. I don't claim to get it. But, in the mean time I will have to limit my consumption of country music to those rare moments when I'm already at the six or seven beer level on the Depair Index. You can't be too careful.
Everyone has their ups and downs. There are optimistic days, and days when the future seems dark. How dark is hard to quantify. Rating emotions on a scale of one to ten is horribly subjective. The English language doesn't have very quantitative measures either. At times, I've tried to track my own emotions, but I've wanted to do it in a manner that I could communicate to someone else if I ever wanted to do so. So, I formulated what I call the "Despair Index". The notion behind the Depair Index is to compare the extent to which negative feelings are impairing your judgment and ability to function, to the extent to which consuming a comparable number of beers in a single setting would. If you score four or five beers on the Depair Index, you are probably not safe to drive, even if you are stone cold sober. A bad day at the office might rate two or three beers. When you start hitting the double digits on anything like a regular basis, you need professional help.
Anyway, the point of this diversion is that the Depair Index provides a means to compare different genres of music. Most of rock music (with some notable but not very common exceptions), is safely in the one to three beer zone, if not stone cold sober and actually happy. Country music is different. Can you even make it onto the radio if you haven't, at least, hit the six or seven beer level on the Depair Index? Are there protaganists in country music songs who haven't been abandoned by wives, lovers, children and dogs? Even the "happy" songs come across as such a squalid existence that you get the impression that everyone involved has passed the "just don't care" threshold long ago. County music DJs absorb more misery in a day than most psychiatrists see in a year. Is that an occupational hazard or something? What do you have to have going on in your life to feel the need to listen to this stuff all day long? No wonder rural people and Southerners are prematurely cynical, vote for Republicans and can stomach the cruel cynicism of talk radio. No one with compassion and empathy circuits still in tact could bear to listen to it for more than a couple of hours a month.
A friend of mine lost the use of her taste buds and as a result kept trying to make her cooking more and more spicy, until she served a meal that made everyone else at the table almost keel over and diagnosed the real problem. Maybe country music is going for a similar effect, trying to find something that will break through otherwise numbed emotions.
I'm sure that there must be more to the genre. I don't claim to get it. But, in the mean time I will have to limit my consumption of country music to those rare moments when I'm already at the six or seven beer level on the Depair Index. You can't be too careful.
Autumn
Today is the fall equinox, the first day of autumn. There are a few leaves turning in the trees and it was a relatively cool day, but autumn in Denver is not as dramatic as it is in the East.
If the story I heard on the radio this week about global warming's effect on Colorado is correct, our weather could start to look more like New Mexico's soon. (Full report here with thanks to Coyote Gulch for providing the link). Temperature increases of 1-4 degrees in average temperature could dramatically shrink the skiing season, reduce the reliability of water supplies for front range cities, and have major negative effects on horticulture in the state. Cactus farming just isn't as commercially viable as growing peaches.
Unfortunately, until policy makers and the general public make the connection between global warming and things like rising sea levels and increased storm activity that the rest of the world has seen the Katrina/Rita duo as an iconic example of, it is hard to see how we are going to make any progress on this front. And, since few nations (even the E.U. and China) are really in a good position to pressure the U.S. to act, the result is likely to be that the U.S. will not act.
If the story I heard on the radio this week about global warming's effect on Colorado is correct, our weather could start to look more like New Mexico's soon. (Full report here with thanks to Coyote Gulch for providing the link). Temperature increases of 1-4 degrees in average temperature could dramatically shrink the skiing season, reduce the reliability of water supplies for front range cities, and have major negative effects on horticulture in the state. Cactus farming just isn't as commercially viable as growing peaches.
Unfortunately, until policy makers and the general public make the connection between global warming and things like rising sea levels and increased storm activity that the rest of the world has seen the Katrina/Rita duo as an iconic example of, it is hard to see how we are going to make any progress on this front. And, since few nations (even the E.U. and China) are really in a good position to pressure the U.S. to act, the result is likely to be that the U.S. will not act.
Contraflow.
The picture above, of Houston residents fleeing Hurricane Rita provokes an immediate and obvious reaction. Has the world gone mad? Why aren't they letting people who are fleeing the city drive on the wrong side of the highway? Later in the day, they did just that. Too late, in my opinion, but credit where credit is due for finally waking up to reality. Allowing people to drive on the wrong side of the highway is called "contraflow" in traffic engineering circles.
The big question in my mind is not why it took so long to do it in Houston (see the section in my post on Conspiracy Theories about how people are frequently incompetent). The big question in my mind is why every major city in America doesn't routinely use contraflow approaches on a daily basis.
Traffic flows on interstate highways in major metropolitan areas are exceedingly predictable. Every weekday morning there is a rush going into the central city. Every weekday afternoon there is a rush going out of the central city. Indeed, this isn't the only place you see highly predictable traffic patterns on interstate highways. The road going to Vail is jammed every Friday evening and Saturday morning during ski season. The road leaving Vail is jammed every Sunday evening during ski season. This isn't rocket science.
I used to have a job in the suburbs at a time when I lived in my beloved central Denver Washington Park neighborhood. Every morning I zipped along Route 6 to the suburbs at 55 mph directing a smirk at the poor souls stuck in bumper to bumper 5 mph traffic going the other direction. On the occassional evenings when I got to go home as early as rush hour, I did the same thing in the evening. I know of no major city in the United States where this pattern does not hold true for at least some major highways.
Highways cost money. Lots of money. Adding a couple of lanes to I-25 between my downtown home and the Denver Tech Center, a project called T-Rex which will be finished at the end of 2006, cost $1.67 billion dollars to improve 17 miles of highway. For those of you who are math challenged, that means that adding lanes to interstate highways in the middle of urban areas costs about $100 million a mile.
Wasting billion dollar resources is bad. Very bad. It would be like Wal-Mart keeping three years of inventory in their warehouses at all times. They'd go broke. Yet, every major city in America does exactly this. They waste a couple of lanes of a six lane highway, every single workday, all through both rush hours.
It is not hard to build convertable central lanes in highways. Concrete dividers, road paint and traffic signs are far less expensive than building new lanes. While I'm going out on a limb here with a guess, I'd be willing to guess that they definitely cost less than $10 million a mile, and that's if you decide to hire Halliburton to do the work. Denver has a similar system with a couple of reversable central lanes on I-25 from downtown to Highway 36 to Boulder that are designated as HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes. But, the HOV component really doesn't matter. Chicago calls similar limited access lanes express lanes and lets anyone use them. The important thing is that if you can reverse central lanes you can add capacity at a fraction of the price of new lanes on the sides of the highway.
I'd be happy to see someone tell me that there is a good reason for not doing this routinely now. But, I sure don't see it. And, the picture at the top of this post could provide the extra boost necessary to get this idea implemented. A simple system for setting up contraflows helps when interstate highways are called upon to help evacuate cities, which was the official justification for creating them in the first place.
Christianity on Three Continents.
Christianity's prospect in Africa and in Europe couldn't be more different.
Source (subscription required for full text).
There are now Africans coming to the United States to do missionary work, instead of the other way around. Most notably, the conservative faction breaking away from the Episcopal Church in the United States is sponsored by an African wing of the Anglican Church. Africa has also become a conservative stronghold within the Catholic Church. I have an Aunt and Uncle who spent years as African lay missionaries for the relatively staid Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the intensity of African involvement in and commitment to their local Christian churches is almost unthinkable for an American in a mainline American denomination.
In Europe, in contrast, secularism is the uniform trend. Weekly church attendance in Ireland, one of the most devout countries in Europe is down almost 30% in thirty years. In the Netherlands, France and Sweden church attendance has fallen below 10% (the United States by comparison has roughly 40% church attendance on a weekly basis).
Neither the African, nor the European trend, have ends in sight. They will continue for, at least, another generation. The only full places of worship in London are immigrant churches and mosques, and unlike other churches in Europe, in these places of worship a large share of the members are young.
The United States is not decisively a part of either trend and shows strong regional variations. According to the Catholic sponsored study (one of the two most comprehensive in existence) called Glenmary:
States differ not just in nature of religious preferences, as well as the extent of religious participation:
Much of the American Midwest and Northwest is dominanted by Lutheran and Catholic churches with their origins in Europe. Both of these churches are scarce in most of the South, were Baptists and other evangelicals dominate the religious scene. The Mormons are a leading church (behind Catholics) in much of the West, not just Utah and Idaho.
According to the American Religious Identification Survey, the other major national study of religious preferences in the United States, modest declines in overall religious participation in the United States are accompanied by significant shifts from one part of the religious landscape to others. Most mainline denominations are stuggling, as is Judaism. They are losing members both to evangelical trends and to secularism. White Catholicism tends to mirror mainline denominational trends (and political trends), while church growth among Hispanic Catholics hides the mixed trends facing the Catholic church. Evangelical denominations are at least holding steady and many of the most charismatic are growing. Non-denominational but evangelical leaning independent churches, and every manner of non-Christian faith other than Judaism (including the ranks of the non-religious), are growing quickly.
The shifting trends in the religious preferences of Americans and Europeans, at least, has important influences on the political and social trends there (in Africa political chaos and a lack of democracy in many countries makes it hard to tell). In Scandinavia, unmarried parenthood has become the norm, and fewer people are having children. But, despite claims the Christianity has been replaced by Materialism in Europe, Europe remains far more committed to less material concerns like the security of a social safety net and leisure, than the far more religious United States. The "culture wars" in American politics do match up to the religious map of the United States. The religious right that drives the Republican party is a minority religious preference in the nation as a whole. But, in many states it is virtually synomous with the regional culture and, of course, "all politics are local."
There is one general rule that helps explain, a little, at least, these trends. Churches thrive when they preserve a threatened culture and wilt when the culture they are embedded in is not at risk.
Why is church participation six times as great in Ireland as it is in Sweden, yet falling? Because the Catholic Church in Ireland spend half a millennium protecting Irish culture from British imperialism, a culture which is now more secure than ever as Ireland has gained independence and the religious conflicts in Northern Ireland have grown subdued. In contrast, the Swedish Lutheran Church was the established church for half a millennium (it was disestablished in 2000) and thus never needed to protect the local culture. The fact that the vast majority of European Christians are members of established churches which almost by definition do not involve threatened cultures again explains their declines.
In the United States, mainstream American culture is the culture of New York and Los Angeles, and more generally the North. This is not a new development. The North has been beating the South in the culture wars since, at least, the Civil War. Broadcasters speak in the accents of Ohio, not Georgia. The application of the Bill of Rights by the U.S. Supreme Court to the states that has taken place for the past several decades has been one loss after another for the South. Most Southerners don't believe in the fundamental idea behind the establishment clause of the First Amendment. They have grave doubts about many kinds of free speech from obsensity to political dissent that they see as aiding our nation's enemies. They are incensed by the protections it affords to criminal defendants. Their notions of what is cruel and unusual are considerably less merciful than those of the rest of the nation or the world at large. Nashville and Memphis, the cultural centers of Country-Western culture, live in the shadow of their coastal Northern counterparts. The dominant national attitudes towards gender and race, many of which are enshrined in law in the Civil Rights era, were enacted over the fierce opposition of the South. The gay rights movement adds insults to those injuries from its perspective.
Why does all of this matter? Because, Southern culture is threatened, and its religious fervency, to a great extent, can be explained by the fact that churches, especially its evangelical ones, are the caretakers of that culture. Failing to support Southern Churches, in the face of a sustained assault from national institutions governmental and private alike, is to sound the death knell of that culture. The African American community faces very different threats to its culture, but the threats are definitely there and likewise drive the vitality of black churches. In contrast, mainline Christian churches preach a creed shared by the dominant Christian culture. The Lutheran Church is not the dike that is holding back national threats to the way of life of the typical resident of Seattle.
This general rule also explains lots of other mini-trends. Why are immigrant churches so vibrant? Because they preserve the culture of the home country. Where are atheist groups most well organized in Colorado? In Colorado Springs, home to Focus on the Family and capital of the Christian Right.
Why are we seeing a wave of Islamic fundamentalism? Because Western modernity is dramatically overhauling the culture of every predominantly Islamic region in the world, dragging hundreds of millions of people through what Europe experienced as centuries of incremental cultural change in a couple of generations.
I don't have textured enough information to really know what is going on in African Christianity, but I suspect that the same principle turns out to be at work.
"There's nothing really to compare with the growth of Christianity in Africa. As far as we know it's a fairly unique phenomenon," says Jonathan Bonk, editor of the US-based International Bulletin of Missionary Research.
Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but IBMR estimates there were 8.7m Christians in Africa in 1900, rising to 117m by 1970 and 389m today. The most recent phenomenon is a rising wave of evangelism, driven by Africans and westerners - mainly Americans - that is sweeping across the continent.
Source (subscription required for full text).
There are now Africans coming to the United States to do missionary work, instead of the other way around. Most notably, the conservative faction breaking away from the Episcopal Church in the United States is sponsored by an African wing of the Anglican Church. Africa has also become a conservative stronghold within the Catholic Church. I have an Aunt and Uncle who spent years as African lay missionaries for the relatively staid Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the intensity of African involvement in and commitment to their local Christian churches is almost unthinkable for an American in a mainline American denomination.
In Europe, in contrast, secularism is the uniform trend. Weekly church attendance in Ireland, one of the most devout countries in Europe is down almost 30% in thirty years. In the Netherlands, France and Sweden church attendance has fallen below 10% (the United States by comparison has roughly 40% church attendance on a weekly basis).
In 1900, almost everyone in Europe was Christian. Now, three out of four people identify themselves as adherents to Christianity. At the same time, the percentage of Europeans who say they are non-religious has soared from less than 1% of the population to 15%. Another 3% say they don't believe in God at all, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity.
In 12 major European countries, 38% of people say they never or practically never attend church, according to the World Values Survey in 2000. France's 60% non-attendance rate is the highest in that group. In the USA, only 16% say they rarely go to church.
Neither the African, nor the European trend, have ends in sight. They will continue for, at least, another generation. The only full places of worship in London are immigrant churches and mosques, and unlike other churches in Europe, in these places of worship a large share of the members are young.
The United States is not decisively a part of either trend and shows strong regional variations. According to the Catholic sponsored study (one of the two most comprehensive in existence) called Glenmary:
Utah (74%) and North Dakota (73%) have the largest percent of people claimed by [religious denominations]. The District of Columbia is also at 73%. Oregon (31%) and Washington (33%) are at the bottom of the list.
States differ not just in nature of religious preferences, as well as the extent of religious participation:
Catholics have the largest number of adherents in 37 states and the District of Columbia. The Southern Baptist Convention has the largest number of adherents in 10 states, all in the South. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has the most adherents in Idaho and Utah, and the United Methodists have the most adherents in West Virginia.
Catholics are one of the four largest groups in every state of the union as well as in the District of Columbia. United Methodists are one of the top four groups in 38 states, and Southern Baptists make the top four in 28 states and the District of Columbia. The Latter-Day Saints and Evangelical Lutheran Church of America are both among the top four in 13 states, and the Jewish adherents are in the top four in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Twelve other groups make the top four in anywhere from one to eight states.
Much of the American Midwest and Northwest is dominanted by Lutheran and Catholic churches with their origins in Europe. Both of these churches are scarce in most of the South, were Baptists and other evangelicals dominate the religious scene. The Mormons are a leading church (behind Catholics) in much of the West, not just Utah and Idaho.
According to the American Religious Identification Survey, the other major national study of religious preferences in the United States, modest declines in overall religious participation in the United States are accompanied by significant shifts from one part of the religious landscape to others. Most mainline denominations are stuggling, as is Judaism. They are losing members both to evangelical trends and to secularism. White Catholicism tends to mirror mainline denominational trends (and political trends), while church growth among Hispanic Catholics hides the mixed trends facing the Catholic church. Evangelical denominations are at least holding steady and many of the most charismatic are growing. Non-denominational but evangelical leaning independent churches, and every manner of non-Christian faith other than Judaism (including the ranks of the non-religious), are growing quickly.
The shifting trends in the religious preferences of Americans and Europeans, at least, has important influences on the political and social trends there (in Africa political chaos and a lack of democracy in many countries makes it hard to tell). In Scandinavia, unmarried parenthood has become the norm, and fewer people are having children. But, despite claims the Christianity has been replaced by Materialism in Europe, Europe remains far more committed to less material concerns like the security of a social safety net and leisure, than the far more religious United States. The "culture wars" in American politics do match up to the religious map of the United States. The religious right that drives the Republican party is a minority religious preference in the nation as a whole. But, in many states it is virtually synomous with the regional culture and, of course, "all politics are local."
There is one general rule that helps explain, a little, at least, these trends. Churches thrive when they preserve a threatened culture and wilt when the culture they are embedded in is not at risk.
Why is church participation six times as great in Ireland as it is in Sweden, yet falling? Because the Catholic Church in Ireland spend half a millennium protecting Irish culture from British imperialism, a culture which is now more secure than ever as Ireland has gained independence and the religious conflicts in Northern Ireland have grown subdued. In contrast, the Swedish Lutheran Church was the established church for half a millennium (it was disestablished in 2000) and thus never needed to protect the local culture. The fact that the vast majority of European Christians are members of established churches which almost by definition do not involve threatened cultures again explains their declines.
In the United States, mainstream American culture is the culture of New York and Los Angeles, and more generally the North. This is not a new development. The North has been beating the South in the culture wars since, at least, the Civil War. Broadcasters speak in the accents of Ohio, not Georgia. The application of the Bill of Rights by the U.S. Supreme Court to the states that has taken place for the past several decades has been one loss after another for the South. Most Southerners don't believe in the fundamental idea behind the establishment clause of the First Amendment. They have grave doubts about many kinds of free speech from obsensity to political dissent that they see as aiding our nation's enemies. They are incensed by the protections it affords to criminal defendants. Their notions of what is cruel and unusual are considerably less merciful than those of the rest of the nation or the world at large. Nashville and Memphis, the cultural centers of Country-Western culture, live in the shadow of their coastal Northern counterparts. The dominant national attitudes towards gender and race, many of which are enshrined in law in the Civil Rights era, were enacted over the fierce opposition of the South. The gay rights movement adds insults to those injuries from its perspective.
Why does all of this matter? Because, Southern culture is threatened, and its religious fervency, to a great extent, can be explained by the fact that churches, especially its evangelical ones, are the caretakers of that culture. Failing to support Southern Churches, in the face of a sustained assault from national institutions governmental and private alike, is to sound the death knell of that culture. The African American community faces very different threats to its culture, but the threats are definitely there and likewise drive the vitality of black churches. In contrast, mainline Christian churches preach a creed shared by the dominant Christian culture. The Lutheran Church is not the dike that is holding back national threats to the way of life of the typical resident of Seattle.
This general rule also explains lots of other mini-trends. Why are immigrant churches so vibrant? Because they preserve the culture of the home country. Where are atheist groups most well organized in Colorado? In Colorado Springs, home to Focus on the Family and capital of the Christian Right.
Why are we seeing a wave of Islamic fundamentalism? Because Western modernity is dramatically overhauling the culture of every predominantly Islamic region in the world, dragging hundreds of millions of people through what Europe experienced as centuries of incremental cultural change in a couple of generations.
I don't have textured enough information to really know what is going on in African Christianity, but I suspect that the same principle turns out to be at work.
21 September 2005
John Andrews: Please Start World War IV.
John Andrews was once the President of Colorado's Senate. He's a Republican opposed to Referrendums C and D. He lives in Tom Tancredo's Congressional District and will likely run for Tancredo's seat in 2008 if Tancredo follows through on his aspirations to run for President. He also has opinions on America's foreign policy. I'll let him speak for himself:
I'm glad he's not my legislator.
(Tom Tancredo, meanwhile, has a wants to sell off 15% of federal lands, including national parks and Indian land to raise money for the U.S. Treasury).
Here's my "Why Not Victory?" list of what President Bush and the United States should do:
1. Address Congress and call this what it is: World War IV.
2. Send another 50,000 troops to Iraq.
3. Increase the defense budget by $200 billion.
4. Institute a draft for the armed forces.
5. Declare war on Syria.
6. Put Cheney in charge of a task force to find Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
7. Name a Democrat, perhaps Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut or Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, as Homeland Security secretary.
8. Militarize the Mexican border.
9. Summon the leaders of Muslim nations to the woodshed in Washington.
10. Assemble democracy activists from Muslim nations at Independence Hall.
11. Intensify FBI surveillance of Islamofascist front groups in the United States.
12. Break relations with the Palestinian Authority.
13. Speed up Hussein's trial.
14. Indict Kofi Annan and notify the United Nations to relocate overseas.
15. Convene a Warsaw summit of the democracies toward replacing the U.N.
I'm glad he's not my legislator.
(Tom Tancredo, meanwhile, has a wants to sell off 15% of federal lands, including national parks and Indian land to raise money for the U.S. Treasury).
Sledgehammers Retired.
The United States has decommissioned the last of its Peacekeeper missiles. These were the larger of the two kinds of intercontinental nuclear missles in the American nuclear arsenal. Each carried warheads capable of hitting ten different targets. For many years, the United States had maintained 50 of them, but they have been eliminated in response to disarmament treaties reached with Russia in 2001. Russia has also cut its arsenal.
Once again, the trend is away from sledgehammers and towards jeweler's screwdrivers. The treaty with Russia was made possible when U.S. military planners recognized that they didn't have a good reason to completely destroy innocents and combatants alike ten different major foreign cities with a single missile. Now, if the U.S. wants to obliterate foreign cities, it has to do so one at a time, up to five hundred times, before it has to turn to aircraft and submarine based missiles.
The U.S. has no imaginable coalition of opponents who have that many significant sized cities. Neither Russia, nor the United States, have any meaningful protection against intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads (nor does any other country). So, basically, every nuclear missile fired will hit and destroy its target.
Once again, the trend is away from sledgehammers and towards jeweler's screwdrivers. The treaty with Russia was made possible when U.S. military planners recognized that they didn't have a good reason to completely destroy innocents and combatants alike ten different major foreign cities with a single missile. Now, if the U.S. wants to obliterate foreign cities, it has to do so one at a time, up to five hundred times, before it has to turn to aircraft and submarine based missiles.
The U.S. has no imaginable coalition of opponents who have that many significant sized cities. Neither Russia, nor the United States, have any meaningful protection against intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads (nor does any other country). So, basically, every nuclear missile fired will hit and destroy its target.
Conspiracy Theories.
Conspiracy theories, as the term is generally used, are almost never true. I'm inspired to write about them today because of a diary I read at Daily Kos wondering if secret defense department technology didn't impact the fact that we had two major hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) in short succession in the Gulf of Mexico, in order to further nefarious administration political goals, but the issue is a general one. There are, of course, real conspiracies, but when the happen they tend to happen in particular sets of circumstances.
Why are conspiracy theories usually wrong?
1. Humans are by nature pattern recognizing animals. They see connections whether they exist or not. Most people also have a poor sense of the way probability works. Many things which seem like unlikely coincidences aren't really nearly as unlikely as they seem, largely because people do a poor job of defining the relevant event for probabilistic purposes. For example, they ask, what are the odds that I'll run into Bob Jones at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and not, what are the odds that I'll meet one of the hundreds of people I know, sometime on my trip, given the overlap in circumstances between my life and theirs (e.g. summer vacation length, likely stops on a trip, ability to afford a trip, etc.). Coincidences are often just coincidences.
2. It is extraordinarily hard for large numbers of people to collectively keep a big secret of general interest to the public. Conspiracy theories, more or less exclusively, mean secret conspiracies. But, the vast majority of group endeavors seek publicity and recognition, rather than trying to hide from it. This is true even in the national security field. When Boeing gets a big new defense contract it usually posts it on its website and sends out a press release within minutes. When a new group wants to take political control in Washington, they normally have rallies and advertise functions. Even "secret societies" like Yale's Skull and Bones, or the Free Masons, generally want the public to know that they exist, even if their inner workings are kept secret. Leaks happen. The best way to keep secrets is to narrow the scope of what you are trying to hide and to limit dissemination of those secrets to a few people as possible. The more people know a fact, the more people there are who can leak it. No Presidential administration has ever been able to avoid embarrassing leaks. Few organizations of any kind are that disciplined.
3. Few people are competent enough to maintain a conspiracy. It is hard to run an organization in open view in a competent manner. Running a secret conspiracy is even harder work that requires competent management and competent participants. Many supposed conspirators are simply too dumb to pull it off. Likewise, incompetence, carelessness and miscommunication is a far more common cause of seemingly irrational behavior than organized malfeasance. When an employer doesn't reply to someone or a bureaucrat gives an inexplicable response, it is far more likely that someone misread or lost your paperwork, than it is that they are out to get you. The military, in particular, is far more stupid than it is given credit for being.
4. New technology is particularly hard to hide. There are some very rare examples of "black projects" which remained secret for a decade or two, most notably stealth aircraft technology. But, the vast majority of scientific and technological developments are either (1) described in public journals, (2) limited in scope by existing scientific knowledge, (3) publicly know, or (4) leaked to the public. Moreover, black projects, even when they do exist, can typically only get so far ahead of the curve, because the same scientific advances that made them possible also allow the public to come up with the same ideas. For example, several science fiction authors with no inside information made fairly accurate predictions about the atomic bomb long before any leaks to the public existed, simply by looking at the existing scientific literature and doing back of napkin calculations. Furthermore, the larger the project, the harder it is to keep secret.
5. Simple plans work best. The 9-11 attack is one of the most elaborate criminal conspiracies to ever succeed in the United States. It involves a dozen participants and a handful of people in supporting roles. The plan was pretty simple. Enter the U.S., Learn to fly 747s, board several of them in small groups, hijack the planes at the same time with box cutters, and fly the planes into a handful of high profile targets. Plans that are more elaborate or involve more people than this one are highly unlikely. Yet, most conspiracy theories are hopelessly elaborate. Every additional step and every additional participant greatly increases the margin of error. The U.S. Marine Corps trains soldiers to assume that any plan of any complexity will go wrong at some point and simply pushes them to drill sufficiently that this point comes later, rather than sooner. Very small conspiracies in very controlled conditions can be somewhat more complex. Larger conspiracies, like the flash mob craze that existed for a while (where people converged on a spot and acted weird and dispersed) or a rave, need to be even simpler and also need to be far more benign (to prevent anyone from feeling morally compelled to report them).
When conspiracies do happen, they typically don't involve public figures, don't require significant technological innovation, involve people who had links prior to entering the organization where they publicly appear, don't obviously work against the public interest, are fairly small, and are fairly straightforward. Any complexity usually arises in a highly predictable context (like a court room).
Why are conspiracy theories usually wrong?
1. Humans are by nature pattern recognizing animals. They see connections whether they exist or not. Most people also have a poor sense of the way probability works. Many things which seem like unlikely coincidences aren't really nearly as unlikely as they seem, largely because people do a poor job of defining the relevant event for probabilistic purposes. For example, they ask, what are the odds that I'll run into Bob Jones at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and not, what are the odds that I'll meet one of the hundreds of people I know, sometime on my trip, given the overlap in circumstances between my life and theirs (e.g. summer vacation length, likely stops on a trip, ability to afford a trip, etc.). Coincidences are often just coincidences.
2. It is extraordinarily hard for large numbers of people to collectively keep a big secret of general interest to the public. Conspiracy theories, more or less exclusively, mean secret conspiracies. But, the vast majority of group endeavors seek publicity and recognition, rather than trying to hide from it. This is true even in the national security field. When Boeing gets a big new defense contract it usually posts it on its website and sends out a press release within minutes. When a new group wants to take political control in Washington, they normally have rallies and advertise functions. Even "secret societies" like Yale's Skull and Bones, or the Free Masons, generally want the public to know that they exist, even if their inner workings are kept secret. Leaks happen. The best way to keep secrets is to narrow the scope of what you are trying to hide and to limit dissemination of those secrets to a few people as possible. The more people know a fact, the more people there are who can leak it. No Presidential administration has ever been able to avoid embarrassing leaks. Few organizations of any kind are that disciplined.
3. Few people are competent enough to maintain a conspiracy. It is hard to run an organization in open view in a competent manner. Running a secret conspiracy is even harder work that requires competent management and competent participants. Many supposed conspirators are simply too dumb to pull it off. Likewise, incompetence, carelessness and miscommunication is a far more common cause of seemingly irrational behavior than organized malfeasance. When an employer doesn't reply to someone or a bureaucrat gives an inexplicable response, it is far more likely that someone misread or lost your paperwork, than it is that they are out to get you. The military, in particular, is far more stupid than it is given credit for being.
4. New technology is particularly hard to hide. There are some very rare examples of "black projects" which remained secret for a decade or two, most notably stealth aircraft technology. But, the vast majority of scientific and technological developments are either (1) described in public journals, (2) limited in scope by existing scientific knowledge, (3) publicly know, or (4) leaked to the public. Moreover, black projects, even when they do exist, can typically only get so far ahead of the curve, because the same scientific advances that made them possible also allow the public to come up with the same ideas. For example, several science fiction authors with no inside information made fairly accurate predictions about the atomic bomb long before any leaks to the public existed, simply by looking at the existing scientific literature and doing back of napkin calculations. Furthermore, the larger the project, the harder it is to keep secret.
5. Simple plans work best. The 9-11 attack is one of the most elaborate criminal conspiracies to ever succeed in the United States. It involves a dozen participants and a handful of people in supporting roles. The plan was pretty simple. Enter the U.S., Learn to fly 747s, board several of them in small groups, hijack the planes at the same time with box cutters, and fly the planes into a handful of high profile targets. Plans that are more elaborate or involve more people than this one are highly unlikely. Yet, most conspiracy theories are hopelessly elaborate. Every additional step and every additional participant greatly increases the margin of error. The U.S. Marine Corps trains soldiers to assume that any plan of any complexity will go wrong at some point and simply pushes them to drill sufficiently that this point comes later, rather than sooner. Very small conspiracies in very controlled conditions can be somewhat more complex. Larger conspiracies, like the flash mob craze that existed for a while (where people converged on a spot and acted weird and dispersed) or a rave, need to be even simpler and also need to be far more benign (to prevent anyone from feeling morally compelled to report them).
When conspiracies do happen, they typically don't involve public figures, don't require significant technological innovation, involve people who had links prior to entering the organization where they publicly appear, don't obviously work against the public interest, are fairly small, and are fairly straightforward. Any complexity usually arises in a highly predictable context (like a court room).
Brisk Walks Not Best
For someone of my gender and very nearly my height and weight, walking through my particular neighborhood park, going at a strolling pace, which I prefer, uses more calories than walking briskly. How often am I lucky enough to get a research result that specific? I will print it out, frame it, and put it on my wall.
Gov Race '06: The Shoe That Won't Drop?
Bill Ritter, the former Denver DA, is the only announced Democratic candidate for Governor in Colorado. He leads Republican hopeful and current Congressman from the 7th Congressional District Bob Beauprez by 44-42 in a poll reported over at Soapblox Colorado. DU President Marc Holtzman is in a bitter fight with Beauprez for the nomination and has been having a pretty bad September, with hit after hit targetted at him in connection with Referrendums C and D, which he opposes but Bill Owens supports. The Referrendums would ease spending limits imposed by Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights.
Ritter is not terribly beloved in the Democratic party. He is pro-life and is perceived as having been soft on police brutality while he was Denver's DA. But, he is a Democrat, and a poll like this one suggest that he can win statewide, in large part by stripping off weak Republicans and independents. This is something that a more liberal Democrat, like State House Speaker Andrew Romanoff (of Washington Park) or Joan Fitz-Gerald, the leading Democrat in the State Senate, might have a difficult time doing. Romanoff has never shown much eagerness to run for Governor. He is biding his time until he is a more seasoned politician. Fitz-Gerald has not entered the race yet, already ceding one key union nomination to Ritter. Other usual suspects like John Hickenlooper, Ken Salazar and Rutt Bridges have all made clear that they are not in the running. As much as we hate to admit it, Democrats in Colorado don't have a terribly deep bench of heavy hitters up to the task of running for Governor. Ritter's crime fighting experience may give him the gravitas that other potential challengers lack.
Everyone had assumed that a pro-choice liberal would enter the race and likely defeat Ritter in a primary, but the longer he stays in the race without opposition, the more it seems like the other shoe might not drop. A poll like this, that puts him in the lead, but just barely with conservative support, is just the sort of thing that make scare other Democrats out of the race. If Ritter is our candidate, it will be a bittersweat result for most of the base, but, maybe as red state Democrats, we need to make compromises. I would certainly welcome Ritter over either Beauprez or Holtzman any day, and I think that most Democrats would agree with me on that point.
Ritter is not terribly beloved in the Democratic party. He is pro-life and is perceived as having been soft on police brutality while he was Denver's DA. But, he is a Democrat, and a poll like this one suggest that he can win statewide, in large part by stripping off weak Republicans and independents. This is something that a more liberal Democrat, like State House Speaker Andrew Romanoff (of Washington Park) or Joan Fitz-Gerald, the leading Democrat in the State Senate, might have a difficult time doing. Romanoff has never shown much eagerness to run for Governor. He is biding his time until he is a more seasoned politician. Fitz-Gerald has not entered the race yet, already ceding one key union nomination to Ritter. Other usual suspects like John Hickenlooper, Ken Salazar and Rutt Bridges have all made clear that they are not in the running. As much as we hate to admit it, Democrats in Colorado don't have a terribly deep bench of heavy hitters up to the task of running for Governor. Ritter's crime fighting experience may give him the gravitas that other potential challengers lack.
Everyone had assumed that a pro-choice liberal would enter the race and likely defeat Ritter in a primary, but the longer he stays in the race without opposition, the more it seems like the other shoe might not drop. A poll like this, that puts him in the lead, but just barely with conservative support, is just the sort of thing that make scare other Democrats out of the race. If Ritter is our candidate, it will be a bittersweat result for most of the base, but, maybe as red state Democrats, we need to make compromises. I would certainly welcome Ritter over either Beauprez or Holtzman any day, and I think that most Democrats would agree with me on that point.
Surreal Issues.
How do you raise a 13 year old boy with a $400 million trust fund which he will receive in full at age 35? The issue is real, although it seems surreal. This is what happens when an estate plan designed for a child inheriting a couple of million dollars ends up dealing with problems on a scale never suspected. Of course, the trustees and the boy's mother (the late father's second of three wives) disagree.
I've helped wealthy young people plan their estates, but never on this kind of scale. The only context I have for a child like this is the movie "Batman Begins", but there, both parents were conveniently absent, removing much of the family strife from the situation. Is it appropriate to simply let a boy in this situation grow up like any other with an ordinary life? Is it humane to completely seperate benefits for the boy from benefits for his mother? Surely, he won't be so stingy when he comes into the funds for himself. Do extreme cases like this show the limits of an inheritance law ultimately based in a feudal systems that we have otherwise rejected?
It is one thing to come into great wealth after decades of being groomed to that life by your wealthy and succesful parents. This is the experience of most heirs. It is another to come into great wealth in the manner that this boy has, as a result of a premature death.
I've helped wealthy young people plan their estates, but never on this kind of scale. The only context I have for a child like this is the movie "Batman Begins", but there, both parents were conveniently absent, removing much of the family strife from the situation. Is it appropriate to simply let a boy in this situation grow up like any other with an ordinary life? Is it humane to completely seperate benefits for the boy from benefits for his mother? Surely, he won't be so stingy when he comes into the funds for himself. Do extreme cases like this show the limits of an inheritance law ultimately based in a feudal systems that we have otherwise rejected?
It is one thing to come into great wealth after decades of being groomed to that life by your wealthy and succesful parents. This is the experience of most heirs. It is another to come into great wealth in the manner that this boy has, as a result of a premature death.
Wash Park Stays Dry
While 11 other parks in Denver have received a go ahead to establish more liberal policies on alcohol use at events, Washington Park, which was to have had a particularly liberal set of rules, was withdrawn from the proposal at the last moment. My local neighborhood association is very anti-alcohol, and I suspect that their concerns were the cause of the change, although the story doesn't expressly say that this was the case.
20 September 2005
Gads! Who needs the Onion?
The headline just can't be real, but it is, in fact, real.
FEMA Sends Trucks Full Of Ice For Katrina Victims To Maine.
God isn't the only one who works in mysterious ways.
(Confirmation here, and here ("The ice cost 26 cents a pound, bringing the total to 44 million dollars to buy the ice. The Army Corps of Engineers is in charge of this project and does not have an estimate of how much it will cost to transport all this ice, but the public information officer says they will hold on to it and store it here in Maine at least until the end of the hurricane season. Truck drivers coming into town Tuesday were told it will be about three days until they can unload their truck, as only four trucks can unload at a time. While they wait they are being paid 800 dollars a day."). All via Fark. A national angle on "Icegate" is here.)
FEMA Sends Trucks Full Of Ice For Katrina Victims To Maine.
City officials say they have no idea why the trucks are here, only that the city has been asked to help out with traffic problems. But the truck drivers NEWSCENTER spoke to said they went all the way down to the gulf coast with the ice --stayed for a few days -- and then were told by FEMA they needed to drive to Maine to store it.
The truck drivers, who are from all over the country, tell us they were subcontracted by FEMA. They started arriving over the weekend, and city spokesperson Peter Dewitt says as many as 200 trucks could come to the city by the end of the week. . . .
No one NEWSCENTER talked to has any idea when, or even if the ice will go back to the gulf coast.
God isn't the only one who works in mysterious ways.
(Confirmation here, and here ("The ice cost 26 cents a pound, bringing the total to 44 million dollars to buy the ice. The Army Corps of Engineers is in charge of this project and does not have an estimate of how much it will cost to transport all this ice, but the public information officer says they will hold on to it and store it here in Maine at least until the end of the hurricane season. Truck drivers coming into town Tuesday were told it will be about three days until they can unload their truck, as only four trucks can unload at a time. While they wait they are being paid 800 dollars a day."). All via Fark. A national angle on "Icegate" is here.)
Introductions To M-Theory and LQG
Over at the physics forums s3nnOc has noted two interesting new papers. One is a nice primer on M-Theory (that's the mod name for string theory, for all of you who are behind the curve), and another assessing the state of the Loop Quantum Gravity research program (i.e. look at a discrete or quasi-discrete time space as a way to reproduce general relativity from the ground up with simple rules).
Both papers call for upper level undergraduate or better backgrounds in physics and mathematics, and neither breaks any particularly new ground. But, both are good introductions for sophisticated readers unfamiliar with these fields.
Both papers call for upper level undergraduate or better backgrounds in physics and mathematics, and neither breaks any particularly new ground. But, both are good introductions for sophisticated readers unfamiliar with these fields.
In Memory of Seho Park.
Seho Park died on Saturday. The young, caring Korean-American man was killed be gunfire while he was a bystander outside the Velvet Room Bar and Lounge, whose patrons had emptied into the parking lot at closing time when a fight errupted. It is a charming little nightclub serving mostly the local Asian community, across the parking lot from the biggest Korean grocery store in the region, with a short handwritten list of rules on the door that includes the rule "Love Each Other". Apparently, the spell of those rules and the proprietor's guidance lapsed when the patrons left.
Police haven't publicly announced any suspects, but I suspect that quite a few people who were there that evening have a good guess regarding who fired the shots and killed Seho Park. Whether anyone will be prosecuted (or perhaps die in a retributive act of violence that might kill another innocent bystander) will likely come down to whether trust in the police (thin at the best of times in any immigrant community, especially in light of sometimes arbitrary immigration enforcement), and outrage at the harm that was done, outweighs fear of the gang members who killed a young man on Saturday. I, for one, hope that justice prevails, so that the cycle of killing can end now and so that the perpetrators (or those seeking vegenance against them) won't kill again. We can all hope.
Police haven't publicly announced any suspects, but I suspect that quite a few people who were there that evening have a good guess regarding who fired the shots and killed Seho Park. Whether anyone will be prosecuted (or perhaps die in a retributive act of violence that might kill another innocent bystander) will likely come down to whether trust in the police (thin at the best of times in any immigrant community, especially in light of sometimes arbitrary immigration enforcement), and outrage at the harm that was done, outweighs fear of the gang members who killed a young man on Saturday. I, for one, hope that justice prevails, so that the cycle of killing can end now and so that the perpetrators (or those seeking vegenance against them) won't kill again. We can all hope.
Wash Park Is Not Ramah
It should be a surprise to no one that Washington Park, my neighborhood, is a place where a hundred pagans can gather in comfort without raising a single word of concern in the community, while rural Ramah (pronounced Ray-ma) reacts so negatively that the Mayor and City Council feel the need to apologize.
I could stop with this common place observation, but I won't. While Richard Florida's book, "The Rise of the Creative Class", isn't flawless, his core observation, which is that the secret to economic growth is a tolerant, culturally vibrant community, is dead on. Ramah is a ghost town (it doesn't even have a single business), and Denver is a boom town, to a great extent, because Denver is a place where people who are different, people with different ideas, are embraced, while Ramah is a place without room for people who rock the boat. The pagans' festival in my neighborhood doesn't directly drive economic growth in the city, any more than the gay man who used to cut my hair two blocks in the other direction does (I can't afford those kind of haircuts any more on a professor's salary). In both cases, you are seeing symptoms of a larger cultural environment, one that can embrace the new ideas that are the secret to economic growth.
When a place like LoDo becomes a cultural center for an entire metropolitan area, it is easy to forget how visionary people like now Mayor Hickenlooper had to be to see promise in it when it was the city's skid row and warehouse district. At the height of the preppy age, you had to be a visionary to see that someone might actually want to live in a partially finished loft without floor to ceiling walls and soffit covering the ductwork. It is easy to forget how hard it was to see that a town famous for its cowboy boots could also be an epicenter of a national Vespa scooter market. And, it is hard to imagine why a satellite television company might want to locate in Denver, rather than Colorado Springs which is home to the U.S. military's space command, until you sit in an interview room a hundred times trying to convince bright young telecommunications professionals to locate in a city better known for being the headquarters of Dobson's Focus on the Family organization, which incidentally is laying off dozens of employees . . . but that's another story, which Colorado Luis has already told well with all of the mixed messages of the larger story.
Indeed, Luis himself is a shining example of the benefits of the tolerant atmosphere that prevails in a place like Denver. While it would certainly be a breach of blog ethics to out him, having met him in real life and having some familiarity with the firm where he works, I know that some very strong personalities with exceedingly different strongly held views, and very different ethnic roots from Luis, co-exist quite well within his firm, and that isn't something that could happen successfully in every city. As a result, his firm, his clients and this city, benefits from his high level skills that might otherwise have gone elsewhere.
I used to practice in Grand Junction, Colorado, which, while vibrant for the Western Slope, is no Denver. And, as collegial as the members of the Mesa County Bar Association were, its members also spent a great deal of time concerned about their reputations in fields well outside the law would be affected by their actions, and my wife, who is not a white Anglo didn't feel comfortable raising our children there because the the overall atmosphere of the area, a feeling I concurred in. Take the decision my family made in Grand Junction, multiple it by a hundred thousand, if not million similar decisions made by other people who have the most valuable resource in our economy, talent, and it isn't hard to see why tolerant places become boomtowns, while intolerant ones slump.
I could stop with this common place observation, but I won't. While Richard Florida's book, "The Rise of the Creative Class", isn't flawless, his core observation, which is that the secret to economic growth is a tolerant, culturally vibrant community, is dead on. Ramah is a ghost town (it doesn't even have a single business), and Denver is a boom town, to a great extent, because Denver is a place where people who are different, people with different ideas, are embraced, while Ramah is a place without room for people who rock the boat. The pagans' festival in my neighborhood doesn't directly drive economic growth in the city, any more than the gay man who used to cut my hair two blocks in the other direction does (I can't afford those kind of haircuts any more on a professor's salary). In both cases, you are seeing symptoms of a larger cultural environment, one that can embrace the new ideas that are the secret to economic growth.
When a place like LoDo becomes a cultural center for an entire metropolitan area, it is easy to forget how visionary people like now Mayor Hickenlooper had to be to see promise in it when it was the city's skid row and warehouse district. At the height of the preppy age, you had to be a visionary to see that someone might actually want to live in a partially finished loft without floor to ceiling walls and soffit covering the ductwork. It is easy to forget how hard it was to see that a town famous for its cowboy boots could also be an epicenter of a national Vespa scooter market. And, it is hard to imagine why a satellite television company might want to locate in Denver, rather than Colorado Springs which is home to the U.S. military's space command, until you sit in an interview room a hundred times trying to convince bright young telecommunications professionals to locate in a city better known for being the headquarters of Dobson's Focus on the Family organization, which incidentally is laying off dozens of employees . . . but that's another story, which Colorado Luis has already told well with all of the mixed messages of the larger story.
Indeed, Luis himself is a shining example of the benefits of the tolerant atmosphere that prevails in a place like Denver. While it would certainly be a breach of blog ethics to out him, having met him in real life and having some familiarity with the firm where he works, I know that some very strong personalities with exceedingly different strongly held views, and very different ethnic roots from Luis, co-exist quite well within his firm, and that isn't something that could happen successfully in every city. As a result, his firm, his clients and this city, benefits from his high level skills that might otherwise have gone elsewhere.
I used to practice in Grand Junction, Colorado, which, while vibrant for the Western Slope, is no Denver. And, as collegial as the members of the Mesa County Bar Association were, its members also spent a great deal of time concerned about their reputations in fields well outside the law would be affected by their actions, and my wife, who is not a white Anglo didn't feel comfortable raising our children there because the the overall atmosphere of the area, a feeling I concurred in. Take the decision my family made in Grand Junction, multiple it by a hundred thousand, if not million similar decisions made by other people who have the most valuable resource in our economy, talent, and it isn't hard to see why tolerant places become boomtowns, while intolerant ones slump.
Children as 1Ls
I'm a father to a six year old daughter and a four year old son. Those who think that peace and harmony are humanity's natural state are wrong. Siblings naturally argue, fight, have tantrums, and have to be taught how to behave in a civil manner towards each other. It is a rare day in my home that a parent doesn't have to intervene with our children to keep things from spiraling out of control, and sometimes we intervene too late.
What children at this age need to learn surprisingly looks a lot more like the first year law school curriculum than it does like the topics on their plate at school. The first year law school curriculum is cannonical. Property, contracts, torts, criminal law, constitutional law, legal communication (aka writing and research), and civil procedure are national norms that socialize new law students in the legal culture.
Children need many of the same lessons.
Going from a two year old's version of property law, "What's mine is mine and what's your's is mine too," to an adult's conception of property, is a painstaking process whose corollaries must all be learned individually. Don't touch the neighbor's plants. Don't go on the neighbor's land. Don't take things at stores that you haven't paid for. Don't grab your sister's things. Don't break your sister's things. But, children learn a more expanded version of property law, because they also need to learn the moral, if not legal corrolaries of property law: share, even if you don't have to share.
Children quickly learn that it is useful to try to hold parents to their promises, and have a hard time honoring executory promises of their own, beyond a few hours. Countless moments are spent teaching children contract interpretation and exceptions. We'll go camping this week does not mean we'll go camping in the mountains this week. Impossibility can void a contract, for example, in the case of horrible rain storms or a funeral on the day we are supposed to go camping. Maybe does not mean I promise. Eating your dinner is a condition precedent to dad's promise that you get dessert. Contracts carry implied duties as well, like the implied duty not to whine about why you can't have more than what was promised.
Torts, which illustrated at great length in cartoons, also encompass many sublessions. The necessity of exercising reasonable care not to hurt others gets translated into look where you're going, no it is not O.K. to throw your brother off the porch steps, stepping onto the street without holding mom or dad's hand is a strict liability offense. Learning that lying is often bad is also a long and difficult process, as is learning the exceptions to the rule, such as that lying is O.K. when everyone knows it is a lie, and that fraud is generally only a serious issue when damages result.
Substantive criminal laws are routinely violated by young children who take time to internalize appropriate behavoir. Don't bite, don't pinch, don't push, don't grab, and don't steal are not lessons that can be learned in a single setting. The more advance elements of criminal law, like the exception to the general rules for self-defense, are best reserved for older children.
Due process at home is not as intricate of courtroom procedure, but those lessons have to be learned as well. Don't tattle unless you can meet the burden of proof. Don't offer irrelevant evidence. Unsubstantiated claims lead to pointless "he did, he didn't" arguments. Don't ask for judgment when you have unclean hands yourself. Appeals to the other parent are usually denied and are subject to a duty of full disclosure of the proceedings below.
The Constitution rarely comes into play in raising children, but issues of how free speech should be or can be are omnipresent, as are issues of equality, and the ever changing division of decision making power between parents and children with is its own model of federalism.
The nature of these lessons is no more apparent than when you actually arrive in law school. While, as I noted before, the notions of fair play and societal rules that govern us are not platonic ideals that we are born knowing, by the time you reach law school, the lessons you learn in your textbooks simply refine the moral intuition that you already have, which is one reason why law schools use the Socratic method. The students already, through a lifetime of experience, know the arguments on boths sides of almost every issue and now just need to learn to hone the presentation of those arguments. Law students are not like physics students learning new ideas for the first time. They took all these classes already in the course of growing up. Now, they simply need to learn how to attach case names and fancy labels to those ideas.
What children at this age need to learn surprisingly looks a lot more like the first year law school curriculum than it does like the topics on their plate at school. The first year law school curriculum is cannonical. Property, contracts, torts, criminal law, constitutional law, legal communication (aka writing and research), and civil procedure are national norms that socialize new law students in the legal culture.
Children need many of the same lessons.
Going from a two year old's version of property law, "What's mine is mine and what's your's is mine too," to an adult's conception of property, is a painstaking process whose corollaries must all be learned individually. Don't touch the neighbor's plants. Don't go on the neighbor's land. Don't take things at stores that you haven't paid for. Don't grab your sister's things. Don't break your sister's things. But, children learn a more expanded version of property law, because they also need to learn the moral, if not legal corrolaries of property law: share, even if you don't have to share.
Children quickly learn that it is useful to try to hold parents to their promises, and have a hard time honoring executory promises of their own, beyond a few hours. Countless moments are spent teaching children contract interpretation and exceptions. We'll go camping this week does not mean we'll go camping in the mountains this week. Impossibility can void a contract, for example, in the case of horrible rain storms or a funeral on the day we are supposed to go camping. Maybe does not mean I promise. Eating your dinner is a condition precedent to dad's promise that you get dessert. Contracts carry implied duties as well, like the implied duty not to whine about why you can't have more than what was promised.
Torts, which illustrated at great length in cartoons, also encompass many sublessions. The necessity of exercising reasonable care not to hurt others gets translated into look where you're going, no it is not O.K. to throw your brother off the porch steps, stepping onto the street without holding mom or dad's hand is a strict liability offense. Learning that lying is often bad is also a long and difficult process, as is learning the exceptions to the rule, such as that lying is O.K. when everyone knows it is a lie, and that fraud is generally only a serious issue when damages result.
Substantive criminal laws are routinely violated by young children who take time to internalize appropriate behavoir. Don't bite, don't pinch, don't push, don't grab, and don't steal are not lessons that can be learned in a single setting. The more advance elements of criminal law, like the exception to the general rules for self-defense, are best reserved for older children.
Due process at home is not as intricate of courtroom procedure, but those lessons have to be learned as well. Don't tattle unless you can meet the burden of proof. Don't offer irrelevant evidence. Unsubstantiated claims lead to pointless "he did, he didn't" arguments. Don't ask for judgment when you have unclean hands yourself. Appeals to the other parent are usually denied and are subject to a duty of full disclosure of the proceedings below.
The Constitution rarely comes into play in raising children, but issues of how free speech should be or can be are omnipresent, as are issues of equality, and the ever changing division of decision making power between parents and children with is its own model of federalism.
The nature of these lessons is no more apparent than when you actually arrive in law school. While, as I noted before, the notions of fair play and societal rules that govern us are not platonic ideals that we are born knowing, by the time you reach law school, the lessons you learn in your textbooks simply refine the moral intuition that you already have, which is one reason why law schools use the Socratic method. The students already, through a lifetime of experience, know the arguments on boths sides of almost every issue and now just need to learn to hone the presentation of those arguments. Law students are not like physics students learning new ideas for the first time. They took all these classes already in the course of growing up. Now, they simply need to learn how to attach case names and fancy labels to those ideas.
19 September 2005
Close Elections.
In the United States, close elections are resolved with a clear winner and a clear loser. Fewer than a 1,000 votes in the final official talley separated Al Gore from George W. Bush in 2000, and the Senate and House were both very evenly divided. Votes cast for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, in that election, helped George W. Bush win (or, at least, made the race close enough for the U.S. Supreme Court to crown him).
Indeed, in theory, the optimal result for a political party in the United States is to calibrate your positions so that they are just barely moderate enough for your party to control the government by a nose. To obtain a larger mandate you would have to moderate your positions, but would provide no additional ability to pass legislation (unless the support was absolutely overwhelming and permitted your party to pass constitutional amendments).
In Germany, the political system works differently. Inconclusive election results are possible and we have seen one this year. Neither the Christian Democratic Party (a moderate right wing party with 35.2% of the vote) and its planned coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party (think American neo-conservatives with 9.8% of the vote), nor the Social Democratic Party (a moderate party of the left with 34.3% of the vote) and its coalition partner, the Green Party (an ecologically minded left wing party with 8.1% of the vote), secured a majority. Most of the rest of the vote (8.7%) went to the "neo-Communist Left Party" which will also be in parliament. Now, these five parties must horse trade until they arrive at a result which will likely reflect the lack of mandate received by any one party. Unlike Israel, for example, there are no minor players or independents in parliament in Germany to muddy the waters. Votes for parties that receive less than 5% of the vote (which collectively won 3.9% of the vote this year) are discarded, in an effort to reduce the attractiveness of extremists. No new prime minister can be appointed until the five parties in parliament form either a grand coalition or a three party coalition including one of the biggest two parties.
There are four plausible ruling coalitions, even after the voters have spoken. The Christian Democrats, who have ruled out bringing the Left Party into their coalition, need the support of either the Green Party of the Social Democratic Party to rule, either of which would dramatically blunt the impact of the reforms they had hoped to implement. Social Democrats must weight a "grand coalition" with the Christian Democrats, luring the Free Democrats into their coalition, or turning to the left by adding the Left Party to their coalition. Any of these additions would similarly limit the ability of the Social Democrats to implement their program.
One can argue that the uncertainty that flows from a "no mandate" election is a problem, but there is much to like about a system where a close election makes it harder for the winner to implement an agenda, rather than allowing an ideologically narrow group that obtains a paper thin majority to rule decisively.
Indeed, in theory, the optimal result for a political party in the United States is to calibrate your positions so that they are just barely moderate enough for your party to control the government by a nose. To obtain a larger mandate you would have to moderate your positions, but would provide no additional ability to pass legislation (unless the support was absolutely overwhelming and permitted your party to pass constitutional amendments).
In Germany, the political system works differently. Inconclusive election results are possible and we have seen one this year. Neither the Christian Democratic Party (a moderate right wing party with 35.2% of the vote) and its planned coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party (think American neo-conservatives with 9.8% of the vote), nor the Social Democratic Party (a moderate party of the left with 34.3% of the vote) and its coalition partner, the Green Party (an ecologically minded left wing party with 8.1% of the vote), secured a majority. Most of the rest of the vote (8.7%) went to the "neo-Communist Left Party" which will also be in parliament. Now, these five parties must horse trade until they arrive at a result which will likely reflect the lack of mandate received by any one party. Unlike Israel, for example, there are no minor players or independents in parliament in Germany to muddy the waters. Votes for parties that receive less than 5% of the vote (which collectively won 3.9% of the vote this year) are discarded, in an effort to reduce the attractiveness of extremists. No new prime minister can be appointed until the five parties in parliament form either a grand coalition or a three party coalition including one of the biggest two parties.
There are four plausible ruling coalitions, even after the voters have spoken. The Christian Democrats, who have ruled out bringing the Left Party into their coalition, need the support of either the Green Party of the Social Democratic Party to rule, either of which would dramatically blunt the impact of the reforms they had hoped to implement. Social Democrats must weight a "grand coalition" with the Christian Democrats, luring the Free Democrats into their coalition, or turning to the left by adding the Left Party to their coalition. Any of these additions would similarly limit the ability of the Social Democrats to implement their program.
One can argue that the uncertainty that flows from a "no mandate" election is a problem, but there is much to like about a system where a close election makes it harder for the winner to implement an agenda, rather than allowing an ideologically narrow group that obtains a paper thin majority to rule decisively.
Katrina Death Toll
The Katrina death toll is currently 816. Efforts to identify and recover the dead are not complete. New Orleans is about 40% underwater and outlying areas have not been fully searched.
18 September 2005
Hunting Down
The New York Times reports that hunting is down about 10% from 16.4 million hunting licenses issued a year to 14.7 million in the period from 1983 to 2003, a decline of about 10% in 20 years. This is about a 10% drop at a time when the nation's population has increased by about 17%. Equally important, the story, which focuses on a program in Vermont designed to interest children in hunting, notes that the people who do hunt are graying and not being replaced by a new generation to the same extent as in the past.
I'm not surprised. As people leave rural America for regimented schedules and urban sensibilities, hunting doesn't fit, and people are leaving small towns for bigger cities. Indeed, the only surprise, really, is that hunting isn't declining more rapidly. I'm in the transition generation myself. Every adult male in my parents' generation hunted. My brother and I never did, and only some of my cousins keep up the tradition. This has a lot to do with the fact that my parents grew up deep in rural America. Most of their generation moved to the city. Very few of our nation's immigrations seek out a farm life (although there are exceptions, with both migrant farmworkers and Dutch farmers seeking to set up feedlots in Ohio as two modern examples).
This shift significantly changes gun control politics. Urban non-hunters tend to favor it. Rural hunters tend to fear it. As the balance shifts, so does the politics. This isn't the only issue affected. My parents' generation grew up seing forests and mountains in terms of the lumber and minerals they could produce (although many of those viewed evolved during their own lives). Urban people tend to see forests and mountains as recreation centers and wildlife habitats. The historical rule of Western water law that boating isn't a beneficial use of water for priority purposes makes no sense to us. I'm a part of the "take only photographs, leave only footprints" generation. Camping and kayaking are vital youth industries, with stores popping up in swanky locations in big cities, but we want to see animals, not kill them. Despite having an uncle who spent much of his life working in a mine, and a grandfather who was a lumberjack, I see extractive industries as a necessary evil, to the extent that we can't recycle, rather than as something to be maximized. Hunting is rarely necessary, and my generation is wary after having heard so many cautionary tales of hunting destroying whole species.
Hunters have tried to seize on feminism as a way to restore interest. According to one source, only about 1% of women have ever hunted, while 12% of men have, woman make up 9% of hunters. The focus of the New York Times article was a girl, the best seller list has featured a novel called "The Girl's Guide To Hunting and Fishing", and a couple of my female cousins were introduced to hunting. But, in the case of my cousins, they have never become hard core enthusiasts. And, if you look at the sport as a whole, the changes in gender balance don't seem too dramatic. Is there anything fundamental about that? Probably not. But, nothing in decline attracts many newcomers.
I'm not surprised. As people leave rural America for regimented schedules and urban sensibilities, hunting doesn't fit, and people are leaving small towns for bigger cities. Indeed, the only surprise, really, is that hunting isn't declining more rapidly. I'm in the transition generation myself. Every adult male in my parents' generation hunted. My brother and I never did, and only some of my cousins keep up the tradition. This has a lot to do with the fact that my parents grew up deep in rural America. Most of their generation moved to the city. Very few of our nation's immigrations seek out a farm life (although there are exceptions, with both migrant farmworkers and Dutch farmers seeking to set up feedlots in Ohio as two modern examples).
This shift significantly changes gun control politics. Urban non-hunters tend to favor it. Rural hunters tend to fear it. As the balance shifts, so does the politics. This isn't the only issue affected. My parents' generation grew up seing forests and mountains in terms of the lumber and minerals they could produce (although many of those viewed evolved during their own lives). Urban people tend to see forests and mountains as recreation centers and wildlife habitats. The historical rule of Western water law that boating isn't a beneficial use of water for priority purposes makes no sense to us. I'm a part of the "take only photographs, leave only footprints" generation. Camping and kayaking are vital youth industries, with stores popping up in swanky locations in big cities, but we want to see animals, not kill them. Despite having an uncle who spent much of his life working in a mine, and a grandfather who was a lumberjack, I see extractive industries as a necessary evil, to the extent that we can't recycle, rather than as something to be maximized. Hunting is rarely necessary, and my generation is wary after having heard so many cautionary tales of hunting destroying whole species.
Hunters have tried to seize on feminism as a way to restore interest. According to one source, only about 1% of women have ever hunted, while 12% of men have, woman make up 9% of hunters. The focus of the New York Times article was a girl, the best seller list has featured a novel called "The Girl's Guide To Hunting and Fishing", and a couple of my female cousins were introduced to hunting. But, in the case of my cousins, they have never become hard core enthusiasts. And, if you look at the sport as a whole, the changes in gender balance don't seem too dramatic. Is there anything fundamental about that? Probably not. But, nothing in decline attracts many newcomers.
16 September 2005
The National Day of Prayer.
Today is the National Day of Prayer in the United States. I am an American. God is a fairy tale.
Rather than offer a prayer today, I will post the Third Humanist Manifesto*, a product of the American Humanist Assocation, of which I am a member. I played an exceedingly minor role, in the company of hundreds of other people, in drafting it. It is a statement that expresses much of what I believe.
If you believe this too, you may endorse this Manifesto here.
Rather than offer a prayer today, I will post the Third Humanist Manifesto*, a product of the American Humanist Assocation, of which I am a member. I played an exceedingly minor role, in the company of hundreds of other people, in drafting it. It is a statement that expresses much of what I believe.
HUMANISM AND ITS ASPIRATIONS
Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.
The lifestance of Humanism—guided by reason, inspired by compassion, and informed by experience—encourages us to live life well and fully. It evolved through the ages and continues to develop through the efforts of thoughtful people who recognize that values and ideals, however carefully wrought, are subject to change as our knowledge and understandings advance.
This document is part of an ongoing effort to manifest in clear and positive terms the conceptual boundaries of Humanism, not what we must believe but a consensus of what we do believe. It is in this sense that we affirm the following:
Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis. Humanists find that science is the best method for determining this knowledge as well as for solving problems and developing beneficial technologies. We also recognize the value of new departures in thought, the arts, and inner experience—each subject to analysis by critical intelligence.
Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change. Humanists recognize nature as self-existing. We accept our life as all and enough, distinguishing things as they are from things as we might wish or imagine them to be. We welcome the challenges of the future, and are drawn to and undaunted by the yet to be known.
Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond. We are committed to treating each person as having inherent worth and dignity, and to making informed choices in a context of freedom consonant with responsibility.
Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals. We aim for our fullest possible development and animate our lives with a deep sense of purpose, finding wonder and awe in the joys and beauties of human existence, its challenges and tragedies, and even in the inevitability and finality of death. Humanists rely on the rich heritage of human culture and the lifestance of Humanism to provide comfort in times of want and encouragement in times of plenty.
Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships. Humanists long for and strive toward a world of mutual care and concern, free of cruelty and its consequences, where differences are resolved cooperatively without resorting to violence. The joining of individuality with interdependence enriches our lives, encourages us to enrich the lives of others, and inspires hope of attaining peace, justice, and opportunity for all.
Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness. Progressive cultures have worked to free humanity from the brutalities of mere survival and to reduce suffering, improve society, and develop global community. We seek to minimize the inequities of circumstance and ability, and we support a just distribution of nature’s resources and the fruits of human effort so that as many as possible can enjoy a good life.
Humanists are concerned for the well being of all, are committed to diversity, and respect those of differing yet humane views. We work to uphold the equal enjoyment of human rights and civil liberties in an open, secular society and maintain it is a civic duty to participate in the democratic process and a planetary duty to protect nature’s integrity, diversity, and beauty in a secure, sustainable manner.
Thus engaged in the flow of life, we aspire to this vision with the informed conviction that humanity has the ability to progress toward its highest ideals. The responsibility for our lives and the kind of world in which we live is ours and ours alone.
* Humanist Manifesto is a trademark of the American Humanist Association—© 2003 American Humanist Association
If you believe this too, you may endorse this Manifesto here.
The Non-Conspiracy of Science.
If you've ever been to a website supporting some crackpot theory of physics or some other scientific discipline, you will often hear complaints about the conspiracy of mainstream scientists to suppress their great idea and prevent people from seeing it. I'm here this morning to say that it isn't so. Non-mainstream ideas don't always get published in leading journals, but the scientific community has created a wonderful public access pre-publishing website, arxiv.org, which serves both its intended function, of allowing peers in the field to provide comment before papers are published, and the unintended purpose of allowing people who radical ideas who aren't crackpots to present their ideas to an international audience of specialists in the field (and laymen who follow those fields), even if the article is never published.
Today's case in point is this paper (hat tip to turbo-1 at the physics forums for finding it):
Is a classical Euclidean TOE reasonable?
Authors: A. Arbona
This is not discussing a mainstream theory. It contradicts the basic principals of general relativity, with both absolute coordinates and an ether approach to the vacuum. It seriously rethinks whether the speed of light speed limit of special relativity is absolute. It proposes a major rethink of some of the apparent paradoxes of quantum theory. And, it does it all in one paper. My point is not that everything physics has held so far is wrong and that Arbona is right. Arbona may not even personally believe the theories explored in this paper. My point is that radical departures from the leading paradigmn, when proposed in a reasonable manner with appropriate equations and discussion and appropriate citation to the relevant scholarly journal work that provides a foundation for the theories can and do reach very wide audiences whether they are published or not.
Plenty of scientists will read the abstract and move on. Different scientists have different interests. But, it takes only one or two serious scientists in the field with an interest in the topic to read the paper and discern whether it has promise, in order for a shot in the dark good ideas to snowball. If the paper is good, those scientists will refer to it and build upon it, and the development (with its originators well documented), will quickly spread across the scientific establishment. Most scientists have read dozens, if not hundreds, of these kinds of papers. At any high level physics lab, the collective momentary glances of all the scientists involved in an experiement provide a resevoir of ideas to consider, should anomolous results deviate from current mainstream theories. This doesn't happen very often, but it does happen, and provides a means for supposedly suppressed ideas to emerge into the mainstream if they are needed to explain reality.
Today's case in point is this paper (hat tip to turbo-1 at the physics forums for finding it):
Is a classical Euclidean TOE reasonable?
Authors: A. Arbona
We analyze both the feasibility and reasonableness of a classical Euclidean Theory of Everything (TOE), which we understand as a TOE based on an Euclidean space and an absolute time over which deterministic models of particles and forces are built. The possible axiomatic complexity of a TOE in such a framework is considered and compared to the complexity of the assumptions underlying the Standard Model. Current approaches to relevant (for our purposes) reformulations of Special Relativity, General Relativity, inertia models and Quantum Theory are summarized, and links between some of these reformulations are exposed. A qualitative framework is suggested for a research program on a classical Euclidean TOE. Within this framework an underlying basis is suggested, in particular, for the Principle of Relativity and Principle of Equivalence. A model for gravity as an inertial phenomenon is proposed. Also, a basis for quantum indeterminacy and wave function collapse is suggested in the framework.
This is not discussing a mainstream theory. It contradicts the basic principals of general relativity, with both absolute coordinates and an ether approach to the vacuum. It seriously rethinks whether the speed of light speed limit of special relativity is absolute. It proposes a major rethink of some of the apparent paradoxes of quantum theory. And, it does it all in one paper. My point is not that everything physics has held so far is wrong and that Arbona is right. Arbona may not even personally believe the theories explored in this paper. My point is that radical departures from the leading paradigmn, when proposed in a reasonable manner with appropriate equations and discussion and appropriate citation to the relevant scholarly journal work that provides a foundation for the theories can and do reach very wide audiences whether they are published or not.
Plenty of scientists will read the abstract and move on. Different scientists have different interests. But, it takes only one or two serious scientists in the field with an interest in the topic to read the paper and discern whether it has promise, in order for a shot in the dark good ideas to snowball. If the paper is good, those scientists will refer to it and build upon it, and the development (with its originators well documented), will quickly spread across the scientific establishment. Most scientists have read dozens, if not hundreds, of these kinds of papers. At any high level physics lab, the collective momentary glances of all the scientists involved in an experiement provide a resevoir of ideas to consider, should anomolous results deviate from current mainstream theories. This doesn't happen very often, but it does happen, and provides a means for supposedly suppressed ideas to emerge into the mainstream if they are needed to explain reality.
Jeweler's Screwdrivers.
I remarked earlier this week that the U.S. military needs not sledgehammers (i.e nuclear weapons and other massively destructive devices), but jeweler's screwdrivers. This is the direction that the U.S. military is going. Several of its new initiatives are designed to make ordinance smaller. While huge new bombs, like the 21,000 pound MOAB ("mother of all bombs") may make headlines, many of the new military developments are working on another problem. Bombs that are too big will destroy more than what you want or need to destroy.
One of these developments is the Viper Strike missile. Designed to be about half the size of the Hellfire missiles which are now used on Predator drones and originally designed as a helicopter borne anti-tank missile, the new Viper Strike missiles are designed to provide close air support to troops in urban settings, allowing them to blow up a room in a house without destroying the whole house, or to blow up a truck without destroying the trailer.
Another is the concrete bomb (September 15, 2005 entry). This is a laser guided or "smart" bomb filled with concrete instead of explosives. Why? So that the Air Force can hit targets like anti-aircraft weapons in urban neighborhoods, while avoiding civilian casualties, or destroy single spans of bridges, without ruining the entire bridge, so that the bridge can be more swiftly rebuilt when hostilities are over.
A third development along these lines is the small diameter bomb, a 250 pound "smart bomb" that fills a gap left in the usual array of 500 to 2000 pound bombs, again allowing more precision. The new F-22 fighter, which will have the smallest bomb payload of any combat plane in the U.S. Air Force or Navy when it enters service, is designed with these in mind.
The military isn't going to stop making larger weapons. But, the military is shifting from primarily planning for all out war against another superpower with a host of heavily armed allies, to preparing for small conventional wars against less heavily armed foes at locations around the world, and is deciding that it has different military needs as a result.
One of these developments is the Viper Strike missile. Designed to be about half the size of the Hellfire missiles which are now used on Predator drones and originally designed as a helicopter borne anti-tank missile, the new Viper Strike missiles are designed to provide close air support to troops in urban settings, allowing them to blow up a room in a house without destroying the whole house, or to blow up a truck without destroying the trailer.
Another is the concrete bomb (September 15, 2005 entry). This is a laser guided or "smart" bomb filled with concrete instead of explosives. Why? So that the Air Force can hit targets like anti-aircraft weapons in urban neighborhoods, while avoiding civilian casualties, or destroy single spans of bridges, without ruining the entire bridge, so that the bridge can be more swiftly rebuilt when hostilities are over.
A third development along these lines is the small diameter bomb, a 250 pound "smart bomb" that fills a gap left in the usual array of 500 to 2000 pound bombs, again allowing more precision. The new F-22 fighter, which will have the smallest bomb payload of any combat plane in the U.S. Air Force or Navy when it enters service, is designed with these in mind.
The military isn't going to stop making larger weapons. But, the military is shifting from primarily planning for all out war against another superpower with a host of heavily armed allies, to preparing for small conventional wars against less heavily armed foes at locations around the world, and is deciding that it has different military needs as a result.
15 September 2005
Denver's 2006 Budget.
Mayor Hickenlooper has another budget for Denver. On tap: a first installment in a ten year plan to end homelessness in the city, another installment in a ten year plan to pave the city's dirt alleys, an overhaul of the recycling program, an increase in the police force size by almost 100 cops to 1425, a little more fire equipment, more alternative sentencing, more library hours and restored recreation services. The gains are modest, but 2006 will be a year of progress instead of cuts.
Health Insurance Costs.
According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study:
The percentage of businesses offering their workers health insurance has dropped from 69% to 60% in just five years. Small businesses can't afford it anymore. Premiums are up 73% since 2000. Employee contributions are up 248% since 2002.
This is a national crisis. And, few people even have any clue why the premiums continue to rise at rates far above the rate of inflation. Double digit insurance premium increases year after year are not sustainable.
This year the survey found that average annual premiums for family [health insurance] coverage grew more than 9% since last year to $10,880. A minimum wage worker earns $10,712 before taxes.
The percentage of businesses offering their workers health insurance has dropped from 69% to 60% in just five years. Small businesses can't afford it anymore. Premiums are up 73% since 2000. Employee contributions are up 248% since 2002.
This is a national crisis. And, few people even have any clue why the premiums continue to rise at rates far above the rate of inflation. Double digit insurance premium increases year after year are not sustainable.
Katrina, Banks and Landlords.
Listening to the radio today, I heard an interview on NPR with the President of a local Southern Mississippi bank. This got me thinking about the systemic influences that Hurricane Katrina is going to have on the banking industry.
Everyone remembers the Christmas special "It's A Wonderful Life". In that movie, the protagonist explains that banks don't keep deposits sitting in some vault. Your deposit goes into a mortgage on someone else's home. The interest coming in on that mortgage pays the interest due on deposits and the expenses of running the bank. The only significant change that has occurred in the commercial banking industry since the time when that movie was set is that now most deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
Banks take reasonable measures to make sure that loans are paid. They make sure that borrowers are employed and have good credit. They take the property as collateral and make sure that there is an "equity cushion" to prevent the bank from bearing the risk of fluxuations in the value of the property. In a conventional residential loan, this cushion is typically at least 20% of the purchase price. In a conventional investment property loan, this cushion is often 50% of the purchase price. In low downpayment mortgages, mortgage insurance is often obtained. Finally, borrowers are required to insure their properties with homeowner's insurance and, if they are in a flood plain, with flood insurance.
Current estimates are that half of the homes in New Orleans did not have flood insurance, since the levees that guarded them took them out of the flood plain where it is typically required. Many of the uninsured buildings in New Orleans would have been subject to substantial mortgages. Except to the extent that ad hoc disaster relief funds make property owners whole, the banks who hold those mortgages are going to face massive losses that are likely to cause smaller banks to fail. Banks run a tight ship and simply don't have sufficient reserves to handle the loss of much of their principal in secured loans. Without the collateral, many of the debtors, who have lost homes and jobs, will be unable to pay in any fashion. If they go bankrupt under Chapter 7, they will have to turn over the land and ruined buildings to the banks holding the loans, and will have the remainder of their obligations discharged. Ironically, the only defaulting loans where the banks have some chance of being made whole may be the low down payment loans with mortage insurance.
Also somewhat oddly, to the extent that people without flood insurance are not made whole through disaster relief aid, one of the main sources of relief to the region may end up being the FDIC. If a bank fails, because its mortgage assets have become worthless, FDIC will step in and insure most of the bank's deposits as a multi-billion dollar cost, in many cases making payouts to local depositors that far exceed the failed banks' assets.
Another story on NPR mentioned that two-thirds of New Orleanians are renters and not homeowners (compared to a national homeownership rate of almost two-thirds). This is relevant to both banks and to tenants. In the case of buildings ruined by the flooding of New Orleans, which includes the vast majority of rental housing in the city, the likely approach taken in the landlord-tenant relationship will be to discharge landlord and tenant alike of any further obligation under those leases. Tenants will seek new homes from scratch. Landlords will try to decide what to do. Landlords without flood insurance or ad hoc federal aid may have to simply surrender the land to banks and make up as much of the difference from their personal funds as they can, as few landlords are completely insolvent. Also, since landlords often own more than one property, and since middle class residences in the older part of the city are probably most likely to have survived the storm (and hence will likely simply be rehabiliated) the pool of property owners and repossessing banks who decide how to rebuild New Orleans may be far smaller than one might expect. If each landlord owned just 10 units, and 10-12% of them surrender the properties to foreclosures, perhaps 10,000 landlords will dominant the reconstruction process, and that in turn would likely be dominated by a couple of thousand property owners who own the bulk of those properties.
For all the grand plans of civic leaders and community members, the future shape of the city is going to be largely decided on a case by case basis, by those property owners and repossessing banks, and it isn't at all obvious that they will be inclined to build as much low income housing as existed before the Hurricane. Revised zoning and building codes will guide their decisions, but the city can't force someone to rebuild (without condemning their property and paying for it, something New Orleans may have difficulty doing at the moment as the City currently has no cash on hand, and the State is working hard to fend off rumors that it too might have to itself go bankrupt). The biggest incentive to build new low and moderate income rental properties to replace those destroyed may come not from city zoning requirements, but from strings tied to federal aid for those who did not have flood insurance. Those conditions, of course, have not yet been set, although the President's speech this evening from New Orleans may set the tone of that debate.
Everyone remembers the Christmas special "It's A Wonderful Life". In that movie, the protagonist explains that banks don't keep deposits sitting in some vault. Your deposit goes into a mortgage on someone else's home. The interest coming in on that mortgage pays the interest due on deposits and the expenses of running the bank. The only significant change that has occurred in the commercial banking industry since the time when that movie was set is that now most deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
Banks take reasonable measures to make sure that loans are paid. They make sure that borrowers are employed and have good credit. They take the property as collateral and make sure that there is an "equity cushion" to prevent the bank from bearing the risk of fluxuations in the value of the property. In a conventional residential loan, this cushion is typically at least 20% of the purchase price. In a conventional investment property loan, this cushion is often 50% of the purchase price. In low downpayment mortgages, mortgage insurance is often obtained. Finally, borrowers are required to insure their properties with homeowner's insurance and, if they are in a flood plain, with flood insurance.
Current estimates are that half of the homes in New Orleans did not have flood insurance, since the levees that guarded them took them out of the flood plain where it is typically required. Many of the uninsured buildings in New Orleans would have been subject to substantial mortgages. Except to the extent that ad hoc disaster relief funds make property owners whole, the banks who hold those mortgages are going to face massive losses that are likely to cause smaller banks to fail. Banks run a tight ship and simply don't have sufficient reserves to handle the loss of much of their principal in secured loans. Without the collateral, many of the debtors, who have lost homes and jobs, will be unable to pay in any fashion. If they go bankrupt under Chapter 7, they will have to turn over the land and ruined buildings to the banks holding the loans, and will have the remainder of their obligations discharged. Ironically, the only defaulting loans where the banks have some chance of being made whole may be the low down payment loans with mortage insurance.
Also somewhat oddly, to the extent that people without flood insurance are not made whole through disaster relief aid, one of the main sources of relief to the region may end up being the FDIC. If a bank fails, because its mortgage assets have become worthless, FDIC will step in and insure most of the bank's deposits as a multi-billion dollar cost, in many cases making payouts to local depositors that far exceed the failed banks' assets.
Another story on NPR mentioned that two-thirds of New Orleanians are renters and not homeowners (compared to a national homeownership rate of almost two-thirds). This is relevant to both banks and to tenants. In the case of buildings ruined by the flooding of New Orleans, which includes the vast majority of rental housing in the city, the likely approach taken in the landlord-tenant relationship will be to discharge landlord and tenant alike of any further obligation under those leases. Tenants will seek new homes from scratch. Landlords will try to decide what to do. Landlords without flood insurance or ad hoc federal aid may have to simply surrender the land to banks and make up as much of the difference from their personal funds as they can, as few landlords are completely insolvent. Also, since landlords often own more than one property, and since middle class residences in the older part of the city are probably most likely to have survived the storm (and hence will likely simply be rehabiliated) the pool of property owners and repossessing banks who decide how to rebuild New Orleans may be far smaller than one might expect. If each landlord owned just 10 units, and 10-12% of them surrender the properties to foreclosures, perhaps 10,000 landlords will dominant the reconstruction process, and that in turn would likely be dominated by a couple of thousand property owners who own the bulk of those properties.
For all the grand plans of civic leaders and community members, the future shape of the city is going to be largely decided on a case by case basis, by those property owners and repossessing banks, and it isn't at all obvious that they will be inclined to build as much low income housing as existed before the Hurricane. Revised zoning and building codes will guide their decisions, but the city can't force someone to rebuild (without condemning their property and paying for it, something New Orleans may have difficulty doing at the moment as the City currently has no cash on hand, and the State is working hard to fend off rumors that it too might have to itself go bankrupt). The biggest incentive to build new low and moderate income rental properties to replace those destroyed may come not from city zoning requirements, but from strings tied to federal aid for those who did not have flood insurance. Those conditions, of course, have not yet been set, although the President's speech this evening from New Orleans may set the tone of that debate.
Colorado Wine Country Trademark Dispute
I really shouldn't disparage my former colleagues in Mesa County. I'm sure these attorneys mean well. But, a recent trademark dispute between Plum Creek Cellars and DeBeque Canyon Winery is a comedy of errors, which has, unfortunately, been turned into a federal case, literally.
Now, they are in federal court over the dispute.
The problem with both claims to the word "Palisade" to name the respective wines is that Palisade is a place name. It is an incorporated city in Mesa County which is home to most of Colorado's wine vineyards, including both parties to this suit.
While I am not an intellectual property specialist, I did have occasion to deal with the Patent and Trademark office to register trademarks and did handle an occasional trademark dispute when I was a full time practicing attorney. I'm surprised that Plum Creek was able to obtain a registration for their mark in the first place in 1998, and I'm equally surprised that DeBeque thinks that they can claim the trademark now.
The federal law governing trademarks, called the Lanham Act, bars marks that are "primarily" geographic. 15 United States Code Annotated Section 1052(e). Geographic marks are not allowed when the geographic significance of the term outweighs other senses of the term with regard to the particular product in the market in which it is sold. Thus, if the term "Palisade" was understood by the purchasers of these wines to refer primarily to a crude wooden fortress, the word could be used, but if customers understand that the term refers to a particular part of Colorado wine country, it isn't entitled to protection. If "the public would make a goods/place association, i.e., believe that the goods . . . originate in that place.", In re Societe Generale Des Eaux Minerales De Vittel (1987), then trademark protection is not permitted for either party.
A trademark may also not be simply descriptive. 15 United States Code Annotated Section 1052(e)(1). You can't get a trademark on words like "Liquor" for liquor, "Dry Cleaning" for dry cleaning, or "Fresh" for fresh foods.
How anyone ever won trademark protection for "Palisade Red", "Palisade Rose" and "Palisade White" to describe red, rose and white wines respectively made in Palisade, Colorado at the PTO is beyond my comprehension. I certainly never got a trademark examiner who was so asleep at the switch. Whenever I tried any stunt remotely like that, I got objection letters back from the PTO telling me that I was full of shit and asking me to change my application. Maybe the examiners were swayed by some free samples of the product included with the application.
"Cotes de Palisade" is no better. The non-literal translation from the French is roughly "Wine from the Palisade Region." Any potentially non-geographic sense of the word Palisade is banished in that phrase.
Finally, of course, DeBeque can't dispute that it is well aware of the actual and continuing prior use by Plum Creek of the mark in the same market. This should bar them from obtaining a new mark, even if it was actually something that could receive trademark protection.
The fact that the 1998 trademark registration lapsed should also eliminate any of the presumptions that come with continuous registration of a mark which might otherwise have muddied the issues.
Maybe there is some essential fact in this case that I'm missing here. But, if there isn't, Plum Creek should be denied an opportunity to renew their trademark, and any application by DeBeque to obtain a trademark of their own should likewise be denied. If the customers find the names confusing, maybe the wineries should come up with more creative names.
Note to French punctuation fiends: I tried to place the ^ symbol over the "o" in "Cotes", but when I hit the publish button, something else appeared, so I suppressed the mark in this post. I have taken similar liberties with the "e" in Rose, stripping it of its rightful accent mark.
Meanwhile, if your appetite for dumb trademark disputes has not been sated, you can investigate the case of Garrison Keillor who is going after an outfit selling the parody "Prairie Ho Companion" T-Shirts here and here. The fair use claim and claim of harassment made by the T-shirt vendor are again, pretty solid. Calling Keillor a "Liberal Comedian", may be overkill to some extent, however. Keillor's tales of wholesome small town America actually make him one of the more conservative comedians out there. But, the threat of a lawsuit in this case, like so many of this kinds of disputes, again shows bad judgment on the part of both Keillor and his attorney, Eric Nilsson, of Nilsson and Associates, P.A. in Minneapolis. Trademark law is designed to prevent knockoffs, not parodies. Also, a hat tip for Kos for pointing me to the story and for providing a link to this handy legal guide for bloggers from the Electronic Frontiers Foundation.
Plum Creek, whose wines include Palisade Red, Palisade Rose and Palisade White, said DeBeque started selling a Cotes de Palisade wine this year.
Plum Creek's Palisade wines go for $9 to $12 a bottle. DeBeque's Cotes de Palisade sells for about $13 a bottle.
"We're concerned that our wines will be confused with their wines," said Plum Creek co-owner Sue Phillips. "Cotes de Palisade is a very high-priced wine, while our (Palisade wines) are moderately priced. One person came into our tasting room unhappy, thinking we raised our price. . . .
Plum Creek said it held a trademark on "Palisade" since 1998 but mistakenly let it lapse in March. It reapplied for the trademark April 26.
Three days later, DeBeque filed for a trademark on the word, Plum Creek said.
According to the complaint, Price worked for Plum Creek until the mid-1990s, when he left to create DeBeque in 1997.
Now, they are in federal court over the dispute.
The problem with both claims to the word "Palisade" to name the respective wines is that Palisade is a place name. It is an incorporated city in Mesa County which is home to most of Colorado's wine vineyards, including both parties to this suit.
While I am not an intellectual property specialist, I did have occasion to deal with the Patent and Trademark office to register trademarks and did handle an occasional trademark dispute when I was a full time practicing attorney. I'm surprised that Plum Creek was able to obtain a registration for their mark in the first place in 1998, and I'm equally surprised that DeBeque thinks that they can claim the trademark now.
The federal law governing trademarks, called the Lanham Act, bars marks that are "primarily" geographic. 15 United States Code Annotated Section 1052(e). Geographic marks are not allowed when the geographic significance of the term outweighs other senses of the term with regard to the particular product in the market in which it is sold. Thus, if the term "Palisade" was understood by the purchasers of these wines to refer primarily to a crude wooden fortress, the word could be used, but if customers understand that the term refers to a particular part of Colorado wine country, it isn't entitled to protection. If "the public would make a goods/place association, i.e., believe that the goods . . . originate in that place.", In re Societe Generale Des Eaux Minerales De Vittel (1987), then trademark protection is not permitted for either party.
A trademark may also not be simply descriptive. 15 United States Code Annotated Section 1052(e)(1). You can't get a trademark on words like "Liquor" for liquor, "Dry Cleaning" for dry cleaning, or "Fresh" for fresh foods.
How anyone ever won trademark protection for "Palisade Red", "Palisade Rose" and "Palisade White" to describe red, rose and white wines respectively made in Palisade, Colorado at the PTO is beyond my comprehension. I certainly never got a trademark examiner who was so asleep at the switch. Whenever I tried any stunt remotely like that, I got objection letters back from the PTO telling me that I was full of shit and asking me to change my application. Maybe the examiners were swayed by some free samples of the product included with the application.
"Cotes de Palisade" is no better. The non-literal translation from the French is roughly "Wine from the Palisade Region." Any potentially non-geographic sense of the word Palisade is banished in that phrase.
Finally, of course, DeBeque can't dispute that it is well aware of the actual and continuing prior use by Plum Creek of the mark in the same market. This should bar them from obtaining a new mark, even if it was actually something that could receive trademark protection.
The fact that the 1998 trademark registration lapsed should also eliminate any of the presumptions that come with continuous registration of a mark which might otherwise have muddied the issues.
Maybe there is some essential fact in this case that I'm missing here. But, if there isn't, Plum Creek should be denied an opportunity to renew their trademark, and any application by DeBeque to obtain a trademark of their own should likewise be denied. If the customers find the names confusing, maybe the wineries should come up with more creative names.
Note to French punctuation fiends: I tried to place the ^ symbol over the "o" in "Cotes", but when I hit the publish button, something else appeared, so I suppressed the mark in this post. I have taken similar liberties with the "e" in Rose, stripping it of its rightful accent mark.
Meanwhile, if your appetite for dumb trademark disputes has not been sated, you can investigate the case of Garrison Keillor who is going after an outfit selling the parody "Prairie Ho Companion" T-Shirts here and here. The fair use claim and claim of harassment made by the T-shirt vendor are again, pretty solid. Calling Keillor a "Liberal Comedian", may be overkill to some extent, however. Keillor's tales of wholesome small town America actually make him one of the more conservative comedians out there. But, the threat of a lawsuit in this case, like so many of this kinds of disputes, again shows bad judgment on the part of both Keillor and his attorney, Eric Nilsson, of Nilsson and Associates, P.A. in Minneapolis. Trademark law is designed to prevent knockoffs, not parodies. Also, a hat tip for Kos for pointing me to the story and for providing a link to this handy legal guide for bloggers from the Electronic Frontiers Foundation.
Useless Technology
Maybe engineers feel pressure to jazz things up for the 21st century, but occassionally they come up with really useless gadets. My car was broken into a few weeks ago and the stereo stolen. The replacement has just such as useless gadget. It has a remote control.
I used to just reach out my arm and change the channels. This always worked fine. I can still do that if I want to. But, if the effort is too great, I can use the remote control instead. I suppose it could be used to allow my four year old to change the channels from the backseat, or during a once a year tailgate party. But really, by the time I decide that I need to do either of those things, I'll have lost the unit or seen its battery exhausted from lack of use. And, who in their right mind would give their teenager in the backseat such a device?
I used to just reach out my arm and change the channels. This always worked fine. I can still do that if I want to. But, if the effort is too great, I can use the remote control instead. I suppose it could be used to allow my four year old to change the channels from the backseat, or during a once a year tailgate party. But really, by the time I decide that I need to do either of those things, I'll have lost the unit or seen its battery exhausted from lack of use. And, who in their right mind would give their teenager in the backseat such a device?
14 September 2005
Frances Newton
Frances Newton will be executed in Texas in a couple of hours. The Supreme Court and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles have given the go ahead for her to be executed, so it seems unlikely that she will avoid the death penalty.
Her case is typical. She's black. Her lawyer was incompetent and has since been sanctioned by the State of Texas. Loose ends were not properly investigated or pursued. It is certainly hard to have confidence that she is really guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in this case.
The Austin-Stateman Herald summed up her case this way:
Even Saudi Arabia listens to pleas from the closest living kin of the deceased. But, Texas doesn't care. The Texas criminal justice system is a disgrace to the United States that has produced a long string of questionable criminal cases. But, the people of Texas don't seem to care, and the U.S. Supreme Court has intervened only intermittently. Frances Newton is paying the ultimate price for that indifference.
The rule in death penalty cases should be: Fiat Iustitia Et Ruant Coeli ("Let Justice Be Done, Though The Heavens May Fall"). Instead, it is "deadlines are more important than a human life."
Her case is typical. She's black. Her lawyer was incompetent and has since been sanctioned by the State of Texas. Loose ends were not properly investigated or pursued. It is certainly hard to have confidence that she is really guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in this case.
The Austin-Stateman Herald summed up her case this way:
Newton was denied a basic requirement for a fair trial — a competent lawyer. Her attorney at trial was the notorious Ron Mock, whose shoddy work in capital murder trials is well known in legal circles. He has been repeatedly disciplined by the State Bar of Texas, and has since been disqualified from handling capital cases. No less than 16 people whom Mock represented were sent to death row. Mock apparently did no investigation of Newton's claims of innocence. When asked by a trial judge, he could not name a single witness he had interviewed on Newton's behalf. . . .
She is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday despite plenty of doubt her new lawyers have raised regarding the triple murder for which she was convicted. Tom and Virginia Louis, the parents of the man Newton was convicted of killing, have their doubts.
"We are the parents of Adrian Newton and the grandparents of Alton and Farrah Newton . . . We were willing to testify on Frances' behalf, but Frances' defense lawyer never approached us," they said in a letter to the Board of Pardons and Parole asking for leniency. . . .
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refuses to hear any new evidence or facts in Newton's case — and many others like it — because those facts were raised after court deadlines expired.
Even Saudi Arabia listens to pleas from the closest living kin of the deceased. But, Texas doesn't care. The Texas criminal justice system is a disgrace to the United States that has produced a long string of questionable criminal cases. But, the people of Texas don't seem to care, and the U.S. Supreme Court has intervened only intermittently. Frances Newton is paying the ultimate price for that indifference.
The rule in death penalty cases should be: Fiat Iustitia Et Ruant Coeli ("Let Justice Be Done, Though The Heavens May Fall"). Instead, it is "deadlines are more important than a human life."
Lonely Brave Political Struggles.
I'm a Democrat. If you've read this blog for any length of time, you probably guessed that fact. In fact, I go to caucuses every couple of years (unlike 99% of my fellow democrats), make modest contributions to political campaigns when I can afford it, and have served in a variety of petty political party offices like precinct captain, vacancy committee member, volunteer campaign worker and state convention delegate over the years. I've even served as a treasurer for a county commissioner candidate when I lived in Grand Junction. This is hardly big time political participation, but it does come with some privileges. One of those privileges is that I know most of my local Democratic party elected officials personally. My state representative is Anne McGihon (State House Speaker Andrew Romanoff represents the other side of the park after the current round of redistricting, and I know him too).
Right now, Colorado's legislature is not in session. But, an elected official's work is never done. I had the delightful chance to talk to Anne for a while this week and found out what she was up to these days. She is heavily occupied fighting a sometimes lonely, brave political battle that needs to be fought, even when it isn't on the front pages of the national papers every day. She is working to help Coloradans gain greater access to health care. One day, she's talking to drug company representatives, explaining to them that they could sell more drugs if more people who needed them had a way to pay for them. Another day she's off to a conference of doctors, explaining why it would be a better thing in more people could get care.
Anne knows and I know that Colorado is not going to turn around next legislative session and solve all of the world's health care issues. Until Colorado passes Referendum C, TABOR prevents the state from spending even all the money it collects with existing taxes, and nothing but baby steps can be taken in the right direction. But, change doesn't happen over night. Second, third and fourth tier influential people need to be won over one by one to the very idea that increasing access to health care is a good thing, before any kind of proposal can avoid their vehement opposition. It is hard work and I back her in it 100%.
As I noted a few days ago, 18,000 Americans die every year in this country from lack of health insurance. NPR just had a story yesterday or the day before about a man who was evacuated from a hospital in New Orleans on the eve of receiving brain surgery that he needed. Now, because he doesn't have health insurance, his prior arrangements have fallen apart and no hospital will take him. The man will probably die, another quiet casualty of a failed health system. I know a man, who is a member of an internet community which I am also a part of, who goes by the handle WinAce. He too needs major medical intervention or he will die in a matter of months. He too can't get it because he doesn't have health insurance. I had a client who injured his hand in an accident in a bar. The doctor told him that his hand would be permanently impaired if he didn't receive surgery in a matter of weeks. The legal system doesn't work that fast. He eventually got a preliminary offer of some medical payments without resolving the entire case from the bar owner. But, the money came too late to do the surgery. My client will be permanently impaired as a result in a hand he needs to use to do his manual labor job because he didn't have health insurance. Now that Colorado has abandoned the "no fault" system of car insurance, many Coloradans who lack health insurance will face similar dilemnas. Businesses are frustrated too. Starbucks spends more on health insurance than it does on coffee.
The payoff may be a long time in coming. The outrage isn't nearly what is should be considering that nations like Cuba get health care outcomes for the average person better than those in the United States. But, I admire people like Anne who take the time to do the groundwork which may, someday, maybe many years from now, bring about sufficient political will to make the system better. As Margaret Mead once said:
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Right now, Colorado's legislature is not in session. But, an elected official's work is never done. I had the delightful chance to talk to Anne for a while this week and found out what she was up to these days. She is heavily occupied fighting a sometimes lonely, brave political battle that needs to be fought, even when it isn't on the front pages of the national papers every day. She is working to help Coloradans gain greater access to health care. One day, she's talking to drug company representatives, explaining to them that they could sell more drugs if more people who needed them had a way to pay for them. Another day she's off to a conference of doctors, explaining why it would be a better thing in more people could get care.
Anne knows and I know that Colorado is not going to turn around next legislative session and solve all of the world's health care issues. Until Colorado passes Referendum C, TABOR prevents the state from spending even all the money it collects with existing taxes, and nothing but baby steps can be taken in the right direction. But, change doesn't happen over night. Second, third and fourth tier influential people need to be won over one by one to the very idea that increasing access to health care is a good thing, before any kind of proposal can avoid their vehement opposition. It is hard work and I back her in it 100%.
As I noted a few days ago, 18,000 Americans die every year in this country from lack of health insurance. NPR just had a story yesterday or the day before about a man who was evacuated from a hospital in New Orleans on the eve of receiving brain surgery that he needed. Now, because he doesn't have health insurance, his prior arrangements have fallen apart and no hospital will take him. The man will probably die, another quiet casualty of a failed health system. I know a man, who is a member of an internet community which I am also a part of, who goes by the handle WinAce. He too needs major medical intervention or he will die in a matter of months. He too can't get it because he doesn't have health insurance. I had a client who injured his hand in an accident in a bar. The doctor told him that his hand would be permanently impaired if he didn't receive surgery in a matter of weeks. The legal system doesn't work that fast. He eventually got a preliminary offer of some medical payments without resolving the entire case from the bar owner. But, the money came too late to do the surgery. My client will be permanently impaired as a result in a hand he needs to use to do his manual labor job because he didn't have health insurance. Now that Colorado has abandoned the "no fault" system of car insurance, many Coloradans who lack health insurance will face similar dilemnas. Businesses are frustrated too. Starbucks spends more on health insurance than it does on coffee.
The payoff may be a long time in coming. The outrage isn't nearly what is should be considering that nations like Cuba get health care outcomes for the average person better than those in the United States. But, I admire people like Anne who take the time to do the groundwork which may, someday, maybe many years from now, bring about sufficient political will to make the system better. As Margaret Mead once said:
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
The Iraq Report.
I scan blogs every day. I read online news headlines. I even read hard copy newspapers most days. Almost every day, it's there, usually in multiple places: The Iraq Report. It has become as much of an ordinary part of my daily read as the weather report and traffic report. Partly cloudy with a high of 72 degrees, accident on Southbound I-25, 160 killed in Iraq in a heavy casualty day.
It is hard to learn much from the Iraq Report. Unlike the weather report and traffic report, I can't plan my day with it. Casualties are just numbers without perspective. The Iraq Report doesn't come to you the way that results of a cholesterol test or an emissions test on your car do, with benchmarks of good and bad against which you can compare them. It is just a low hum, reminding you that there is still a civil war raging, in which we have an unclear strategy and unclear objectives, and little justification for beginning it in the first place. The level of mayhem is so great, it is hard to relate to it. I look forward to the weekly edition of the Washington Post that comes to my home in hard copy, so that I can read a story with enough flesh to understand how the latest wave of suicide bombings, ambushes and other horrors have impacted people's lives.
Your usual instinct when confronted with horrible events is to take bold action to prevent them from happening again. In Iraq, that process has grown unthinkably muddy. Will the suffering be greater with more U.S. troops or fewer? Is the political process surrounding the constitution in Iraq the key to ending the violence, or is it irrelevant? Often, terrorists seek to influence policy by making demands. In Iraq, the insurgents seem content to let their policy of attacks speak for itself. Vague suggestions like the establishment of a Sunni Monarchy in Iraq are so out of touch with reality one doesn't know where a peace process could even begin. But, again and again, our troops claim to be killing and capturing vast numbers of insurgents and beating them in military engagements, and yet, again and again, they end up calling the next stronger and smarter wave of attacks proof that the insurgency is in its last throes, which doesn't convince anyone but idiots.
Attacks on U.S. troops seem to have leveled off. But, this means little for the other twenty-six million people in Iraq. By some counts, 6,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq so far this year. Basic services like reliable electricity supplies are still absent. When Saddam Hussein starts to look good by comparison to the U.S. occupation, it is hard to see how any good has come of this war.
It is hard to learn much from the Iraq Report. Unlike the weather report and traffic report, I can't plan my day with it. Casualties are just numbers without perspective. The Iraq Report doesn't come to you the way that results of a cholesterol test or an emissions test on your car do, with benchmarks of good and bad against which you can compare them. It is just a low hum, reminding you that there is still a civil war raging, in which we have an unclear strategy and unclear objectives, and little justification for beginning it in the first place. The level of mayhem is so great, it is hard to relate to it. I look forward to the weekly edition of the Washington Post that comes to my home in hard copy, so that I can read a story with enough flesh to understand how the latest wave of suicide bombings, ambushes and other horrors have impacted people's lives.
Your usual instinct when confronted with horrible events is to take bold action to prevent them from happening again. In Iraq, that process has grown unthinkably muddy. Will the suffering be greater with more U.S. troops or fewer? Is the political process surrounding the constitution in Iraq the key to ending the violence, or is it irrelevant? Often, terrorists seek to influence policy by making demands. In Iraq, the insurgents seem content to let their policy of attacks speak for itself. Vague suggestions like the establishment of a Sunni Monarchy in Iraq are so out of touch with reality one doesn't know where a peace process could even begin. But, again and again, our troops claim to be killing and capturing vast numbers of insurgents and beating them in military engagements, and yet, again and again, they end up calling the next stronger and smarter wave of attacks proof that the insurgency is in its last throes, which doesn't convince anyone but idiots.
Attacks on U.S. troops seem to have leveled off. But, this means little for the other twenty-six million people in Iraq. By some counts, 6,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq so far this year. Basic services like reliable electricity supplies are still absent. When Saddam Hussein starts to look good by comparison to the U.S. occupation, it is hard to see how any good has come of this war.
ICBMs still there.
The United States has about 500 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads (it also has land based Peacekeeper Missiles (about 50), submarine based Trident nuclear missiles, and aircraft based nuclear weapons). They aren't in the news as often as they were in the 1980s when the United States and the Soviet Union were in a cold war standoff. But, they are still there and they still work. A couple of weeks ago, an unarmed one was launched from North Dakota to a Pacific Ocean target as a test. It crossed the 4,000 miles in 30 minutes (more than ten times the speed of sound at sea level). Equally important, the U.S. is preparing to take a much more aggressive stance regarding when it is prepared to use those missiles pre-emptively.
A single Minuteman missile can annihilate an entire metropolitan area. But, while the U.S. has the power to rain down massive destruction anywhere in the world, the military value of destroying whole metropolitan areas full of mostly innocent people is questionable. The U.S. has all the sledgehammers it needs, but most wars, which are politics by other means, call for jeweler's screwdrivers, not sledgehammers.
A single Minuteman missile can annihilate an entire metropolitan area. But, while the U.S. has the power to rain down massive destruction anywhere in the world, the military value of destroying whole metropolitan areas full of mostly innocent people is questionable. The U.S. has all the sledgehammers it needs, but most wars, which are politics by other means, call for jeweler's screwdrivers, not sledgehammers.
The Nuclear Waste Status Quo
Those who criticize new nuclear waste dumps are implicitly arguing for the status quo. If you live downriver from Moab, Utah, the status quo is pretty frightening.
There are 12 million tons of radioactive wastes on the banks of the Colorado River, which provides drinking water for more than 25 million people.
The current plan calls for the waste to be moved, mostly by rail, to a temporary spot 30 miles from the Colorado River until a longer term solution can be found. The big point is that the status quo is a real problem. The nuclear waste option to be frightened of isn't a storage site that may have a problem in 1,000 years instead of 10,000 years. It is the existing storage sites that could be a problem far sooner.
There are 12 million tons of radioactive wastes on the banks of the Colorado River, which provides drinking water for more than 25 million people.
The 94-foot-tall pile of uranium tailings - radioactive material leftover from uranium mining - is located three miles northwest of the city of Moab in Grand County, Utah. . . . The threat of the tailings leaching into the Colorado River was heightened by January flooding in southern Utah.
Moab's rich uranium deposits were mined in the 1950s for nuclear bombs. The Uranium Reduction Co. sold its mill in 1962 to Atlas Corp., which ran it sporadically until declaring bankruptcy in 1998. The Energy Department took over the site in 2001. The Moab Project Site covers about 400 acres and includes a 130-acre uranium mill tailings pile that occupies much of the western portion.
The current plan calls for the waste to be moved, mostly by rail, to a temporary spot 30 miles from the Colorado River until a longer term solution can be found. The big point is that the status quo is a real problem. The nuclear waste option to be frightened of isn't a storage site that may have a problem in 1,000 years instead of 10,000 years. It is the existing storage sites that could be a problem far sooner.
13 September 2005
Katrina Death Toll
The Katrina death toll is currently 659. This includes a large share of the deaths that will be found in Mississippi, but the process of locating the dead in Louisiana is just beginning.
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