The Maxwell Evans Report

Numbers

2010-10-07T16:14:00.013-05:00

“No one can speak well, unless he thoroughly understands his subject.” - Cicero

$14,119,000,000,000 - Total US GDP
_$3,517,681,000,000 - Total Federal outlays
___$303,700,000,000 - Household spending on energy
_$1,623,200,000,000 - Household spending on health care
___$530,700,000,000 - Private spending on computers

_$1,578,400,000,000 - Gross exports
_$1,964,700,000,000 - Gross imports
___$515,300,000,000 - Gross exports, services
___$376,900,000,000 - Gross imports, services

___$661,049,000,000 - National defense
____$22,095,000,000 - Internat'l development & foreign aid
____$11,052,000,000 - General science & basic research
____$18,397,000,000 - Space flight, research & technology
_____$8,276,000,000 - Pollution control & abatement
____$17,635,000,000 - Farm income stabilization
______-$978,000,000 - Postal service
____$84,289,000,000 - Transportation
____$16,710,000,000 - Disaster relief & insurance
____$53,206,000,000 - Non-higher education
____-$3,258,000,000 - Higher education
____$51,549,000,000 - Total, administration of justice
___$186,902,000,000 - Net interest
____-$5,292,000,000 - Royalties, Continental Shelf

___$300,010,000,000 - Health care services
____$30,565,000,000 - Health research & spending
_____$3,752,000,000 - Health & safety (OSHA, CPSC, etc.)
___$430,093,000,000 - Medicare
___$122,537,000,000 - Unemployment
____$79,080,000,000 - Food & nutrition assistance
___$682,963,000,000 - Social Security

- Tiro

Still Not In My Name: A follow-up on the Park51 controversy

2010-09-09T21:26:00.007-05:00

“The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.” - The Prophet Muhammed, pbup

After I posting the last article, I received a number of interesting responses, including a link to Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on Park51 from a relative of mine, who summed things up by saying, “This is America, dammit!” I’m not always a big fan of Olbermann, but when I agree with him, I can always rely on him to provide a more eloquent description of my position than I can.

I also got into a discussion with a former colleague of mine - a very intelligent guy, whose opinions I hold in very high regard. Although we differed in our views on Park51, our discussion forced me to clarify a number of the points I was making - as any good discussion should do. So here I present my original thesis again, hopefully in much clearer terms.

First, the term ‘racism’ - if you’ve ever gotten into a discussion about race with an anthropologist (such as my fiance), you’re probably aware of the fact that the term is fuzzy, at best. While there are some physiological characteristics that are common among people from common geographic areas - skin pigmentation, for example - the idea of sorting people into a handful of racial categories is pretty ridiculous.

That said, the term is still useful. Terms like “islamophobia” aren’t really accurate - distrust and hatred of a particular group because of what they look like isn’t the same as fear of that group. So, to be clear, what I say “racism,” I mean treating a person or people a certain way because of what they look like, how they dress, what their religion is, and anything else that’s about ‘the group,’ rather than who they actually are, individually. Yes, it’s a broad term, but that’s the point - in this country, we judge people based on who they are, what they have done, and the individual choices that they have made. This is America, dammit!

And now onto the core point from last time: If you see someone who looks Muslim, and you think “terrorist,” then you are a racist. No metaphors or qualifiers necessary - a racist. Whatever your background, whatever your past experiences, whatever atrocities may have been committed by other Muslims you know -- if you see a Muslim, and because of the fact that they are Muslim, you think “terrorist,” then you are a racist.

In discussing this with my colleague, he compared avoiding the building of mosques near Ground Zero to a college trying to avoid placing football players in the dorm room next to a female student who had been gang raped by a football team. I imagine that the common response to this is, “well, it’s not really fair to the football players, but the poor girl has suffered enough already...”

Now, replace “football players” with “black students” or “hispanic students.” Suddenly, this wouldn’t be okay, by any stretch of the imagination.

My point is not to diminish the suffering of our hypothetical girl - she has suffered greatly, and it would be perfectly normal human response for her to be terrified of people who look like her attackers. But simply following our basic instincts and urges generally doesn’t lead us to great outcomes.

Our social structure has evolved to include certain safeguards that prevent us from acting on these base urges, and encourage us to act in the manner that we’ve agree is the right way to act. It is one of these safeguards that ensures that most of us, however uncomfortable it might make us, would agree that the girl, raped by a black man, who doesn’t want black men living next door, is a racist.

The safeguards don’t always work, though. For some reason, we seem to have a blind spot when it comes to Muslims (gays and atheists, too - but that’s another discussion), which is Ron Ramsey can call Islam a “cult” and still take 22% of the votes in a 3-way gubernatorial primary.

So, on to my final point from last time: the “Ground Zero Mosque.” If you see a mosque as a symbol of terrorism, that’s not ok. Even if your mother, your brother, your son, your wife, or anyone else was killed by radical Islamic terrorists on 9/11 - it’s not ok.

The idea that the Park51 community center should be moved “out of respect for the 9/11 families” implies three monstrous things: that “the 9/11 families” are racist, that this racism is excused by the death of their loved ones, and that the group that is the target of their bigotry should go out of its way to avoid being seen.

This is insanity of the highest order. As I said last time, the way to deal with racism is not to ignore it, and it is certainly not to blame the victims - it is to stand up and call out the racists.

There are legitimate discussions to be had about how to deal with the problems of radical Islam and terrorism, and a populace that implicitly condones anti-Muslim racism isn’t helping.

- Tiro

__.

Not in my name: why we need the Park51 community center

2010-08-18T12:31:00.003-05:00

"It is a great thing to know our vices." - Cicero

Forget for a moment, if you’ve even heard it, the name Feisal Abdul Rauf. Imagine instead an American-born Muslim by the name of William E. Robinson. Imagine that Mr. Robinson has been involved improving relations between Islam and the West for his entire career, has condemned acts of terrorism as being blatantly at odds with Islam, and has even written about how America is, in his view, more in line with Islamic ideals than many ‘Muslim nations.’

Now imagine that the opportunity arises for a non-profit run by Mr. Robinson to buy a building in lower Manhattan, a building which has been abandoned for years due to the heavy damage it sustained in the 9/11 attacks. When discussing the idea of buying the building and transforming it into an Islamic community center – similar to a YMCA or a JCC – so close to the site of the attacks, his wife, Daisy, notes that “only in New York City is this possible.”

The original plan is to name the center Cordoba House, after the period of Muslim rule in Spain when Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted peacefully. The name is changed to Park51, though, after certain politicians point out the fact that the name could also refer to the church that had been remodeled into a mosque following the Umayyad defeat of the Visigoths in 600 AD (and was later restructured back into a church in 1236).

Does this Mr. Robinson scare you? He certainly doesn’t scare me, but maybe that’s because the image I have is of a middle-aged, slightly overweight white man, glasses perched on top of his balding head. Yes, he’s made some comments that could be considered controversial, but he’s clearly on our side – the side of moderate Islam – in the very real war against religious fanaticism. Simply put, he is the best hope we have of preventing the events of 9/11 from ever happening again.

Let’s drop the ‘American-born’ part of the story, and call Mr. Robinson by his real name, Imam Rauf. Do you hesitate a moment longer before passing judgment on this man’s life and work? Does he suddenly seem like one of Them, instead of one of Us? Is the fact that his skin is brown and his name unfamiliar to my American ears make it easier to imagine that he was cheering rather than crying on the most terrifying day of my life? Yes, it does – and that is appalling.

There’s an often repeated quote that warns of the dangers of sitting idly by while they come for the Communists, the trade unionists, and the Jews – and it’s true, there is great danger in apathy. But there is even greater danger in justification: yes, Muslims have the right to practice their religion on private property as they see fit, but why there? Yes, freedom of expression is a core American value, but come on…

Because the argument that Muslims shouldn’t practice their religion near the site of the worst terrorist attack in our country’s history depends entirely on the premise that those Muslims bear responsibility for the actions of the extremists who look and sound like them. I lost a family member that day – a cousin, and I know my experience is nothing compared to those who lost a mother, a son, a spouse – and like all Americans, I lost a profound sense of security that I only now realize I possessed. But I reject the idea this somehow justifies my own racist fears, or absolves me from the responsibility of acknowledging and working to fix these failings.

While the politics of fear have always been a part of the world I live in, I get the sense that there is a shift occurring. I’m only 24 – racism, as I’ve seen it, has always been either the ‘institutional racism’ that seems more about economics and social class than skin color, or the angry ranting of a small group of madmen. But the kind of deep, quiet racism that creeps through the shadows, whispering that discrimination is necessary, that these fears are justified, and that we’re just being “careful” - this seems new to me. What seems most dangerous to me is how willingly we offer our consent: I’ve seen good people, family members and close friends, accept lies built on the most monstrous of assumptions, even when they stand in direct conflict with the facts. And I’m guilty of it myself.

Where do we go from here? While I hope that those among us who lived through McCarthyism or race riots can offer some advice, my own experience and my understanding of history offers only one solution: call out prejudice and racism wherever we find it, especially within ourselves. I have always loved the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King – although he died long before I was born, when I read his speeches and letters, I get the sense that I’m listening to a man who is intensely firm in his convictions because he has questioned them deeply.

Whatever your views on the Park51 Islamic community center, I ask you to question those views, and to understand the full implications of those views. Because I can’t say it any better, I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

-- Marcus Tullius Tiro

Error Margin

2009-12-24T06:24:00.002-06:00

There are times when a picture is quite literally worth a thousand words.

Intervention

2009-08-28T21:15:00.007-05:00

A Colorado pine forest is a peculiar thing. In the depths of one you have the sense that you are wandering through the land which inspired Grim's Fairy-Tales and most of the more earthy old gods. Pan peeks out at you from around the trunks of the majestic natural residents and you get a sense that the trees are all very, very old.

This is not, of course, generally the case.

While periodically, on the lower slopes, you do run into a pine of unusually grand stature and robust character, for the most part the trees rise to a certain point and then rise no farther. The reasons for this are as simple as they are complicated. The forests of Colorado, certainly around the area of the fourteeners, are marked by a particular cycle of life, death, and rebirth, a cycle they share both symbiotically and parasitically with the pine-borer beetles.

A tree that is damaged becomes particularly vulnerable to these little buggers, but they can and will bore straight through the bark of a healthy tree to lay their eggs underneath. When the eggs hatch, the larvae roam around eating the "live" part of the tree (xylem, phloem) in random directions, a process which ultimately causes large strokes of the bark to fall off, and which kills the tree.

The tree will then gradually dry out. A dry tree is a fire-hazard, and as the number of these fire-hazards in a given area grows, the likelihood that one of them will be struck by lightning also increases. When this happens, the tree in question ignites like a bomb, burning down itself and igniting neighboring dry trees. The inferno is generally broken by the live-trees at the edge of the infestation (pine-needle carpets discourage underbrush from taking hold, which in turn makes it harder for fires to spread through healthy, live trees... no kindling to speak of).

Pine-cones in the Colorado forests do not open and release their seeds until incited to do so by extreme heat. The ash from the dead trees lays down a thick carpet of fertilizer that allows the new trees to grow quickly through their vulnerable adolescence and to a point where they can, again, wipe out all local ground-cover.

And the pine-borers? The inferno kills the majority of the pine-borer beetles in the area, preventing a massive exponential outbreak.

For years, the forestry teams in Colorado (it isn't just their mistake, remember Smokey the Bear? Cute lil' animals a'la 'Bambi' fleeing the great flaming evil?) have been tamping down forest fires. Initially the idea was preservation of forest, but more recently the problem has changed, and the strategy, unfortunately, has remained (by necessity) largely the same. They have, however, begun to use controlled burns in an effort to bring the forest back under control (unless my information is inaccurate in this area, which it might be).

You see, because they tamped down the forest fires, the pine-borer beetles got out of hand. Now, as you drive through Colorado, you may notice that the "evergreen" forests are abnormally brown. Entire mountainsides of trees are dead, rotting husks of their former selves. Forest fires of the magnitude created by a mass of dead trees that large, without intervention, become legitimate dangers to human settlements in the area, and the rangers must now run around determining (as much as possible) the extent of each blaze that takes hold.

Well-meaning human intervention has created the necessity of well-meaning human intervention, you might say.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, but I'm not sure I like what it teaches.

(addendum 8/30/09)
Had the pleasure of a chat with RR on a long hike the other day, on which the subject of the borer beetles came up. RR is a recently-retired Colorado ranger, so he knows his stuff regarding those.

The major infestation at present is actually the result of a long string of warm winters. In the normal borer cycle, the larvae are largely killed off every few years by a winter which reaches temperatures below 35 degrees F. This temperature is necessary because at that stage in their lives, pine borer blood is literally (chemically) antifreeze. Thus, while such massive infestations as the one presently menacing Colorado are not common, they are possible without human interference.

In fact, the first fire of such magnitude happened in Yellowstone in 1910, and was in fact the reason rangers started engaging in fire-control.

Additional random tidbits I picked up from RR- pine borers attack Lodgepole pines in particular, and all pines in general, with a certain voracity, however Fir trees (and to a limited extent Spruce trees) are extremely resistant to attack. RR theorizes that differences in sap discourage infestation, and also that thinner bark provides insufficient shelter for the larvae.

The borer beetles attack the entire tree, from top to bottom, but where they attack it is more or less random. In cold winters, the beetles deep under the snow level are much more likely to survive than those above (insulation), and this allows many to survive all but the harshest of winters. No winter is cold enough to eliminate the entire population, of course, but the percentage that survives the cold is small.

Some lodge-pole pinecones open and drop seeds like normal pine cones, and some drop seed only in extreme heat. The reason for this, according to RR, is that some pine cones are covered by the lodge-pole's sap, which seals them up until the sap is melted away, a process that (usually) takes just long enough for the fire to move on to somewhere else before the seal weakens sufficiently that they pop open.

I realize that this additional information doesn't feed well into the article, but hey. I don't feed you inaccurate information if I can help it, and usually I can help it, even if it hurts my point.

Of Shoes and Ships, and Sealing Wax...

2009-08-21T17:16:00.002-05:00

"By doubting we all come to truth." - Cicero

Lately, I have been experiencing nearly constant reminders of a phenomenon that has bothered me from as early as I can remember. When I was younger, probably around the age of 8, I asked my mother why we went to church, worshiped Jesus, and so on (I come from a Catholic family), and my mother told me that it was what we believed. When I asked her why we believed it, she told me, "Well, you have to believe in something." Of course, years later, I now know that she was absolutely right. Regardless of our view of the world, we all have a set of fundamental assumptions and beliefs about the world - that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the laws of physics apply equally at my desk and at yours, or that humanity was born out of cornmeal and the blood of a god.

The phenomenon I'm referring to is the oft repeated claim that Americans, by and large, are afraid of complexity, bored by nuance, and only receptive to new information that fits neatly into their existing model of the world - call it 'passive ignorance,' if you like. Naturally, this is not true of all Americans, nor is it true only of Americans; and yet the claim gets made. I like to think of myself as practicing that form of 'healthy skepticism' that tries to ask questions about important issues, but that doesn't really mind taking unfounded assertions as long as the source has a reputation for reliability - and yet I know that I often fail to live up to this ideal.

Take your pick of any of the major news stories, and you'll see this: the current 'health care reform' maelstrom, the global recession, or my personal favorite, the swine flu pandemic. From the Synthesis blog, 'Apparently Swine Flu is Back' discusses a Fox News piece which, among other things, worries that the federal government might use swine flu as a way to impose martial law, and continue the transformation of the US into a totalitarian police state. To be fair, the Fox piece sticks to the facts of the case, describing the actions various national governments have taken, and leaves the discussion of various doomsday scenarios to quotes by various outside sources.

The coverage of this issue, and the popular reaction to it - at least from what I've seen - is basically what you'd expect: 'far-right' conservatives/republicans/libertarians see swine flu as an excuse for the federal government, using what may or may not actually be a legitimate issue, to further the implementation an ideologically-motivated welfare state; 'far-left' liberals/democrats/progressives see this response as the racially-motivated paranoid fantasies of a group so detached from reality that they would oppose any ideas coming out of this government, even at the expense of the safety and securing of the populace.

I don't think that either of the above descriptions is really appropriate, but I do think that most of of us, seeing this coverage, would pretty quickly dismiss at least one side's concerns as being somewhat nonsensical - and here is where 'passive ignorance' rears its ugly head. In truth, both sides do have legitimate concerns, and there are issues here upon which reasonable people might disagree. In dismissing either side, we deprive ourselves of the chance to study an interesting problem, engage in healthy debate, and be a little better for it.

First at issue is whether the fundamental problem - swine flu - is in fact a problem. If, as the Fox article mentions, the current swine flu strain results in a pandemic like the 1918 'Spanish flu' epidemic, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 50 to 100 million people (see this article, references 1-5, specifically), including my own great-grandmother, then there is almost certainly a legitimate cause for concern, even taking into account the enormous strides medicine has made since then. Furthermore, even if swine flu doesn't cause such a pandemic (or epidemic), building the capability to defend against such an event is probably worth considering.

Next is the very real question of whether measures such as quarantine and forced vaccination ethical and/or legal. One argument for such measures is that by not being vaccinated during an epidemic, a person risks becoming infected and thus constitutes a direct danger to the safety and health - and thus the fundamental liberties - of those around him. On the other hand, as with all medical care, vaccination does carry risks, and the government's decision that such risks are outweighed by the interests of the state must have a defensible basis. Of course, we could avoid this by the use of quarantines, although this simply shifts the burden on individual liberties from those of life and health to those of the freedom of movement and due process.

Finally, the claim most likely to be dismissed by the 'liberals' among us is that of whether such practices constitute the advancement of ideology in the guise of public necessity; but the concern here is, at least in my (admittedly non-professional) opinion, a valid one. The Fox article mentions the Posse Comitatus Act, which, in general terms, prohibits the military from engaging in civilian law enforcement. The law was originally passed to end the use of the military as a quasi-police force, upholding and enforcing unpopular laws in the post-Civil War era South. In its current state, prohibits the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines as well as the National Guard when acting under the command of the president from being used to enforce civilian law, except in certain specific situations; this prohibition does not extend to the Coast Guard, nor to the National Guard of a state when acting under the direction of the state's governor. According to the Fox piece, the Department of Defense is considering a proposal which would allow the creation of military units permanently stationed in the US to assist local civilian authorities in dealing with an epidemic incident. (Note: the Fox article implies that the proposal describes setting up units specifically to deal with the potential swine flu epidemic, as seems to be confirmed by this CNN article, rather than as a permanent force. Note also that this particular CNN article does not mention the potential legal issues, and searches for 'military swine flu posse comitatus' and 'swine flu posse comitatus' on CNN.com return no results.)

Is the potentiality of military police prohibiting suspected carriers of swine flu from leaving their houses looming on the horizon? Probably not. But still, there are legal limitations on what the military can and cannot do in such a situation, and these limitations must be respected; or, if the limitations aren't a good idea, then perhaps Congress should repeal them.

Personally, I like thinking about complex issues. I enjoy nuance, and, in most situations, I find ideas that don't easily fit into my current world-view more interesting than those that do. Which is why I have so much trouble understanding things such as this article, 'What Media Bias? Part 152.' The author quotes an article (I believe it's this Reuters article, but I can't be sure) saying that "U.S. consumer confidence took an unexpectedly steep slide in June," and accusing the media of presenting a biased view of the economy, asking, and I quote:

"Unexpectedly? By whom? How much of a liberal pinhead do you have to be to not expect a massive slide in consumer confidence when unemployment is going heck for leather towards 10%?" (emphasis in the original)

Of course, the article (at least, the Reuters article that I believe he's discussing) goes on to say that the consumer confidence index dropped from 54.8 in May to 49.3 in June, as compared to the 55.0 expectation of 'economists polled by Reuters.' Other indices and figures come from Standard & Poor's/Case Shiller, the National Association of Purchasing Management-New York, and others. Now, I know the article doesn't give the names and employers of the 'polled economists,' but I generally tend to trust Reuters, and most of the economists I know would certainly not qualify as 'liberal pinheads.' Of course, I'm in training to be one myself (not a macroeconomist, but still...), so I'm certainly biased, but I still think its good to know that they were talking to economists as opposed to random people of the street.

I'll conclude, before I start ranting about the misunderstood 'dismal science.' In the words of Aaron Sorkin, et al. (via C.J. Cregg of The West Wing), "complexity isn't a vice."

- Tiro

On Reading

2009-07-09T18:03:00.003-05:00

The Stage: Mr. Hanna and his conservative movement requests that all representatives promise to read the whole health-care bill personally before they vote on it, and requests that bills be made available to the public three days prior to each vote on the internet. Mr. Hoyer (D-Md.) has been quoted replying that the idea of every representative reading every bill they vote on is patently ridiculous.

---

My take:

It would be easy to harp and whine that all representatives should read the entirety of all bills they vote on. I myself, in younger years, have whined the same thing, with no less justification. In an ideal world, this would, of course, be ideal.

The problem is, that most people writing these bills are lawyers, and lawyers are not known for keeping it short. Bills often run over a thousand pages. The Patriot act was seven hundred some (I read about a third of it, incidentally, and much like sausage, you really don't want to know what was in it), and health-care is looking to be something closer to twice that.

The record number of votes taken in one day in the House of Representatives presently stands at fifty-three.

Let's be generous and presume that an average bill is somewhere in the vicinity of five hundred pages. I suspect it is somewhat more, particularly if you factor in the pork.* Five hundred pages times (again, to be generous and to simplify) fifty votes is 25,000 pages of legislation you expect your representative to be current on at any given day and time.

Still, that's a record, so let's assume that a more normal voting day is, oh, ten votes. Ten votes times five hundred pages is five thousand pages of reading, every day, plus additional pages to keep current with revisions.

It is, quite frankly, not possible.

Which isn't to say that Mr. Hanna doesn't have a point. The health-care bill is not a standard bill. Most bills that go to the floor on a given day are not points of major contention. They get done big simple obvious things that need to be done. Things like "vote to take the unmaintained, tax-delinquent land between forty-fifth and forty-sixth street under eminent domain and classify it as 'business' land to allow resale to companies intent on improving the property." Or maybe "Bill to provide additional funds to nearby VA hospital which is unable to maintain ceiling lights."

This sort of bill requires only a check-through by staff to make sure that nothing nasty got slipped in. You hand it to your assistant (a friend of mine did this job over the previous summer, incidentally), and say "look through this and make sure none of the pork makes slavery legal or anything like that."

However, the health-care bill (and the Patriot Act) is not a minor piece of pittance legislation. It's a major, important bill that needs to be done right, or not done at all.** I'm inclined to agree with Mr. Hanna, additionally, that bills should be concluded three days prior to voting and put up online for public review. A major change in a bill's structure the day before a vote is a problem, because there is insufficient remaining time for that change to be properly vetted.

In this particular instance, then, I would say that yes, every representative should read every page themselves, so that they know what they're about to do to the country. In all cases I think bills should be available for public review 3 days prior to the vote, or earlier (perhaps have "versions" of the bill online with version-numbers so people can track changes if they want to).

I agree then, with Mr. Hanna in this particular case. However, I also agree with Mr. Hoyer that expecting every representative to read the entirety of every bill they vote on is patently ridiculous.

Neither man is out of line, and they're both right.

-Maxwell Evans

*(Not all pork is bad pork, incidentally, but we'll set that aside as an argument for a day when that statement is more true than false. These days, pork is pretty much always bad. We just don't have enough pigs left to go 'round.)

**(It does, however, need to be done. I'll explain my take on it in a later article.)

Iran

2009-06-21T17:41:00.002-05:00

[this will be replaced by a more detailed analysis at a later time, when the data is less green and the materials presently blocked by the Iranian government's media blackout become available.]

For the time being:

I would like to extend my support to the protesters, and condolences to those who have lost family or friends in the violent government reactions.

I would further encourage legitimate political leaders to not acknowledge the legitimacy of the present Iranian "government" until such a time as it consents to have an election that hasn't been blatantly rigged.

Perhaps more practically (being mindful of the dearth of political leaders among my readership) I would encourage my readers to contact their political leaders and let them know that acknowledging the present, illegitimate government of Iran would be unpopular among their people/voters/whatever.

A wide public acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the "election" would steal steam from the Iranian revolt (too much blood has been shed to call the incidents "protests," but perhaps too little to term it a revolution, particularly since the unseating of the Ayatollah does not seem to be a stated objective, yet. Also because the revolt does not yet seem to have a centralized leadership ready to take command of the country should the government be toppled).

To the people of Iran, our sympathies are with you. Our own country is rooted in revolution and in the principle that power accrues to, and issues from the people. If that power has gone astray, those who die reclaiming it are martyrs.

Nothing less.

Godspeed.

Abortion: The Value of Life

2009-06-03T00:53:00.002-05:00

Due to my anger, my last posting became somewhat derailed (and I would like to extend a word of thanks to the lady who scolded me sternly yesterday in a comment and drew my attention to my own rage-post... we do read, and greatly appreciate, comments), and so today I would like to take a step back and look at a larger issue which the murder of George Tiller has brought to mind.

The Value of a Human Life

I believe that the arguments being made against abortion are presently the wrong ones. They tend towards hypocrisy because they are framed in terms of the sacred nature of all human life. This is not the issue. The issue is whether a life is sacred to you.

Human groups tend to weigh the value of out-group members lower than the value of in-group members, but their definition of "in" and "out" can at times be extremely complex. Islam, for instance, breaks the world into (setting aside that "house of armistice" nonsense they added in as a practical measure somewhere along the way) two houses... the house of Islam (Dar al Islam) and the house of War (Dar al Hab). Within the house of Islam are the protected people of the book, who enjoy the protection of Islam so long as they pay extra taxes and live as second-class citizens. This group includes Jews and Christians.

Christians, conversely, have a much more ephemeral understanding of "us" and "them." The operative difference between Christianity and Islam in terms of "them" is not so much the objective (converting the whole world) but the methodology. Thematically Christianity prefers to convert through peaceful methods, offering something in return for a willing ear. Of course, this has not always been the way of things in practical application, but for this particular philosophical discussion I feel safe setting a few thousand years of history aside and looking only at intent.

In either case (Islam or Christianity), "us" is believers, and "them" is nonbelievers, and being in the non-believer category makes your life worth less than it would be if you were a believer. Their daughters will not marry you, their businesses will distrust you, and if you die they are ever so slightly less perturbed.

Setting aside those two major religions for a moment (and Judaism, because they have no conversion mandate), let us approach the subject from a slightly more grounded standpoint: The State.

States, like religions, define "us" and "them" and value the life of "them" less than the life of "us." It isn't evil, or wrong, necessarily, it's just the way things work. There's no point in forming a State if your objective is to look out for everyone. A state looks out, first and foremost, for its own.

Similarly families look out first for their own family members, friends for friends, schools for their own students.

Why is it that on a small scale we see this sort of classification as "okay" or even "as it should be," yet when applied to a larger world, we see only evil?

I believe that this contradiction is the root of the abortion debate. In our society we generally view all children as "us" and all adults as "them" to some extent. The innocent and helpless should be protected, and anything over the age of eighteen should be able to take care of itself. Even adults that we consider within the "us" group, we also expect to operate as "thems" under certain circumstances. When we give them money, we expect it returned. If they're not family or close friends we might even expect interest.

Where the abortion issue gets into the flames is basically where we start drawing lines in the sand, lines that say where "us" really begins. For Catholics, "us" happens when the sperm and egg meet. For some on the far-left (quite farther than I myself care to go), "us" happens at birth. I personally draw the line, and I think Tiro draws a similar one, roughly around the time the child's brain starts functioning. Some draw it around a specific trimester, others around a specific size. Some, I'm sure, even think masturbation is murder. It is around this classification stage that the greatest contention arises, and not because of a disagreement about when the child feels pain, or when the child becomes human.

It's a disagreement about when the child enters that transient phase where they are "us" until they are older.

Philosophically, then, I can understand why someone might be pro-war, pro-death penalty and a gigantic fan of Ayn Rand, and still be pro-life. War, starvation and the Death Penalty happen to "them," and abortion happens to "us."

I do feel as though something might be wrong with this... but I can't honestly say that I find it in any way inconsistent with normal human decision-making about life and death.

----

You may compare the preceding article to yesterday's kneejerk as a case-study in the difference between sleeping on a matter and rage-posting on a dime. Eventually, I'll get better at catching myself when I'm crafting the latter sort, but until then, they'll happen from time to time.

That said, if you're happy that George Tiller was shot to death in a church (a view I have seen expressed in many forums, blogs and other such anonymous locations), you're still a rat bastard. Also, all of the biases expressed in the former article are probably still somewhere in my head, waiting to pop out the next time I get really mad about something. It's just the way heads work, and I wrote the words, so I own them.

I'm probably going to leave the subject of abortion alone for awhile now, as I don't believe it is an issue that anyone's going to agree on, anytime soon. The futility of beating the dead horse every couple years rather frustrates me.

George Tiller

2009-06-02T03:33:00.002-05:00

I give to you, four stories.

On Sunday last, George Tiller was shot to death in church in Wichita Kansas while handing out pamphlets.

On Sunday last, Doctor George Tiller was shot to death in church in Wichita Kansas while handing out pamphlets.

On Sunday last, Doctor George Tiller was shot to death in church in Wichita Kansas while handing out pamphlets. He leaves a grieving widow.

On Sunday last, Doctor George Tiller, one of the few doctors who, in certain circumstances (imminent danger to the mother, non-viable fetus), would give late-term abortions to women, was shot to death in Wichita Kansas while handing out pamphlets. He leaves a grieving widow.

---

If your opinion of Doctor George Tiller’s murder was significantly altered by the last paragraph, I have a few questions I would like to ask you.

Do you have a yellow ribbon on the back of your car? Did you vote more than once for Bush Junior? Do you own a gun?

If you answer “yes” to any two of these (there being perfectly reasonable explanations for any one of them individually, for instance an earnest belief that yellow ribbons buy Kevlar, not bullets), you are what we call a ‘hypocrite.’ Your rallying cry is “Stop killing babies, we need them to die for our crusade” and you value only human life that is either under the age of one, or Christian. ... pardon me, “Christian that agrees with you totally.” Remember, Tiller was handing out pamphlets in church at the time of his ungodly, untimely death.

You are also a rat bastard, in serious need of self-reflection.

Allow me to explain this to you. You cannot be “pro-life” and “pro-war.” You can’t. You just can’t. You also can’t favor capital punishment. In fact, about the only way you can justifiably be pro-life in the modern world is if you put a flower in your ear, do a lot of acid and lie around in a field somewhere musing about the significance of it all and trying to come up with new, creative poetry about free love.

Actually, most of the people I’ve met who I could see being pro-life without falling into the dangerous web of hypocrisy are either conscientious objectors, hippies, or Buddhists. Are you a conscientious objector, a hippie, or a Buddhist?

If not, you can’t be pro-life. I’m sick of this shit. You can’t cry about baby-killing and then go shoot a doctor to death in a church.

Fuck that shit. And if you’re secretly bouncing with joy about his death...

Well, then fuck you too. I hope you burn in a hell of your own creation.

Trains, Planes and Automobiles

2009-05-15T04:59:00.002-05:00

Traveling by train is a powerful experience for those unused to it. I was unused to it. In the last few days I have seen dreamlands and wildernesses that still the heart. I have seen parts of my country that time itself has forgotten and watched the dawn overtake the stars on a river I grew up on, but apparently never looked at. Not like this.

I have seen barges aglow in the night and townships and villages you couldn't fly to even if you wanted to. I have seen horses in pasture and really looked at them in a way you don't, or can't, from a car. In the comfort of the lounge gallery wherein I write this, I have discoursed with a young man forging his way south to Austin, and with a Wiccan lady who has found all manner of new ways to the divine. I have listened as a young man and woman fell in love. I have watched four old men (old men) playing a game of Munchkin and laughed at jokes I've never heard before, even from Tiro (believe me, that's saying something).

I have traveled, and I have come to the revelation that I have never traveled before. When you are driving, you see nothing but broad expanses of concrete. You pull over where you can and enjoy a hamburger or the world's largest ball of twine, but when you pass a living factory in the night, you cannot simply gaze at it and wonder that such a place exists, where towers of concrete and steel glow golden in the light of a thousand magic stones. You cannot stare openly at the barge tied up, quite literally, to a tree by the side of the river. You pass so near these things but you can never, ever see them.

Twenty-four hours on a train feels like an hour on an airplane, and you don't even have to get molested by security on your way. You can freshen up, walk around, stretch your legs, grab dinner, plug your laptop into a power outlet to charge it, drink leftover beer from last-last night's (amazing) party and chat it up with fellow night-owls in the lounge as the other passengers sleep away the night in the spacious, comfortable, expansive reclining seats of Coach.

You talk to people, too. Plural. People here aren't in a hurry to get where they're going. If they were in a hurry, they'd be flying. A loading dock in the middle of nowhere goes by, workers starting to trickle in already at five thirty in the morning. Cars in the parking lots, men walking, a bridge, conveyor belts still silent, but there is a feeling here that these places are still used, that they do not suffer from the rot and decline of my native city. Would you like to look at my family history tracing back to the dark ages? I have it here, in this binder. Sure, why not. My goodness, you have a lot of bastards in your family tree. Oh, is that what Fitz means? I think we're coming up on the Grassy Knoll. Last time they called it out, but I was in the lavatory, I missed it. Left or right? You watch left, I'll watch right.

We just passed under a vehicle bridge, walled on the sides for safety. The drivers will all be looking straight ahead, desperately wishing they could safely glance out their side windows to enjoy the view. Their view is, at any rate, interrupted abruptly by the wall. It protects them from themselves. It pads the corners of their world so that they do not need to see, and takes their eyes as payment.

I do not envy them the hours they shave off their miserable journeys. They have forgotten that the journey is part of life, and here I sit in exquisite comfort, legs stretched out, fully charged laptop on my lap, Buddy Guy from the weekend's blues playlist flooding my ears, wondering at how easy it was to be reminded. What sacrifices mankind has made for the saved hour... I do not think the hour was worth it.

Mankind doesn't even realize that he's not, in fact, saving it.

If you need to, you can arrive off a train fully refreshed, shaved, in clean clothes, relaxed, having slept pretty darn well and having brushed your teeth in the morning. D pointed out to me, as well, that you arrive downtown. Avail yourself of public transportation and you've saved another 38 bucks in taxi fare and tip. Instead of getting off a plane, crawling into a bed and wasting half a day recovering from jet-lag, you can crawl right out of the sleeper-car (which cost you less than a coach ticket might have on a jet), and into your business meeting. Factor in time saved from security and from the fact that you don't have to check (or subsequently collect) much in the way of luggage (or pay for it), and you've turned one day of miserable airport-hopping into one day of luxurious scenery and relaxation.

And driving? You don't even save all that much time driving to begin with. You arrive tired, with a kink in your back and a foul mood in your gut. You don't get anything done in that time, but you feel like you've been working all week. You save money, probably a bit, but if the trip is over 12 hours or so, you're likely to need to take it in two days, so remember to factor in the 8 hours of (non-moving) sleep per night and the hotel rate, plus gas and toll fares. Add wear and tear into the equation, an oil change, spent tire rubber and the possibility of an accident along the way, and you might start to see where I'm going with this.

So.

When people ask me what I think of the administration's high-speed rail plan and whether it's a gimmick, it's hard to answer them. It isn't so much that there aren't plentiful good reasons why it's not a gimmick, or why it's a good idea in general... Even economically, it's a good idea. It generates productive, useful jobs which will return a net profit to the investors (not move-rock-move-rock-back jobs). It's environmentally advantageous if the rail is built right, and the fuel for the train will come more directly from an electrical grid rather than burned fuel, which means that more transportation can be shifted onto renewable energy sources. It will somewhat reduce our oil consumption and while it may be competition for our airliners, if you hadn't noticed, they're all going out of business anyway, and they're all terrible. Subsidize foreign air travel and let high-speed localized jet travel be cornered by a few smaller companies for all I care.

Honestly though, the major reason I think the high speed rail is a good idea is more ephemeral. Without significantly slowing down the nation, it would give the nation a sense of things slowing down. Business travelers would lose some of the wrinkles around their eyes. Reduced travel costs would improve the melting-pot aspects of our nation, and the increased ability of trains to stop at places airports are more-or-less useless to (D had the excellent suggestion of ultimately setting up two rail systems, one for express travel between large cities and one which stopped along the way) would make a lot of the isolated places in America seem suddenly less remote.

So no, I don't think it's a gimmick. In fact, I think it's one of the best ideas the administration is presently toying with, and I don't think the long-range implications for our future are being fully comprehended yet by the people doing the talking.

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

2009-04-23T12:04:00.002-05:00

“I am not ashamed to confess I am ignorant of what I do not know.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero

You may have noticed Maxwell's comment on my last article, about the shortcomings of making predictions based on rather limited models. This post originally started as a comment addressing some of his points, but after considering it, I think there's a larger idea here that deserves a full post of its own. As always, I leave it to you, our dear readers, to be the final judges.

-------------------------------------------------------

Maxwell,

Your point about altruism is absolutely correct - and somewhat of a sore point between ('experimental') economists and psychologists. The argument, at least, from the rather biased point of view of the economist goes like this:

Economist: "If we model payoffs in X way, and we model actions in Y way, then, we can make prediction Z."

Psychologist: "Well, I tried that, and we don't get Z, we get Z'. Therefore, your theory must be wrong."

Economist: "Actually, you thought you were testing people with payoffs X and actions Y, but you were actually testing people with payoffs X', and actions Y'. If we alter our model, so that it's talking about X' and Y', we do get (at least something much closer to) Z'. In fact, here's an exact measure of Z-Z', and X-X'. So shut up."

Yes, it's a childish-sounding argument. But, unfortunately, this is often what happens when economists pretend to be psychologists and vice versa, and often in any situation where individuals from different backgrounds meet.

You're correct in saying that the Prisoners' Dilemma, when it just takes into account time served, give us 'bad' predictions. But, if instead of time served, we were able to come up with some measure of 'overall value,' that included time served, what type of facility the time was served in, whether you'll get shanked as punishment for snitching, loyalty to your partner, and so on.

In this case, assuming that we've properly included all the relevant costs and benefits, we would be perfectly justified in performing some calculation, and coming to some conclusion based only on the numbers.

Which brings me to the larger idea of this post: understanding what, exactly, economic theory and the assumptions it must always be based on, actually mean.

This goes along with the idea that Maxwell put forth a few months ago: that claims that 'science has been wrong before' are incorrect, and that a proper statement of the claim would be, 'science has made incorrect predictions before.' It's important to understand the difference between process and product, whether in relation to science, economics, government/political systems, or any other complex field of study.

The field of economics, like essentially all modern sciences, is based at least partly in mathematics. Math gives us an incredibly powerful set of tools to work with, and a convenient shorthand for talking about problems, but we have to be able to translate everything we do from 'economics' to 'mathematics' and back again. Thus, while math is one of our chief tools, it is not necessarily the 'basis' of the field, but merely a tool used by it.

Economics is based, then, on an axiom and a definition.

First, we assert that, given a set of options - where this set can be almost anything imaginable - individuals will choose certain of those options. That is, for each individual, given a set of options, there is a set of choices they will make.

Most commonly, we think of this in terms of 'bundles of goods.' When you go to the supermarket, there are 'bundles' such as (+12 eggs, -$1.35), (+1 gallon skim milk, -$1.89), (+nothing, -nothing), and so on. Given these options, which may include things like the time of day, how hungry you are, and anything else that may or may not influence your decisions, you make certain choices.

Secondly, we define 'preferences' as some function that takes in a set of 'options' and spits out a set of 'choices.' Thus, we claim that there is some 'mapping' from (all the possible bundles of goods, which include all the relevant information about everything in the state of the world) to (some subset of that set) that describes how you actually behave, and we call this your 'preferences' (or, your 'preference relation,' and so on).

So that's it. Essentially all of economics consists of some 'model' of the above, which we then use to try and answer some question we consider interesting about the world.

How does this relate to the 'translation' to math mentioned earlier? Well, it turns out that, under certain conditions, we can come up with a mathematical representation of preferences as a a normal mathematical function that takes a bunch of numbers representing an option (X) and gives us a number that, in some sense, tells us 'how much you like X.'

This is, of course, the infamous concept of 'utility' - the idea that, inside each of us, there's a part of our brain that's constantly evaluating our options and plotting them on a line somewhere, and directing us to simply grab the highest one. This has, over the history of the field of economics, led to a number of arguments, much confusion, and conclusions that, while technically correct, are often useless.

The point is that these numbers, our 'utility,' don't really mean anything in any real sense. They are merely a mathematical convention, a container that we must put our ideas in before we can use the tools provided by mathematics. Of course, once we 'do math,' we have to translate the results back into 'economics' - unpacking the container, if you will.

Let's return to the argument between the Economist and the Psychologist again. The economist, in his model, says that if individuals have actions X, and preferences Y, and the 'game' they play is set up according to a set of rules, G, then we should see them do Z. Often, these games are designed to be like the Prisoners' Dilemma - we actually try to find places where, given a model that seems reasonable, the conclusions we come to don't match what we see in the real world. From this, we find ways to change and grow our models: is there a problem with what we included in X, Y or G? Is there something about the way we're coming up with Z that's wrong? Are we actually seeing Z, but not recognizing it, because we were expecting it in a different shape/form?

This type of thinking leads us to be able to say more useful things then just, 'The model (X, Y, G, Z) is wrong.' One way to do this is to ask, 'how wrong is the model?' If we can come up with a rule for saying when it's 'really wrong' versus when it's 'not too wrong,' we might be able to figure out where the problems are. Maybe Z is very different from Z', but it turns out if we change X a little bit, we get something very close to Z'.

Which is, essentially, what the Economist and Psychologist are arguing about. The Psychologist says, "Well, there's obviously something wrong here," and the Economist responds, "Yeah, I noticed. Here, tweak this knob, and see if it works."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

To wrap up, it's important to understand that there's a difference between process and product. The prediction that 'people will all throw litter on the ground' is correct, if we've set up our model properly. The concepts that this conclusion is based on are axiomatic - they are essentially true by definition. The fact that the prediction differs from reality is important - it's crucial, in fact, if we ever want to be able to say anything 'useful' in the sense of answering interesting questions about the world.

- Tiro

PS - My apologies to Maxwell - I really don't mean to sound like I'm disagreeing with you, or disregarding the issues you mentioned. You're absolutely right!

Room for Debate

2009-04-21T00:21:00.002-05:00

There are secret places on the internet that no one is watching. They are places where children romp and grownups stomp, and the seeds of a thousand villainies are laid and hatched.

For the most part they are designed to avoid confrontations of an undesirable nature, for their inventors and designers and tenders find confrontation does not profit them. Some of them are even moderated privately or safeguarded with filters.

Nonetheless, in these rooms I have uncovered politics and lives beyond my pale. I have discussed taxes with middle-easterners and tariffs with Serbians. Law-enforcement with Swedes. I have asked South Africans how the ANC is doing and received politically incorrect answers for which there will be no penalties.

After all, no one is watching these places. No one thinks they have value, or imagines them dangerous.

These places are “games.”

The effect is most pronounced in a game in which I have immersed myself more recently, EVE Online. I won’t waste your time with the mechanics of the game itself, but the game has only one server, and that server hosts people from just about everywhere. We don’t all speak the same language, and sometimes we don’t even use the same alphabet on our keyboards. We collide in channels and clusters and local spaces where we trade words, curses, philosophies and politics with a freedom even the founding fathers would have found daunting.

I have trafficked in these spaces (in dozens of games) with politicians, businessmen, physicists, political scientists and laborers, students, professors, teachers of music, artists and all manner of other men who have found their way to these spaces from places so far from my understanding it begs questions of the consistency of space-time.

I have argued with religious men, with atheists, with priests and with paupers, with the young and with the old.

If I were inclined to be a censor, I would encourage the government to take an active interest in those spaces it is presently ignoring. But I am not, and (fortunately) no government agency is going to be easily persuaded to take these spaces seriously. So instead, this rather takes the form of an invitation to those of you inclined to such things, to search these spaces out with an open mind and a bone to pick.

‘Games’ have come a long way while you were sleeping.

Wake up.

Putting Down the Lighters (Again)

2009-04-15T09:19:00.002-05:00

"Certain signs precede certain events." - Marcus Tullius Cicero

First, I must apologize to Maxwell -- I don't mean to pick on his post about burning our wallets again, but the events of the day have turned my mind back to the subject of money, its value, and some of the more interesting ramifications thereof.

I am speaking, of course, of the new report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which can be found here.

In short, March's inflation rate (as determined by the Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers - the "CPI-U"), when adjusted for seasonality, was negative. Granted, the change in the CPI-U was small - only -0.1 percent - but let us examine the reasons behind the change.

The report indicates that most of this drop came from the decline in energy prices - particularly fuel oil, natural gas, and motor fuel - which led to a 3 percent drop in the energy index. The food, housing, apparel, and transportation indices also showed a drop, although transportation was the only one of these which posted a change of more than 1 percent.

When removing food and energy from the CPI, though, we see a slight positive change of 0.2 percent -- over sixty percent of which, according to the report, comes from an 11 percent increase in the index for tobacco and smoking products.

So, why should we care about this? In short, this is exactly what I was talking about the other day. For people like myself, who are in relatively secure jobs, with a relatively low, essentially fixed income, the deflation that is occurring in some areas of the economy - particularly for food and fuel - is beneficial. I mean, we're getting to the point at which storing your money in your mattress is almost becoming a profitable investment.

So why is deflation often seen as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse? I had no clear idea myself until I began researching the subject a few weeks ago, and the answer is one of those things that seems so obvious in retrospect. In the simplest terms, the answer is 'loans.'

In short, anyone who has borrowed money in the past, with the requirement of paying it back tomorrow, suffers during periods of deflation. As the 'value of money' (for those of you who care, I mean, the price of money in terms of real goods) increases, the 'cost' of paying back that debt increases. A loan which would have originally cost 'one 24" flat screen TV,' or 'one additional R&D scientist' to pay back may now cost 'one 42" flat screen TV,' or 'two additional R&D scientists.'

-----------------------------------------------------------------

But how does this relate to the original issue, that of burning our wallets? Well, Maxwell's argument has a definite place, and there is often value to controlling inflation by, essentially, destroying currency (or otherwise keeping its supply limited). The problem with this is that the destruction of currency is an example of what is known as the 'Prisoners' Dilemma' in economics.

Two men are captured by the police, who have only limited, circumstantial evidence against both of them. Both are offered the option of confessing, and turning on their accomplice. If neither confesses, they serve a year in a minimum security facility, and if both confess, they both serve three years in a minimum security facility. If only one confesses, however, he gets off with only probation, while his partner receives 5 years of jail time.

Thus, the best overall outcome, from the perspective of the prisoners, occurs when no one confesses, and the worst occurs when they both confess. The problem, though, is that if the two cannot coordinate somehow - and more importantly, if they cannot commit themselves to some strategy - it is in each man's interest to confess, regardless of the other's actions, and thus we expect them to end up serving three years each.

This situation - in which individuals have a strong incentive to a way contrary to the 'greater good' - can be seen in countless everyday examples: US bank runs, prior to the establishment of the FDIC; arms races between enemy powers; people throwing trash on the ground, rather than in trash cans.

The last is a particularly interesting example, because it goes against our intuition. How many of us, when trying to get away with something like this, have been asked (perhaps by a parent), "What would happen if everyone did that?" The answer, of course, is that the place would be a mess, and thus we shouldn't litter. But the problem is that it doesn't matter -- regardless of whether everyone else does it or not, it's still in our best interest to take the easy way out.

Of course, this doesn't always happen, because we've found ways of dealing with these problems. Often, government is the solution - we force everyone to contribute, by way of taxes, and then hire others to take the costly actions for us, and we all end up better off. Social conventions, guilt, and other 'punishment mechanisms' also may serve this role.

But to get back to the subject at hand, we have one of those exact situations with the issue Maxwell describes. If inflation is destroying the value of the money we all hold, we will end up being better off - in some sense - if we can remove some of the currency from circulation. The problem with this is that, regardless of whether others burn their money or not, as long as my money isn't completely worthless, there is a strong incentive for me to hold on to it.

Of course, there's always the possibility that Maxwell had all this in mind when writing his earlier post, and that the entire article was simply an 'investment' of sorts....

- Tiro

Somalian Pirates

2009-04-12T17:42:00.002-05:00

I feel obliged to thank the Somalian pirates who, in failing to steal, failing to kill, and failing to dodge gave us all a reason to feel good on Easter. Congratulations are in order to the captain, his family, the (badass) crew of his ship, and lastly-not-least to the Navy SEALs who waxed the bad guys.

/salute

That said I think it wise to remember that the pirates in question were desperate, poverty-stricken fishermen who, in the unlikely event of success, call their captured target in to a central hub of 'real' pirates who move the stolen property. Thus, in the usual noncommittal manner of The Report, I shall follow my congratulations to the soldiers and crew for the slaying of the pirates by suggesting a moment of prayer (to whatever god you claim) for the families of the fishermen who died this day.

Sometimes I wish issues existed which had only one side... but I suppose if they did we wouldn't learn much from them.

Rhetoric, Revisited

2009-04-10T06:52:00.004-05:00

I have recently found myself browsing ZDnet forums for information about the conficker worm, which I anticipate needing to remove from a number of friends’ computers in the coming weeks. Normally, I contain myself to reading the actual articles, but for some reason I found myself reading an article about the most recent chain of Windows commercials, and my eye was drawn beneath it to the spam of comments from what shall, henceforth, be referred to as “Mactards,” “Wintards” and “Linux fanboys.” Effectively the argument (copied out a thousand times in a thousand languages) always goes one way:

Wintard: “Macs suck.”
Mactard: “What? Windows has viruses!”
Wintard: “Macs cost too much.”
Mactard: “That’s because they’re better.”
While (x <= Num_tards) {
Wintard: “No they’re not.”
Mactard: “Yes they are.”
x++;
}
Wintard: “You don’t have games.”
Mactard: “I’m too cool to play games.”
Linux Fanboy: “Linux is free and it has no viruses.”
Mactard + Wintard: “shut up, fanboy, you’ve only got like 5% of the market share.”

(If the Mactard starts it, simply ignore line 1)

Normally I would ignore this redundant spam altogether and hunt for meaty meaningful and/or original tardspam, but I had, at this particular time, recently been browsing political forums, and I discovered something interesting.

The rhetoric is identical.

Democrat: “Republicans suck.”
Republican: “Republicans are stronger on national security.”
Democrat: “Yeah, but they’re fat bastards.”
Republican: “That’s because they’re smarter and more successful than your dumb ass.”
While (x <= Num_tards) {
Democrat: “No they’re not.”
Republican: “Yes they are.”
x++;
}
Democrat: “You have no domestic policy.”
Republican: “Good thing we have all the launch codes.”
Democrat: “Wait, what?”
Lin... err... Libertarian: “If everyone voted Libertarian you wouldn’t have these problems.”
Democrat + Republican: “Shut up. You’ve only got like 5% of the voting base.”

Now this is, of course, a gross oversimplification of what I’m sure is a very complex set of issues, but given that none of the Detards, Retards, and Libertardians making said arguments actually understand any of the issues they’re arguing about, it strikes me that really, it might be simpler if everyone just shut up.

Now, in the name of hypocrisy:

The present administration just upheld the Bush reinvigoration of that “government secrets” bullshit. Essentially the way it works is, government misconduct is a “government secret” and therefore inadmissable in court. In other words, evidence that the government has been behaving badly is actually, by virtue of being evidence the government has been behaving badly, inadmissable in court.

Detard, retard, Libertardian, whatever, you have to admit that checks and balances are probably a good thing... them being the single most essential component of our governing system.

Stop shouting at each other for a minute and start fucking paying attention. We have a new administration, but that doesn’t mean we can stop breathing down its neck. Quite the opposite. We’re still going to hell in a handbasket, and even after that fall has been aborted, it is ultimately the responsibility of the American people to ensure that they do not lose the rights with which they have been endowed.

And if the government doesn’t want judicial review of its actions, fine. So be it. We’ll review its actions with more straightforward, “traditional” methodology.

(There is, actually, another option - that the new administration not breaking with the old indicates that whatever secret is buried is so dirty that they can't bring it out in the light even to pin it on their political enemies.

But I'd rather not contemplate that one.)

Welcome to our Newest Author

2009-04-03T20:06:00.003-05:00

I'll adjust this placeholder once he picks a pseudonym so I can refer to him "by name," but the long and short of it is that our newest author has for his credentials a masters in political science, a perspective I believe will be a nice addition to our literature. I'm not in the habit of giving out much information about authors who write on this site (if any), but suffice to say that comes with my recommendation and regard.

Those of you who know me personally probably realize that "comes with my recommendation and regard" means 90% of the human race is about to be mortally offended.

If any of said human race would like to bring arguments to bear against his article, which is deliciously confrontational, we will, of course, welcome said arguments to The Report. May they live long and prosper.

His first posting will be soon.

Carry on.

Worship

2009-04-01T17:15:00.005-05:00

I am not an atheist. Quantum physics has given me a notion of God so large and so small that it works for me, as long as I don’t try to give that entity any particular attributes or humanize it for my own convenience.

I worship this God through my interest in the world around me. The structure of life, the mechanics of waves and particles and all the weird things electrons can do that they shouldn’t be able to do, all these things and more make up my bible. I believe that God’s nature can be understood only through understanding the nature of his universe.

I make no assumption that God created man, through evolution or otherwise, but we have come to pass in his universe and we thrive in the passing of his time, whatever time itself may be made of. We find ourselves surrounded by puzzles and toys and interesting things to see and do and discover, and in seeing and doing and discovering these things we pay homage to their creator.

So why, oh why, do the people who most claim to love god least seem to worship the universe he created? Why do they bury their heads in the sand and refuse to use the reason with which they were endowed? Why?

Why Texas? Why?

I cannot understand. Is the problem that evolution makes you feel humbler than you’d like? Aren’t you supposed to be humble? Did your god not specifically instruct you to view pride as a sin?

Is it so impossible that we, who must be to God as a pebble is to a mountain, might share a common ancestor with an ape? The new testament has freed you from the bonds of your infancy. Your bond with God is now a spiritual one, instead of a physical one, and your punishments do not come in the form of lost sheep and slain children. You wear what you like and come home whenever you so choose, because your father has said “you are an adult now, you can live as you like, and I will approve and disapprove from a greater distance.” Why is it so difficult for you to conceptualize that God might also have meant that you were free to give up childhood stories like the Stork and Santa?

When we are young, our parents lie to us because we cannot understand the truth, are unprepared for the truth, or the truth would hurt us. They tell us that the stork brings babies so they can avoid teaching us about sex until we are old enough to learn about it safely. They tell us that Santa brings toys so that we’ll go to bed early on Christmas Eve and let them lie down together on the sofa and hold each other like they did before we were born. They tell us not to touch the wall socket “because I said so” and not to climb that tree “because you’ll hurt yourself.”

Why should your experience with God the father be different? You are free to explore the universe in which you have been born. You are big enough now, and smart enough now, to know the risks behind the things you do. Wall sockets will hurt you because electricity will travel from them through your body and cause your brain to be unable to communicate with your muscles. With surprising slowness, you might die. Babies happen when a boy and a girl have sex, and in addition to this risk there are associated other risks of which you should be made aware. Both kinds of risks can be mitigated through the proper use of a condom. Leave some air at the tip to ensure it doesn’t break when you finish. Santa doesn’t bring toys, we do, and this year we’re very low on money so the toys are going to be simpler... it doesn’t mean you’ve been bad, it just means we’re on rough times at the moment.

The garden of Eden is your stork story. Evolution is your sex-education and the petri-dish antibiotics experiment (the one that shows you why it’s so important to finish all the medicine the doctor gives you) is your explanation of the proper uses of a condom.

It’s time to grow up.

And I’m not just talking to Texas when I say that.

Would the real Democratic Party please stand up?

2009-03-31T02:00:00.004-05:00

"As Congress prepares for a crucial vote on President Obama's budget this Thursday, Republican leaders have been plotting an all-out effort to block it without offering a single specific idea of their own. But we can't allow them to obstruct progress with hollow rhetoric.

Watch this video and donate $5 or more to help us air an ad exposing the GOP's petty politics before Thursday's important vote:"

I did some work for the Obama campaign during the last election and, as a consequence, I am treated to lovely personalized spam in my Inbox from the Democratic National Committee, a group which seems to be suffering from the delusion that the last election was a vote for the Democratic party, which it most emphatically was not. In general, I ignore it (the irony pains me and the begging annoys me), shuffle it into my spam folder or read through it for a good laugh... but today the email caught me in a particularly philosophical mood, and so it made me think.

There is a peculiarity of our government that really does not make any sense. We vote for individuals, who build administrations, which either control, or are controlled by (depending on the potency of the individuals involved) a political party. Effectively we have two of these parties, ignoring the various fringe groups that muddy up the works either strategically (to draw attention to specific issues) or egotistically (Nader). These parties are the Democrats and the Republicans, and they have taken for their respective symbols a loud, stubborn, relatively inexpensive pack animal (you get what you pay for) and a fat, plodding machine that scares every other form of life away from the water hole and turns perfectly good plant matter into poop and Ivory, in order of quantity.

Setting aside the obvious parallels between their symbols and their general party lines, it is generally agreed that both parties are mostly useless, most of the time. Their hands tend to be tied by bureaucratic nonsense and their ability to change the status quo is as limited as their understanding of the forces that drive our universe. This is, of course, why the American system is so stable. For the most part you're guaranteed that things will work pretty much the way they worked last year, because the amount of red tape, ass-kissing and bribery involved in getting that semicolon in paragraph 457 changed to a dash is so monumental that you generally have about five years to prepare for whatever difference that will make in your life.

Generally, it won't make much.

This is fortunate, because when that semicolon is changed to a dash, it is generally presumed that anyone to whom that paragraph pertains will go to their local library, look up a copy of the paragraph in question that is less than 5 weeks old, double-check to make sure the semicolon has not, yet, been changed to a dash, and act accordingly when implementing whatever action (or inaction) the paragraph pertains to. This, of course, does not happen.

In reality, people generally ignore the entire body of the law, assuming that if a law exists that will screw them, the amount of time involved in toeing the line, combined with the effort invested in toeing the line, exceeds the value returned for the investment. Furthermore, it is generally impossible to accomplish anything legally, because American law is precedent-based and consequently contradicts itself rather prolifically. Laws vary state by state, even on big, obvious matters like murder, rape, arson and felony theft.

For the most part, people find that if they ignore the law, the law does them the kindness of ignoring them back, and while periodically you'll run into the bad neighbor who tickets your friends for violating the "resident parking only" areas, or calls the cops because your cocktail party has gotten too rowdy, you can pretty much safely assume that you won't be jailed for a bar-fight and your average ticket-price for ignoring all parking meters will not exceed the total price you would have paid into the meters you ignored.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that government in America is good government precisely because it is so messy, so thick and so convoluted that you basically have to rob a bank to get a monkey on your back. The inefficiency of our government protects us, and prevents people from doing stupid things when the opportunity presents itself (Though Texas may soon prove me wrong on that count). In fairness I should note that recently, someone did rob a bank in St. Louis and so far, no monkeys have been seen riding him around.

When we vote for an individual for the role of president, however, we are effectively voting for someone to fill the only job perceived as one capable of "getting something done," and we must consider a few different matters... matters which weighed heavily in my decision to work for, and vote for, Obama.

1. Is this person capable of forming complete sentences?
-This is more important than people give it credit for. If your president is an idiot, it is generally presumed that your entire nation is an idiot, and diplomacy proceeds accordingly.
2. Does this person surround himself with people smarter than he is, or dumber?
-This is the most important thing to consider. A president is only as good as his administration, and he must demonstrate the ability to surround himself with independent thinkers. His administration should be the best of the best, whether the best agrees with him or not.
3. Does this person control his party, or does his party control him?

It is the subject of number 3 that I would like to dwell on. The chief reason I voted for Obama was that I noticed that he took control of his political party and caused it to act in a more intelligent way than it otherwise might have. However, the party was only incidental in that equation. It was a tool by which I established the quality of the man and his likely effect upon our government as a whole. The Democratic party (like the Republican party) is not an entity in which I would willingly place my trust.

The email spam is becoming bothersome.

The tone of these emails during the election was to be expected. The propaganda, the annoying turns of phrase and the anger-inducing injections of my name into every godforsaken motherfucking sentence (I can see the board meeting now... "Hey guys, I just discovered scripting! Let's beat the idea to death and then turn the remains into glue!"). I understood the rhetoric and the need for it. It was all part of the game.

The game is over. We won the game. All this rhetorical shit about our opponents' rhetoric is needless, counterproductive, and aggravating. I understand that the Democratic party wishes to milk their boy's good name for every dollar they can before his honeymoon is over (not that he got much of one of those), but I would greatly appreciate it if they could prioritize just enough to understand that there are larger issues to take care of right now, issues that can only be solved as a nation, not as a bunch of bickering idiots with delusions of grandeur who've come to believe their own propaganda.

So let me make this simple (albeit it may be too late for that). The Republicans (or Democrats, respectively) are not your enemy. Everyone wants the economic crisis to end and while the guy you're arguing with might not be right his heart is probably in the right place, so maybe you should try explaining why he's wrong instead of punching him in the nose and calling his arguments "rhetoric." If you can't explain to him why he's wrong, then either he's right or you shouldn't be the one arguing with him anyway, and should find him someone to argue against who is better informed.

We've had quite enough of this shit from both sides of the isle, thank you very much. I don't think the "change" we were looking for was a change of color from red to blue.

Geithner as Head Pretzel-Vendor

2009-03-24T19:22:00.002-05:00

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." - Marcus Tullius Cicero

Maxwell and I were discussing the current state of affairs in the world, and Maxwell was trying to trying to reconcile a 'debt-consolidation' metaphor he had constructed with the latest act in The Fall of the House of Geithner, and he asked for my take on things. I really tried to avoid doing the requisite blog-post-about-the-financial-crisis, but it seems to have been unavoidable. The following, with some minor cleaning up, are my thoughts on the subject.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Eh, the initial 'bailout' was more like lending your brother money so he can buy gas to go to work, since he's short on cash at the moment. Obviously, if he can't get to work, he can't make any money, so you give him the cash, and hope he pays you back.

But, since you don't actually have the cash on hand (or rather, you do have the cash, but you already have a bunch of loans outstanding to your neighbors (i.e. China, among others), you basically take out another loan so you've still got 'enough' cash on hand. Keep in mind that, in many situations, this actually makes sense (that is, it's not quite as insane as it seems). If your brother is going to pay you back $10 (i.e. a %200 return on your investment, before adjusting for the fact that it'll take some time to get the $10), then it make sense if your neighbors are only charging you, say, %5 interest.

What's going on now, and what was proposed originally, is that your brother bought a bunch of... um... Pretzel Wagon franchises. He thought the franchises would be making him lots of money, and that he'd eventually be able to sell them, but now, because he apparently misjudged how many pretzels people can afford, the franchises are worth a lot less.

Of course, the phrase "worth a lot less" is not really true. What it means is that the franchises are making a lot less money, but your brother is claiming they're still worth, say, $100 each. He's trying to sell them, but everyone else seems to think they're worth $30, so he doesn't want to sell them. Likewise, he doesn't want to admit that they're only worth $30 ('worth X' here meaning, 'people in the market are willing to pay X for them').

Of course, the whole thing is made worse by the fact that, because your brother is worried, he's not opening new franchises, and therefore not hiring people in town, and so people in town have, on average, even less money to spend on pretzels.

So, what do you do? Well, Geithner, as well as a number of other apparently intelligent people, have decided that we're going to hold a garage sale. But not just any garage sale. Here's what we do:

You tell people that you're selling your brother's franchises (at least, the ones that aren't doing well), but that you'll loan them most of the money to buy them. So, say Bob decides that one such franchise is worth $50, but he doesn't have that kind of cash on hand. "That's ok!" you say, and lend him $44, on pretty good terms. What's more, you agree to basically agree to cover half the remaining amount, and give him $6 more, in exchange for a partial ownership in the franchise. The end result is that he ends up putting up about $6 for something (apparently) worth $50.

But this isn't as crazy as it seems -- well, not quite as crazy. First, it assumes that your brother will be ok, once he sells off the bad franchises. Of course, this plan does nothing to address the fact that your brother is apparently an idiot, or at least, managed to a make a LOT of bad calls, all at once. Second, if the $50 purchase price is 'about right' -- that is, if the Pretzel Wagon ends up making about the same amount of money as $50 spent somewhere else, say, on a Mrs. Field's franchise, would have -- then things are pretty much okay. Bob will eventually pay back the loan and you'll get repaid, plus, because of that $3 you put up, you'll end up getting a cut of the profits. Of course, if the thing fails, and Bob never pays you back, or if the franchise ended up only being worth, say, $30, then you're pretty much screwed. Bob's not too upset, especially if he manages to get out of paying back the loan, since he only lost about $3. You, on the other hand, have lost $47. And your brother, who managed to sell off a worthless piece of junk for $50, is loving the whole setup. Stupid freeloader.

Of course, there's always the opposite possibility, where the thing ends up being worth $200, in which case Bob and you are both thrilled, and, in the end, your brother isn't too upset, since he needed cash at the time, and he's just happy to be rid of the whole mess.

And, throughout all of this, your neighbors (China, et al.), are wondering if you've completely lost your mind, or if there's actually something sensible, in an odd, twisted way, about your relationship with your brother. Of course, they'll keep lending you money throughout the whole thing; you may be paying it off for the rest of your life, but they know you'll pay it off. Plus, who's gonna buy the crap at their craft store, if you and your brother are bankrupt?

-- Tiro

Put Down Your Lighters

2009-03-23T23:59:00.000-05:00

"I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money! Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors." - Cicero

Now hold one just a minute.

It is just me, or do other people get the sense that they've had to spend a larger share of their time talking others down from various extremist positions lately?

The concept of money is one of those deliciously complex ideas, which seems so simple at first; the fact that we use it everyday, the fact that it is so familiar, makes us forget what, exactly, we're talking about most of the time. The 'undergraduate explanation,' to borrow a phrase from one of my colleagues, is that money serves three purposes: 1) as a medium of exchange, 2) as a store of value, and 3) as a unit of account.

In other words, farmers use money because it's easier to trade dollars for haircuts than radishes, and because dollars don't go bad, unlike radishes, and because it's easier to tell others how productive your farm is in dollars, rather than in radishes.

There are, of course, other philosophical motivations for money. One of my personal favorites has always been Ayn Rand's, in Atlas Shrugged:

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. ... Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor -- your claim upon the energy of men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money."

Of course, I do take issue with some of Rand's claims (that of a gold standard, mainly), but general point is still valid: we hold money because we believe other people will hold it as well; money has value for me, today, because it has value for others today, and tomorrow as well.

But back to the point at hand -- burning our wallets.

Maxwell brings up an important problem, one that was especially common back in the days of gold-(and other 'scarce resources)-backed currencies. The easiest way to think of it is this:

A country has a fixed amount of resources at any given time(i.e. 'stuff'), and some production technology (i.e. means to make more 'stuff') which allows for unbounded growth (i.e. over time, the amount of 'stuff' keeps going up). If the country has a fixed amount of money, each unit will become worth more over time. On the other hand, if the amount of 'stuff' goes down drastically - or if the quantity of money available drastically increases - then each unit becomes worth less.

This, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a problem. One example of this is Milton Friedman's concept of a 'helicopter drop' -- if the government were to simply give everyone more money, nothing would change, in relative terms. The price of a loaf of bread might double, but, if your salary (and the price of milk, eggs, haircuts, etc.) doubles as well, it doesn't matter.

The problem Maxwell mentions, with the candy, is an artifact of the discrete world we live in - things like indivisible units, transaction costs, and so on. Of course, there are cases in which this doesn't matter: the other major form of currency we use is electronic currency, which, theoretically, can be divided as much as we want. And, in other cases, there may be other issues: recently, there's been much discussion about retiring the penny from use in the US, with supporters claiming that the cost of producing and using the coins far outweighs the cost of potential issues (like those described above!).

Which brings us, again, back to the original point -- burning out wallets.

If there was ever a time to burn our wallets, this is most definitely NOT the time to do it. If anything, the value of the cash in your wallet may actually be going up, given current circumstances.

The concept of inflation is relatively well-known to most of us - the idea that money, over time, becomes less valuable. Intuitively, the 'inflation rate' is the rate of interest you'd have to be getting on your money for it to maintain its value over time. Usually, this is calculated using what is known as the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. The CPI is a measure of how much a 'standard bundle of goods' costs, in dollars, at some time. So, since the CPI in January of 1991 was 134.6, and in February was 134.8, we know that things 'cost more,' in a very specific, quantitative way.

So, why is this interesting right now? According to most measures, we're in a period of deflation at the moment.

In 2008, the CPI slowly crept up, from 211.080 in January, to a high of 219.964 in July. But then it began to fall, dropping to 215.303 in December. The CPI went up from January to February, but February's numbers were still a good deal lower than the peak last July, coming in at 212.193.

Now, I'm not predicting that this trend will continue, and that in a few months, $5 will buy you a new car, but I think it's safe to say that it's not quite time to reach for the lighter yet...

- Marcus Tulius Tiro
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A side note: I meant to talk about more current events, and some of the other reasons (and there are many) that we shouldn't be burning our wallets (but why it might still be a good idea for Maxwell to be telling you all to do so), but I managed to get a bit off track. Hopefully, this means I'll be posting again soon!

Wisdom 11-20

2009-03-23T12:43:00.002-05:00

11. Overkill works.

12. Never share a cockpit with someone braver than you are.

13. If everything is going according to plan, start looking for the ambush.

14. No plan survives the first contact with reality.

15. The fuse is always shorter than you think.

16. Teamwork gives the enemy someone else to shoot at.

17. The enemy diversion you are ignoring is the main attack.

18. The shortest distance between two points is always a trap.

19. Your greatest regrets will be the things you did not do.

20. Most of the things you regret not doing would have killed you or ruined your life.

Wisdom, 1-10

2009-03-21T06:06:00.003-05:00

Because everyone needs a dose.

1. Fly only what you can afford to lose.

2. If a fight is fair, someone did not plan well enough.

3. If you are going nowhere, be sure to travel in good company.

4. Do what you will, death will do as it wishes.

5. Truth is often sad, but there is much fun to be had in making light of it.

6. Few things are more dangerous than an incomplete education.

7. No education is ever complete.

8. Make few rules. Enforce all of them.

9. You can either learn to win, or learn not to lose. These paths lead to entirely different life experiences.

10. With enough guns, you can destroy the universe, but they will not rebuild it for you.

Burn it All

2009-02-22T11:39:00.003-06:00

Our government is about to print more money. In times of economic boom, this is done as an intentional devaluation of the currency so that it can be used more effectively in the economy - in other words, when the penny is too valuable to be spent on a piece of candy, something needs adjustment because the currency for buying pieces of candy individually does not exist. There was a time in Britain when golden guineas were so scarce that they were hoarded by the nobility and by rich merchants for foreign trade... also Britain's peasants at times fell back on something resembling a barter economy for lack of silver pennies (one of the reasons governments switched from precious metals to paper/faux coinage was so that the government could control the money supply and use it to represent wealth like sheep’s wool and wheat).

This is not an economic boom. In times of economic downturn, recession, or (as I am beginning to suspect this will be) depression, printing more money is a way for the government to pay government workers. The hope is that no one will notice the devaluation of the currency until it is too late, allowing the government a few years of peace and quiet in which to shuffle blame around and decide which hee-hawing asses are going to take the fall for everything.

So this is a call to all Americans who can afford the losses:

Please burn your money.

Technically the government is burning your money as we speak, so you’re not actually losing anything. You have been robbed already, and burning money only serves to create a realistic image of how much money you actually have.

If enough Americans go out back and burn money, maybe we can avoid the currency collapse that struck China so many years ago. Its government devalued the currency so fast and hard that people were paid in wheelbarrows full of bills (incidentally I am not using hyperbole here) that weren’t worth anything by noon the next day. Maybe we can avoid starving to death in the streets, and war with all the nations who refuse to allow us to settle our bills with the unstable dollar and demand that we barter off the homeland instead.

Trust me... we do not want war with China. Not now, and probably not ever. War these days does not mean what it used to mean. The weapons are too mean, too unscrupulous and too destructive. War between superpowers in the old world meant millions of dead soldiers and cities burned to the ground. They accomplished this with gunpowder and napalm and bullets.

Today, we have missiles that can reach orbit.

We have nuclear weapons hundreds of times more destructive than the horrors that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (any one of these monsters would vaporize all of Manhattan instantaneously, then carry on gallantly into New York State). China has these toys, just like we do, and the question you need to ask yourself is this:

Is China the evil (or amoral) giant or a state of great conscience?

Let us evaluate the options. If China is evil or amoral, they will use nuclear weapons in a war with America. War with them would result in the devastation both of China and of the U.S.. No one would win, and (honestly) no one would probably survive, including you.

If China is a state of great conscience, war with them is not morally justified, and we would be (in actuality) the “bad guys.” History would write us in as the guys that couldn’t pay off our debts and solved the problem by going to war. We would be France! The very fact that I am, this day, mocking France for improper banking practices hundreds of years ago is evidence that you never recover from that kind of idiocy. That doesn’t jive well with me.

So we do not want war. We just don’t.

If we do not want war, we want our creditors to think we can pay them back with money. Which means our money must be worth something, which means we need to stop printing more of it.

Money, like anything else, is prone to supply and demand. If there is more supply, the money is worth less. If there is less supply, the money is worth more. Money must be worth little enough to buy candy, but enough to buy F-14s and nuclear submarines. Right now, the dollar still has value. I can go to Ecuador, pay a Taxi three dollars to take me cross-town and get a huge gourmet lunch for a buck fifty more. Then I can crash at a hostel for six dollars and get breakfast in the deal.

Keep your eye on exchange rates. Right now, Pounds are selling for about 1.1 dollars and Euros for about 1.25 dollars. This is an improvement, mind you, over where we were recently, but this has less to do with improvement at home and more to do with economic collapse in the world outside. The bubble is bursting everywhere.

If the government persists in printing money, then we who can afford it must counter the effect. Consider it a donation of sorts - the printed money is being paid in to repair broken roads and do other such useful stuff, and it is feeding the families of American poor. Every dollar you burn makes their money worth more.

If all of us burn even just a dollar, it will help. Given how little a dollar will be worth soon, that's nothing.

Burn it.

Burn it all.

[Alausi will continue when I've finished the salvage-work on the relevant photographs]

On Free Trade and Reasoned Debate

2009-02-18T10:32:00.002-06:00

"Men decide far more problems by gate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute." - Cicero

Recently, an article appeared on the New York Times blog Room for Debate with the title "That 'Buy American' Provision." For those not familiar with the blog, the idea is to give a range of viewpoints on issues and topics currently in the news, via an introduction and a collection of short (~5 paragraph) statements by various guest authors.

In "That 'Buy American' Provision," the subject was the section of the recently passed stimulus package which essentially requires government funded projects to use US-made steel, rather than foreign-made steel, even where domestic materials are more expensive. The guest writers included 5 economists, a union official, a historian, and a US Senator, Sherrod Brown. The article can be found here.

Upon reading Senator Brown's piece, I felt that a response of some kind was necessary. The Senator, an ardent critic of unrestrained free trade and a proponent of 'fair trade,' constructed an argument for the provision that was, in my humble opinion, essentially hand-waving and demagogic. The following is a letter I sent to his office, and I'll post his reply, if I receive one (and no, the actual letter was not signed using my pen name).

-- Marcus Tullius Tiro

--------------------------------------------------------

Senator Brown,

After reading your comments in the article "That 'Buy American' Provision" (February 11, 2009) on the New York Times website, I must say that I'm disappointed, and more than a little offended. In an impressive display of irony, you took an opportunity for honest discussion of an important issue and sunk to name-calling and making sarcastic comments - on a blog entitled 'Room for Debate.'

You're right in saying that "some Ivy League economists don't like" protectionist trade policies, such as favoring domestic suppliers. But you fail to mention that, by and large, most economists agree with the basic theory of free trade, such as David Ricardo's original assertion that free trade allows countries to mutually prosper via the existence of comparative advantages. You may claim that the theory fails to take into account many of the complexities of the modern economy, or that existing trade agreements fail to guarantee standards of environmental stewardship, or that the effect of 'creative destruction,' which is a natural outgrowth of free trade, should factor more significantly into the discussion on trade policy -- but you do none of these things, and instead offer a snide dismissal of those who disagree as 'elitists.'

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this exactly the kind of attitude that was supposedly rejected by the American public in our last round of elections? The dismissal of the expert opinions of people who have devoted their lives to studying this issue based on the fact that they are experts is bordering on the absurd! Of course, one can always add that there are many highly respected economists and other experts who support the concept of free trade who, unlike yourself, are not Ivy League alumni.

Contrary to what your claim about these 'elitists,' many of them are exactly the people whose jobs are threatened by free trade policies. In my doctoral program, the vast majority of my colleagues are not US citizens; rather they are foreigners who came to this country in search of educational and academic opportunity. When I enter the job market, many of my competitors will be Americans, but many others will be American-educated foreigners, here by virtue of our policies on the free flow of intellectual capital.

Ignoring, for a moment, your dismissal of "some Ivy League economists," the point that there may be lessons to be learned from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and its impact on the Great Depression is a valid one. Although the actual impact of Smoot-Hawley is still debated today, history shows us that retaliation from our trading partners is a real threat to be mindful of, especially when our country is economically weakened.

If you'd permit me, I'd like to submit another claim to the people of Ohio for 'straight face test': the act of subsidizing domestic producers at the expense of foreign producers, by explicitly favoring them in government spending bills, is anything other than protectionism. Reasonable people can disagree on whether protectionism is right or wrong under different circumstances, but let's not try to avoid calling it what it is. Closing a door, whether it's open a foot or an inch, is still closing a door.

Senator, I believe that you care deeply about the issue of free trade, and I'm sure that you understand the intricacies of US trade policy much more that I do. So, when given the opportunity to voice your opinion in a forum like Room for Debate, to an audience that genuinely wants to understand the conflicting views on such an important subject, why reduce yourself to name-calling and drastic oversimplification? A solid case certainly can and should be made for trade policies that help strengthen American industries and protect American workers, and the Room for Debate blog would have been the perfect forum for such a case.

Sincerely,

Marcus Tullius Tiro

The Long Road to Alausi II - Ecuador 4

2009-02-08T14:22:00.003-06:00

In part because the hostel was closed, and in part because there were only a few hours remaining before the adventure we sought was due to begin, we opted to explore a bit instead of sleeping, placing our bets on the local coffee-shops and bakeries opening around 6:00. From 1:50 (our time of arrival) to around 4:00, we wandered, aiming at first at a large, colorful statue of Jesus in the center of town (think “Buddy Jesus” but without the thumb's up and with a slightly less ostentatious grin), which is as good a time as any to mention the way “dogs” work in Ecuador.

I put the word “dog” in quotation marks because in Ecuador the line between dog and wolf is somewhat narrower than in America. In America, if you run into a stray dog, odds are he's more scared of you than you are of him. This is not always the case in Ecuador, where strays arguably serve a very important purpose, and that purpose is inflicting pain on unknown elements who stray too near. The streets of any town at night are roamed by three sorts of dogs. Domestic dogs out for a piss, Strays of domestic origin out because they have nowhere to go (these are often in search of garbage or the leavings of whomever happens to be around), and strays of unknown origin out because they're hungry.

Any encounter with a dog in the street at night (or during the day) in Ecuador is most easily explained with diplomatic terminology. The two parties meet, size each other up, and attempt to ascertain who would have the advantage in a fight. If the dog is alone, this is you. If the dog is not alone, this is him. Borders are drawn depending on who wants to go where, for how long, and why. If both parties merely want to pass, each chooses one side of the street (not the same side) and the meeting is brief and painless, if wary.

If the canine party intends to stay, or considers part (or all) of the street territory (this is often a problem with domestic dogs, near their homes), the human party ascertains the threat level. This involves a series of determinations, starting with the health of the dog. A healthy dog is either a domestic or a stray of unknown origin. Strays of domestic origin usually appear somewhat emaciated, and are most likely to turn tail and run if you opt to move forward. If the healthy dog is also clean, it is domestic, at which point you must ascertain if it is chained. If it is chained, walk on the opposite side of the street. If not, or if you cannot tell, assume the dog is feeling territorial, and find another route. One friend of Ma.'s made the mistake of not heeding her regarding a particular gang of dogs, and paid with a goodly portion of one of his legs. This is not a joke.

If the dog is healthy and dirty, you probably have a problem. Look around for other dogs. If you see any, and they're looking at you, you're either being hunted or you're close to their “territory.” In either case, do not make eye-contact, and attempt to back away. If they follow, antagonizing them would be redundant and so it is wise (according to Ju., a friendly fellow we met in the hostel) to throw rocks, preferably large and/or sharp ones.

The dogs of Alausi know where you are at any time, and you cannot wander the streets at night without them raising unholy hell in whatever neighborhood you are passing through. While we were on the road itself, a small pack of them staked us out, but the arrival of a bus threw off their rhythm (and ours... it was dark and foggy and there was a bend in the road) and they left off their curiosity. Near the Jesus statue we found the final leg blocked by a couple angry-looking small dogs, could not ascertain if they were chained, and found a new way around instead.

We arrived at Jesus to discover the view somewhat obstructed by fog, and photography of the view rendered impossible by the bright white lights which were used to light the statue up at night (though I admit, I was too tired at any rate to pull out my camera, at this point). An interesting consequence of these lights, however, was that at night, every insect in the city (otherwise dimly lit) gravitated upwards and to the center, and hung out (like a pack of mall-rats) around that central square on a hill. Jesus himself was swarming with horned beetles, moths, and other small insects I initially mistook for mosquitoes but later recognized as tiny-little-doohickies-that-don't-bite-so-who-cares.

Aside from the difficulty of not stepping on the horned beetles (I did step on one, which made a rather depressing krunch noise and made me feel rather miserable about myself as a person... they're quite pretty and they are BIG), the square was pleasant enough and contained a map of the town which informed us that there was to be a market held there. Around this time, I identified some of the odd noises as bat noises, and mindful that rabies was a bad thing to have, I suggested we make our way down. The bats were, of course, hunting the local all-you-can-eat buffet, and so left us entirely alone.

We wandered for a time, and eventually set up shop for a nap on a bench, and a bit later in one of the doorways of the train-station while we waited for the town to come alive:

People passed by and said “hi” and such when a certain hour rolled around, and such encounters became more frequent (and more hurried) as time wore on. We gleaned bits of information from passersby while we were awake, learning that the train station actually opened at 8:00, that the train we were here to ride left every hour or so (rendering useless the inane difficulties we had gone through to arrive the previous day to ensure we could get tickets) and no longer arrived from Riobamba because (accounts varied) there had been a mudslide, a rock-slide, or some other catastrophe which closed the rail between those two towns.

Tickets to ride the Devil's Nose cost us eight dollars each, which was a relief, since someone had earlier told us it would cost twenty-five. At this juncture we learned that due to some ten-year-olds managing to seriously injure themselves, the entire point of the trip (riding on top of the train) had been rendered illegal by mayoral edict. At that point, we thought the universe had won, and that the Devil's Nose trip was to be a near-total loss. We took our seats behind muddied, jammed windows and prepared to be underwhelmed.

That said, I have gleaned some degree of perverse pleasure from stringing this tale along over several days, so why don't we leave it there for now, and return to it tomorrow?

Signing out,

Maxwell Evans

The Long Way to Alausi - Ecuador 3

2009-02-05T16:01:00.002-06:00

The last couple days (thirty two hours, to be precise) has been interesting. Ma. and I got up intending to make two day-trips, one down to the hot-springs and one (the following day) down to the Nariz de Diablo, which we understood to involve a two-hour bus-drive down to Alausi and a train ticket. However, someone informed us that in order to get tickets for the train, we'd need to arrive at 3 pm the previous day, so we canceled our trip to the hot-springs and got on a bus headed for (as Ma. pronounces it) Ah-loo-ah-see. The bus-driver informed her that the trip, contrary to what we had been informed, was going to take three and a half hours, so she called ahead to the hostel to see if someone could go buy tickets when the billetario opened at 3:00. When we got on the train, it was approximately 2:00, mas o menos.

Every meaningful experience in my life, it sometimes seems, has come to me while I was lost. My closest friendships, the best stories, my most valued photographs, and (perhaps most importantly) my most potent life lessons. These are the lessons that, as Calvin's father would have said, "build character."

It is interesting, on some level, that this might be so... for is it not the case that the beaten path is the beaten path because it is the best way to go? It seems uncanny that a trail beaten down by so many men and women is, in fact, teaching them little and costing them much of the only resource they can never replace: time. But a beaten trail was once a game-trail, faint and difficult to follow. The road through middle school, high school, and college was once full of dangerous animals and scarred by plentiful conflicting trails leading off into the mists.

Over time, however, this trail has become widened. People have lain down cobblestones and even tar, added trail markers and put up street-lights to mark your way in the dark. In some places there are even moving sidewalks and, wherever it gets too steep, there's a cable car if you can afford to pay for the ticket. When people get to the end of this road, they do not, in other words, find themselves surrounded by the same filthy backpackers that arrived there in the old days, smelling of industrial bug-spray, wincing from the necessary vaccinations and gaunt from (at best) trail food and (at worst) eating whatever they could find along the way. Instead, the end of the path is full of plump, colorful tourists with cameras who turn at your arrival and say "oh, you did it the hard way? How marveous!" and then continue to enjoy the view.

It isn't the road's fault, really... it still builds character if you walk alongside it, fighting off bears and beating your way through the nearby bushes. It still builds character if you ignore the cable car and never pay heed to the walking sidewalk. It still builds character if you dig your meals out of the dirt, or out of the tree-tops, it simply does not reward character. You arrive at the end of the road, and find yourself in the same company you were in when you began your journey. What is the purpose of a journey in which you are never surrounded by new and different sorts of people?

This bus-ride to Alausi might have been that sort of trip. The path was beaten by a thousand tourists before us. But it wasn't.

It wasn't, because when Marly asked the bus driver if he was headed to "Ah-loo-ah-see" he saw my blond hair, identified us as tourists, presumed she intended to say "Eh-loo-ah-sees," a notable resort up north which is, incidentally, three and a half hours from Quito, and said "yes."

So we hopped on the bus, sat down in the back, and didn't think twice about it until Marly noticed (approximately two hours later) that we were passing through a small town which was, most definitively, north of Quito. Alausi is South of Quito, and this was a problem. Marly's suspicions were confirmed by a nice gentleman across from us, a young man from Ibarra who spoke English with a surprising degree of fluency. He invited us to spend the night at his place in Ibarra, told us he owned a flower shop and that the year had been bad for flowers. He said he wasn't really sure what Ibarra had to offer tourists, since he had only just moved there himself, but warned us that any attempt to return to Alausi that night would most likely involve an overnight bus, which did not come recommended.

After a few rounds of Marly running up to the front of the bus and questioning the bus-driver (still using the pronunciation "Ah-loo-ah-see") she came back, grabbed a tour book, opened up a map and went to him to point to it. Shortly after she returned this time, the bus drivers' assistant (each bus driver has a man or woman who goes around collecting money from passengers and otherwise taking care of business) came back to us and informed us (hurriedly) that there was another bus passing us at that moment which was headed toward Alausi and we could get on it if we were so inclined. We apologized (also hurriedly) to the nice young man for not accepting his hospitality and jumped ship, since by our (incorrect) estimation, we'd be able to make it back to Alausi by 20:00.

There followed a hurried exchange between the two drivers (standing on the road) about where, exactly, everyone was going, and when things seemed properly sorted out, Ma. and I jumped onto the bus in question (literally - buses in Ecuador expect a certain limber character from their passengers and tend to assume you'll be able to make it on as long as they're traveling under 15 kmh) and were on our way in the right direction. We soon found out that the bus was not, in fact, headed to Alausi - what the driver had intended to convey to our driver was that he was going to somewhere from where we could get a bus to Alausi.

It is a peculiar case in lost people that in our eternal scrabbling efforts to be "found" we are, nonetheless, somewhat less open towards people of the "found" category. I have a theory now as to why this might be, one which came to me while thinking about a Hostel at which Ma. and I took dinner the other night. There was abundant conversation, interesting characters from just about everywhere (at night's end I found myself in conversation with a New Zealander and his girlfriend, an Englishman, and a girl from Canada, all of whom I shall henceforth refer to by their nationality.

England had a plan. He had a budget and a job to which he would be returning after his plan was carried out. New Zealand and his girlfriend had a plan, though the details of it escape my memory.

Canada though... Canada spoke no Spanish. One day, she had decided to take a few years off school, bought a ticket to Ecuador, and up and left. Her friends barely found out in time to throw her a going-away party, and when I asked her what she was doing down here, she shrugged and replied (paraphrased) that she was going to see where fate felt like dragging her, and follow along without resistance. It was thus in Canada's palm that I left my contact information and a request that she do an article for The Report, whenever the whim struck her. It was Canada in whom I was most interested. Canada was lost and that, to me, meant (though I'm not sure I realized it at the time) that Canada was on her way to learning something worth learning.

The lost attract the lost. We know from experience the value of losing your place in the world, and so we seek not only to repeat the experience, but also to glean from other lost ones what we can of their own wanderings.

When we arrived at the bus transfer, it was quite dark, and the bus we were supposed to be taking to Ambatto (from where we could transfer to Alausi) had already "left the station" so to speak. Fortuitously it had stopped for ten minutes at a little cluster of restaurants so the drivers (and any passengers so inclined) could avail themselves of the available snacks, drinks and newspapers. We were starving, and the only store still selling food made out like a bandit, which made them four dollars and fifteen cents and made us two sodas, three candy-bars, two large sandwiches, a bag of peanuts and two packages of cookies. At least the dollar is still worth something somewhere, eh?

The second bus was very pleasant. All Ecuadorian buses that travel between cities have bathrooms that consist of a metal hole and a bucket of urine, broken in-house lights and have violent movies playing the entire trip, at high volumes, but on this bus they gave us free packages of banana chips and free juices, had curtains and kept the volume of the violent movie down to a manageable level. Considering that Ma. and I had already decided the universe thought badly of our day-trip, this bus was a godsend. The driver was also an amiable fellow, which given his job is a wonder.

Which brings us to Alausi.

The bus driver determined that we needed a hotel, and when we asked him to drop us off at the hostel, he misunderstood, and dropped us by a small hotel at the side of the road. It was foggy (the town and the surrounding hills were quite definitely inside a cloud, at this point at night), and the town itself was down the face of a cliff which we could not scale. Alausi was within sight, but not so much within reach. We began scouting for a way down, and (after rejecting jumping down into a hilltop cemetery because Ma. assured me that "the guards will be armed and they will keep dogs") eventually we settled on following the highway until we found a road down. There was not much in the way of a margin, and we kept Ma.'s phone out so that approaching traffic could see the light even if it couldn't see us. In the darkness and fog we missed the stairs down entirely (they do exist, if any of you are inclined to visit there) and ended up on a long winding road down into town. It was about one o'clock in the morning.

The town was empty.

Our hostel was closed.

The battery on my computer is running low, and this is running long, so I shall continue the story later in Ecuador 4 so that I have time to post this up today. I have not had time enough to revise it, but I have opted not to concern myself with such things until I arrive back in the states.

Signing out for the moment,
Maxwell Evans

Ecuador 2

2009-01-31T11:16:00.004-06:00

The internet here being somewhat unreliable, and it being impossible (effectively) to upload much in the way of photos, this will be replaced when possible... but most likely there will simply be a surge of "ecuador X" articles all at once on the 18th or 19th of January.

Apologies.

I'll drop what I can here, photo-wise, until I get home:

From the statue of the Virgin

From the balcony of the Secret Garden hostel.

You should be able to click on either for a larger image.

Ecuador 1

2009-01-28T01:53:00.002-06:00

In the morning, the sun breaks over the mountains and rains down upon an ocean of buildings that would look decrepit in St. Louis, yet somehow here do not. Laundry hangs across their balconies and people swarm up and down the street in cars, on motorcycles, and on foot. The atmosphere is much like you would expect if New York City suddenly adopted a laissez-faire atmosphere about zoning laws, electrical grid layouts and building construction. I am staying with a friend of mine in a (temporarily) vacated room in her apartment, which takes up an entire floor of the building, contains a relatively spacious kitchen, a washer, a dryer, a living room, a dining room, two full bathrooms, two (and a half) bedrooms and is costing each of three roommates 190 dollars per month.

Food here is cheap, and a taxi ride from one end of the city to the other will run you about five bucks, if you're foreign and your driver feels like gypping you. Today, I've been driven all over the city, all day, for a sum total cost of three dollars and change.

Electronics (and anything related to them, including internet) are not cheap here, and I'm told that I could hawk the ancient iPod I brought with me for five hundred if I were so inclined (if I find a buyer, I am so inclined). The “cable” here runs at 256 kbps down, in theory (about a twentieth of what you get in the states), but actually delivers only 33 kbps of that in practice. Combined with cable, it runs them 50 per month, which isn't cheap for what they're getting, but could be worse.

Aqui, con frequencia, otras personas estan aqui que hablan Ingles, pero si que hablas un poco de Espanol, todos las cosas estan mas facil.

My Spanish is, of course, terrible, but it does help that should I need to find out quantos quadras or donde esta Calle Rumipamba, I am not totally fubared.

Mosquitoes are not a problem in Quito. The altitude probably helps. Nonetheless, if you buy anything from a local market intended to be used as clothing or as bedclothes, be sure to wash it before you use it, as arthropods do tend to be a problem here. In the case of blankets, I recommend boiling water and dousing them for a few minutes, just to be sure. Otherwise, the blankets will infest the sheets, and if (like me) you sleep in boxers, the sheets and blanket will infest your boxers which will, in turn, infest your pants. Anything thus made problematic can also be boiled to remove the problematic insects (you go, River Tam). My friend recently made the mistake of not washing a blanket she purchased in the market and we're now facing the prospect of boiling every inch of cloth in the apartment. You live, you learn.

On the whole, though I've been here only a day, I have noticed already that the pace of my existence is both slowing down and speeding up. I spend more time on food than I do at home, and I am more grounded, somehow. Perhaps because of this, this article is not actually going to foray into a philosophical discourse of any kind. I guess that makes it, to my regular readers, a reverse Bel-Aire of sorts, and for that I plead forgiveness. Ma. and I spent much time digesting philosophy today (over some of the best wine I've ever had, which costs three dollars here and comes in a box) and that part of my brain is full, but tired. Overnight it shall digest things, and I suspect tomorrow, or the next day, shall bear fruit in that vein.

For now, goodnight to all.

Home

2009-01-15T16:54:00.000-06:00

I was looking back today and thinking of all the times that I have made really close, binding friendships with people. They come about in different ways, of course, and I wonder sometimes if all people are really capable of having them. A really close friendship has as a necessary pre-condition that you consider that person more important than almost anything else. If they show up at the door dead tired with a dead hooker and a pound of cocaine, you show them the futon, hide the hooker and the coke in the closet and hold the questions until they wake up in the morning.

I see people go through their days bound up in things, and money, and apartment square footage and cars as though they have a little list in their head of the things they want to have. I’ve tried to make one of these check-lists, myself, and it always feels hollow. I don’t really want the things. The things are merely necessary pre-conditions.

My final year at University was marked by a time I spent living with a group of people who were initially mostly strangers. I knew S and L from dancing, of course, but I didn’t know them terribly well, and the other four occupants were a mystery to me until I moved in. It was one of the best years of my life. I was rarely unable to find another person in the house to play games with or sit around watching TV with or drink beer with or go down to the store with. I didn’t always want to do, or have time to do these things, but the constant availability took a load off my chest. I was happier that year, on net, than I had been anywhere, ever before, and as we were relinquishing that house to the subsequent occupants, it occurred to me that I really didn’t want to.

I didn’t want to move out. I enjoyed life there. I liked my little room and the little living room we shared. The roof leaked, the squirrels and raccoons were constantly warring above us and periodically invaded the house itself, the heater didn’t work right and for a few months the fan-blades were so choked with dirt and rust that we couldn’t hear ourselves think, let along talk to each other without shouting. We shouted a lot. The bathroom wasn’t much to speak of, the oven didn’t have knobs and there was a naked power-box of some sort on the kitchen wall that would threaten to burn the house down if you left the kitchen lights on too long. The basement was filthy and appeared, at one point, to have been used for child abuse and/or BDSM. Several of the windows leaked.

I didn’t want to move out.

It was “home.”

It occurred to me then that “home” is a very mutable subject. Literally, it often refers to the place you go when you sleep. But this isn’t “home,” necessarily. I have slept in many places that were not “home.”

I played with it, in my mind, removing objects and doors, moving rooms around, going from one location to another and trying to decide which of these things could be changed without making a place not be Home anymore. Whatever I changed, Home was still Home, until I removed one essential component that I had previously (born and raised American) overlooked.

People.

Home is where your people are.

I think people move around a lot because there’s a better job here, or they like mountains and there’s more mountains there. They move to beaches, they move to rivers, they move to warmer or colder climates and everyone nods their heads and says “yeah, that makes sense. I get that.”

But if you say you’re moving because you’re following a person, or people, everyone freaks out and says “but what about your future?”

This is intrinsically ridiculous. I can’t think of any better thing to follow than people. Why would you follow anything else? I can learn to live in hotter climates, or colder climates, on bigger or smaller salaries, but fuck all if I’m going to live without swing dancing, board games and people who laugh when I crack a joke about a cat in a box or the Medici family.

People speak of moving as if it’s a big commitment, and I suppose it can be. If you’ve settled before you find the people you want to settle near (some people not only do this, but consider this “wise”), moving means uprooting from your career, finding a new place to live, and moving or throwing away a bunch of the crap that has accumulated in your living space over the years.

If you’re not there yet, though, if, like me, most of your more important possessions can be packed up into a trunk with room spare for clothes and a cooler of beef jerky (the books and the cello can be piled in the back seat), then why bother with places and things? Eventually, you’ll have kids, and you’ll want a refrigerator and lunch boxes and four bedrooms and two bathrooms and a little white dog, but these things weigh you down. They tie you to the Earth, and this leash is easier to make than it is to break.

Breaking it is often not even morally right. You’ll have dependents, and debts to pay. Travel while you’re young and free. Endure great discomforts and wash clothes in whatever rivers you may find along your way. Freeze half to death in the winter and hide in the shade of the dunes from the summer sun. Incur great debts if necessary and pay them back later. The person you will be when you put down your roots will thank you for it later.

For anyone reading this who hasn’t yet figured out my intentions, my next road-trip will begin before this year is out, and will be long. I may have the good fortune to be accompanied by a friend more experienced in these matters than myself, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I’m considering writing a list before I start, of things I want to do before I come home. Swim naked in a (clean) river, climb another mountain, write down the day every night, sleep under the stars, meet someone with a point of view so different communication is almost impossible, take a picture of something perfect, take a picture of something perfectly awful, watch the stars where there are no lights, smoke pot for the first time. That sort of stuff.

Overcoming the Self

2009-01-12T15:51:00.002-06:00

I don’t remember what age it was exactly that I began cataloging my weaknesses and designing interrelated strategies to defeat them. It is a convoluted process and the list of weaknesses is longer than I like to admit.

By “interrelated” strategies, I mean that I use one weakness to overcome another, or overcome one weakness by overcoming another. For example, in college I would save up big, scary assignments and then offer myself false dichotomies: “you can either work on the thesis paper, or you can do that little philosophy reading assignment.” The big projects would sometimes suffer for it (I essentially turned “procrastination” into a study strategy), but not as much as they would have suffered from my ignoring the daily grind.

My tendency to procrastinate is, even now, problematic for me. Even if I enjoy an activity, I will procrastinate if it becomes “work.” I enjoy writing to no end, and given a piece of paper and a pencil will fill every inch of it with words, just because. Yet while detritus surrounds me, my novel inches forward like molasses. Yesterday I designed a method to defeat this.

I hate exercise with a passion. Mind you, I’m in fairly good shape, because I dance, and hike, and sometimes climb, and because I view eating with a largely utilitarian bent. But I hate exercise for exercise’s sake, and the holiday season makes it difficult to accomplish exercise for “fun,” because the dancers I know are out of town.

I love writing, but it is “work” now, so I procrastinate it. On this newest attempt at “the novel,” I have made a rule. Each day, the number of pages between where I am and the number 100 get added to a little list I made and converted into minutes of exercise. I don’t have to do the exercise on the day on which I rack it up, the minutes just keep adding up until they form a scary, impossibly huge barrier. At that point, exercise becomes the “big scary assignment” and writing becomes not only the small, enjoyable assignment, but a way to minimize the big scary one. The more I write, and the more I focus in on the primary project, the less I have to do an activity I hate, but which is good for me. When I breach 100, I will begin counting down to 200 (equivalent to approximately 400 paperback pages), which should be about as much space as this story will need.

It is interesting how the human mind works. There are wheels within wheels within wheels. Thinking about the manner in which I trick myself into doing things makes it possible, on some level, for me to relate to people who have either had their brains divided, or have multiple personalities. There are so many different kinds of people within one person.

I myself have done wonderful, and terrible things to people, just depending on who I was the day they ran into me. Was I the nervous, socially awkward geek, or the grandstanding, in-your-face geek? Was I the confident, experienced lead, or the new dancer with two left feet?

I contain people capable of great emotional involvement, and people capable of great emotional detachment. I have loved women deeply and shallowly. I have used people for sex and cried on the laps of virtual strangers. I have made immense sacrifices for people I hardly knew, some of whom will never know what I gave them or why. But I have also taken things that were not mine to take.

Watching American movies is a little funny, for me. People are so steadfast, and sturdy. They always are what they always were. They are allowed to be interesting, but they are not allowed to change unless that change is permanent, meaningful, and the basis of the plot.

Yet the people I meet from day to day are fickle, like me. They are one thing to one person, and another to another. Sometimes they are kind, sometimes cruel. Sometimes they laugh at a joke and sometimes they become offended. They like, hate, love, and fear things before they know why, and spend days, weeks, even years surrounding their emotions with reasons, because ultimately, mankind must rationalize everything that it does.

The people who are most successful, I think, are the ones who decide which specific subset of the people inside them are going to be allowed to come out. They decide who they are, and defy any internal voice to deny it. They overcome their demons and their angels alike.

There may be something to this, in terms of understanding structured religion. Overcoming your own demons and angels is exhausting. Believe me. Coming to where I am now (and I do not think I have succeeded yet) has nearly killed me twice over. A religion is a structure through which you can be told which demons and angels to listen to and which demons and angels to ignore, and be given the tools with which to rationalize your decision and stick to it. Done right, it frees more of your mind for other things.

Those of us without this structure, though, must continue to overcome the self. If you are among us, I can only wish you the best of luck and assure you that if you succeed, you will be better and stronger for having done things the hard way. It may not be true, but you don't really have any choice in the matter, so you might as well believe it.

If you fail, of course (as I might), then you are basically screwed.

Ganbare o, as they say.

Gay Marriage

2009-01-06T20:05:00.008-06:00

History as a subject is in many ways the study of patterns numerous and wholly unreliable. Some few have attempted to treat history as a social science, with amusing results, but for reliable practitioners the order of the day (when it comes to predictions) is wide error margins and general trends.

With one exception.

Given two nations with similar access to resources and reasonably even military might (each nation possesses at least enough military that a prolonged occupation by the other would be economically impossible), the nation with fewer institutionalized restrictions on ways of life will always, without exception, rise above the other. The reason is simple. People (on average) prioritize where they live in the following way, most-important first:

Safety
Fun
Future

What this boils down to (at the end of the day) is that if countries A and B are identical, except that in country B you can wear hats on Sundays and in country A you can't, people in country B will spend their Sundays marching up and down the border making fun of the people in country A for being backward. People in country A will wonder why people in country B can wear hats and they can't, and will either start breaking the law (just to find out what all the fuss is about, at first, but later as a matter of principle), or will move. Country A suddenly finds itself with overpopulated prisons and an emigration problem, where everyone who can afford to move, moves, and everyone who can't afford to move breaks the law.

Now, in America, we don't really have that much fear of brain drain or people moving away. Most other places are less attractive as places to live for a wide variety of reasons, be it simply language, job opportunities, or generalized freedom of [whatever]. Thus, when we speak of restricting freedoms, we often don't consider the effect it will have on the immigration/emigration balance, because it probably won't have any international effect whatsoever.

Which is, incidentally, why folks who want to fight for same-sex marriage should really be fighting for it to be a state-level issue. Brain-drain between states does happen and is a factor, and the “Sunday Hat” effect is almost case-study-perfect since most states are, mostly, exactly the same in terms of what rights you have and how you can live.

If you want to have sex with a fourteen year old girl or get away with polygamy, you move to Utah. If you want to smoke pot, you move to Denver. If you want to blues dance, you move to San Francisco, and if you want to live a nice quiet life in the plains surrounded by other nice Christian folk, you move out somewhere in the rural midwest. People move around all the time within the United States, based on relatively minor differences in living conditions. We make a big ruckus about things like a tax difference of a tenth of a point.

There's a study out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida) that has created something it terms the “gay bohemian” index. Essentially what it says is that the most reliable way of predicting prosperity in America is not tracking money or business growth. It is, in fact, tracking the homosexual and artist populations. It takes a little thinking to get through to the point, but here's a short assist:

People in America can generally find a safe place to live in any state or city, if they are so inclined and can afford it. The primary motivator, then, for where they live, is number 2 on the list: Fun. When you want fun, you don't go out and find a good math conference or lecture to attend (well, you might, but you'd be in a gross minority). You go out to the pub, or go listen to a concert, or go hang out in a coffee-shop. My friend in Houston (who I just returned from visiting) initially lived close to where he worked, but moved because he'd rather have a (daily) hour commute to work than a (weekly?) hour commute to fun. The friend who introduced me to the index himself chose the city he was going to live in based on what life would be like there and bought his plane ticket before finding a job. In his case, St. Louis having a dull night life cost it a brilliant engineer.

Fun, in other words, generates population, and population generates income. Business is not fun. Money is not (in itself) fun. Art, music, gaming, dancing, these things are where your fun is at, and who makes the art, music, and dancing? artists, musicians, and DJs.

But why does the gay population tend to follow the bohemian one?

Perhaps because bohemian crowds tend to be more liberal, and liberal crowds tend to be less homophobic. Perhaps a disproportionate amount of the bohemian crowd itself is gay? Who knows. But where those two groups go, prosperity follows, and if you want prosperity, you invite them.

Economically, then, it makes no sense to pass policies that make the base of your prosperity unhappy. Both the bohemian crowd (liberal, remember) and the gay one (gay, remember) tend to find laws restricting the rights of homosexuals to be anathema, and passing such laws tends to make them move elsewhere. California, should it fail to get its act together, has just ensured that whenever a gay couple want to get married, they move, taking their money, artistic contributions, businesses and (often) their friends with them. The wedding itself will happen elsewhere, so a large sum of money will be dumped from your economy into someone else's economy right off the bat. It's a silly, silly policy.

Of course, you could make a religious argument, and many do. But it's a religious argument. What place, exactly, does your religion have in the politics of a free nation? ABSOLUTELY NONE. NONE AT ALL. This is not the case to protect other people from the light of God, it is the case to protect believers from the wrath of nonbelievers. It protects you far more than it protects anyone else. Getting your God into everyone else's business is a sure way to get everyone else's business into your God. There might also be persecution involved. I hear that happens sometimes. Marriage is a civil institution. You, yourselves, fought to make it a civil institution because you wanted people to receive bribes for being monogamous. Well, congratulations, it worked. But now, Marriage is a civil institution.

Civil institutions cannot be closed to specific groups.

You have two options when it comes to gay marriage. Either homosexuality is a choice, or it is not.

If it is a choice, then it falls under the same protections as freedom of religion, or the freedom to choose a political party. In America, we do not persecute people based on the choices they make, so long as those choices do not adversely effect the freedoms of others. If it is not a choice, then either there's nothing wrong with it, or it's a disability/disease/whatever.

In either case, gay people are entitled to all the rights and privileges of straight people, and since marriage is a civil institution, gay people must be entitled to partake.

Civil Unions are not an acceptable compromise. This country has tried “separate but equal” before, and we know how it works out. It doesn't. Why should a nation have two separate (but identical!) laws that do the same things for different groups of people? Well, the obvious reason is so that one law-set can be changed without changing the other. Restrictions can be placed on one group, but not the other. Freedoms can be given to one group, but not the other.

This is unacceptable. This is virtually the definition of un-American, for those of you fond of the phrase.

Proponents of “defining marriage as between a man and a woman” are essentially saying that the rights of married people are dependent on denying those rights to others. The benefits of marriage, in other words, include the benefit of laughing at all the people who don't have your rights.

If your religion doesn't want to give marriages to gays, well fine. That's your right. It is not your right to deny other religions the right to give them.

How does this tie into the beginning of this article?

Inevitability. It is profitable to allow gay marriage because it encourages the immigration of a part of the population which generates prosperity. Thus, given the opportunity, places which allow gay marriages will reap benefits that places who do not allow gay marriage will not reap. Over time, evolution will take its course. The only way proponents of “civil unions” and other such piles of [expletive] will ever win this war is on the national stage.

Gay marriage advocates, the national stage is one you cannot afford to lose. Right now, your opponents want to take the battle to the states. I say, let them. Let it be constitutionally established that gay marriage is a State issue, and then turn the tables state by state. The sure victory is less sweeping and grand than the quick victory, but it has the benefit of being sure.

And if you live in California and they succeed in this idiocy, and show no signs of correcting it... well... vote with your feet, and send letters to your congressman explaining exactly what they're losing with your move. If you run a business, include the amount of taxes they're not going to get every year. Tell them what you make. Tell them what you sell. Tell them what you do. Tell them where you're going. And tell them what they can do to get you back.

I should note, however, that the national stage is an inevitable playing field. I suspect Tiro will be going into more detail, since he disagrees with me on the “let them take it to the states” approach, but suffice to say that the basic issue at hand is defense of minority rights. It should not be the right of any State to restrict minority rights within their boundaries. In America, your rights are your rights, regardless of your race, creed, religion or gender.

In the long run though, time favors the progressive. The longer gay marriage advocates avoid the national fight, the more likely they are to emerge victorious.

The constant attempts to compromise the very founding principle of our democracy (prop 8 et. al.) must be allowed to continue, because the people making them have a right to challenge the system.

Of course, they must never be allowed to succeed, and much like they are fond of saying about homosexuals, “just because we have to allow it doesn't mean we have to like them.”

"Legal Problems"

2008-12-31T17:28:00.005-06:00

“I was legally and constitutionally appointed. Why won’t they seat me because the governor has legal problems? You know, that’s apples and oranges.”
-Roland W. Burris
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/us/01illinois.html?_r=1&nl=pol&emc=pola1)

This quote from the NY times makes my head spin around on my shoulders.

It most definitely is not apples and oranges. A person seated in the senate is a representative of a portion of a democratic nation. A representative being appointed at all is an unfortunate and necessary evil, a step taken only when such a seat has been vacated early by something like death, or someone being elected president. Because it is necessary, the power to appoint exists. Because it is evil, the power is allocated only to the governor, who is assumed to be a sane person, and himself a representative of the will of the people who elected him.

Blagojevich is clearly not sane, and I seriously doubt the people he represents wanted him to attempt to sell Obama’s senate seat. Furthermore, not only is it wrong that Burris was appointed by Blagojevich, his appointment was a flagrant exploitation of racial tension. The governor knew that blocking Burris’s appointment would be awkward for politicians and that is the only reason he made that appointment. His first attempt, representative Danny Davis (also black, which is why I say Blagojevich’s attempt to exploit racial tension to get his way is “flagrant”), had the good sense, wisdom and common decency to politely inform Blagojevich where he could stick his nomination.

This is absurd. Burris knows what he’s being handed and he’s taking it anyway. I get it. No black people in the senate today. Gotta break those glass ceilings. But this isn’t breaking a glass ceiling. This isn’t an election, it's an appointment, and Burris is attaching himself to one of the most hated men in politics. To a man who actually tried to sell a senate seat to the highest bidder. It is political suicide of the worst sort, because Burris is sacrificing his career not to do something worthwhile or good, but to do something misguided and bad.

That Burris is trying to justify accepting the nomination...

That sickens me.

That absolutely sickens me.

It’s disgusting.

JOB

2008-12-29T10:03:00.003-06:00

Christmas is done, I am back, and while I have friends remaining to visit, those trips that remain will inspire more articles than they are likely to inhibit.

Tonight I turn my mind to the task of writing a dialog, in the screenplay style.

Lucifer and Michael stand apace from each other and the war rages on around them. Michael adopts a look of great emotion and says to Lucifer:

MICHAEL: “There's only one thing I want to know, Lucifer. How? How did you become free?”

LUCIFER: “Who said I was free?”

I remember reading JOB in a class in college named “The Problem of Evil.” The class itself was an endless collection of people pointing out, one after the other, that if you applied a system of rules, devised by humans and thus inherently flawed, to God, he didn't make any sense. What a silly concept! After all, it seems to me that the most common use of God by man is as a method of dealing with things that don't make sense. The argument “your method of dealing with the illogical is illogical and therefore illogical” is somehow both circular and inane, when stated apart from the usual protective cloud of long words and flowery language. A favorite quote of mine from Quine (though I have taken it quite out of context) puts it best: “Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.”

I bring this up, though, because there is a story that has interested me for a very long time, and it is the story of the fall of Lucifer. The bible is vague, and so one is free to throw an amazing degree of personal inflection on the events, both those referenced by God when speaking to the King of Egypt and those referenced by the book of revelations, a book I honestly believe was inspired by an overdose of Opium.

The book of JOB seems to imply that “the adversary” must follow God's rules. But if God's rules apply to the adversary, than why is the adversary so often portrayed as a being apart from God, in opposition to him?

There are two main ways around this. Either the adversary, Satan, the Devil, is a part of God and under God's control, or he is not. If he is, then we run into The Problem of Evil, because if the Devil is part of God or under God's control, the actions of the Devil are God's responsibility and God cannot be wholly good. If the Devil is not part of God, on the other hand, we run into The Problem of Evil because God does not have control over the Devil and thus, God cannot be omnipotent.

There's a third way around this conundrum, of course, and that is that if God made a promise to the adversary similar to the promise he made man (free will), to break that promise would be impossible for a wholly good Deity. If, then, we set aside that frivolous crap and focus in on the matter at hand, it is possible that the Devil, wishing to come home, was willing to play by any rules he was given in order to make his case to God and be allowed home.

What case?

That man is as corruptible as the Devil, and that if man is permitted redemption, so too must fallen angels be permitted to redeem themselves.

The specifics are neither here, nor there. Really, the question itself is interesting. Why not?

LUCIFER: “I am no more free than you, Michael. I perform my function.”

Let us presume that free will divides man and angels. This seems reasonable. After all, the bible never explicitly grants free will to Angels and they never seem to make use of it until the final chapter, revelations. If angels have no free will, this also in some capacity explains the necessity of mankind. God created us to worship him, because the perfect worship of the angels was meaningless. They did not have free will. Their worship was an empty crystal chalice. Pretty, but not terribly successful at slackening anyone's thirst.

If this is the case, revelations itself takes on something of a sinister overtone. God once flooded the world to rid it of the unfaithful, and then promised never to do it again. What, though, was the nature of the flood? If the promise was meant in simple literal terms, God has many other options for wiping most of humanity out. He could cleanse the world in fire, for instance. But presuming God isn't in to cheap tricks, and I suspect he's not, it seems safe to presume his intention was to promise that he would never do anything like the flood again.

The essential component of the flood, it seems to me, is that it is like a dog being beaten for pooping on the rug a week prior. There is no connection, to the dog's mind, between his sin and his punishment. He learns nothing from it. The flood made learning irrelevant, because it killed all the sinners outright, but in God's estimation, perhaps this was a ham-handed way to go about it. Reasonable then, to say to man “look, I don't really regret what I did, but in the future, we'll handle this sort of thing differently.”

MICHAEL: “How do you go against God if you are not free?”

LUCIFER: “Who said I was going against God?”

Revelations is about sorting. The bad from the good, the wicked from the pure, the Christian from the otherwise inclined. It isn't, however, a random sorting. People are allowed to take sides. Then, there is a war, and one side wins outright. According to the bible, God's side wins. The ending is already predetermined.

If the ending is predetermined and Lucifer is aware of this (as he must be) then why even bother? What would he gain? What would anyone gain?

To me, the answer is obvious. Lucifer gains nothing. Lucifer is a tool. God is flooding the world, but this time he wants the side flooded to know why and to understand their sin in very tangible terms. He is directly connecting their sin with their punishment. He even warns them, if they happen to read the book “look, the ending of this thing is preordained. There's a right side and a wrong side, and you'd have to be pretty stupid to be on the wrong side of this one, but if you really, really want to, you can be.”

He lays out a series of appropriately vague indicators that the apocalypse is approaching, sits back, and lets people squirm around trying to figure out when the fight is gonna happen. He waits.

There is no incentive for God to bring about the actual apocalypse. Not yet. As long as people keep trying to figure out when it's going to happen and keep coming up with dates, there will be incentive for people to clean up their act in preparation for the inevitable. When the incentive from that is clearly not working anymore, that will be the proper time for God to show up and say “reminder time, folks, I hope you've read up on the good book” and have Lucifer knock 1/3 of the stars out of heaven.

Lucifer will round up an army of the unfaithful, and God will smite them down. It's a ruthless method of cleaning house, sure, but God never pretended to be a fluffy bunny kind of guy, and his only use of a rainbow, ever, was as a lame apology for a genocide he was already planning to repeat. Let's face it. God, according to the bible, is a hard-ass.

MICHAEL: “But if you're his tool, surely he will spare you!”

LUCIFER: “Does man spare a hammer that has been spent, a saw that has been dulled, or a spoon that has been bent?”

Of course, Lucifer must see this coming. If nothing else, he's got the book to go by. So he knows he's going to be used in this fashion. Without free will, he has no choice, but surely this must wear on his nerves! He must be looking, even now, for any way at all that he can break away from his dismal fate, betray God by not betraying God or by betraying God in a different way. Yet every such thought feeds the fire and makes him more the tool that God needs – a tool which genuinely despises his own master. A convincing, but powerless enemy. An unwilling scalpel.

But like a scalpel, the telling of Lucifer's story humanizes him, which may in itself be an error. To humanize a scalpel is to give it emotions the scalpel cannot feel, and thoughts the scalpel cannot have. Much as observing an electron changes its behavior, attempting to get at the essence of a fallen angel through logic might be the wrong way to explore the subject's essential properties.

"Reframing Life"

2008-12-18T13:48:00.005-06:00

It was the summer that I turned 16. I had been raped by one of her friends. It was a confusing time to begin with, turning 16 and knowing I was going to be starting yet another school, in yet another state. Like so many times before I packed my bags for my new “home”. I blocked out what happened, and what continued to happen.

School was the last thing on my mind over the next year and it was made clear by both my behavior and my lack of grades. I had one passion that lived through my rape and could continue to thrive through the madness happening around me and to my person. I was lucky enough to have a NYC high school art teacher who was persistent with me and pushed me to apply to the coveted New York State Summer School of the Arts. http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/nysssa/ It was here that I became who people know now and where I found my true voice. I met many others who also had a passion at this program and all of us became quick friends who supported each other emotionally. This experience continued to shape me and my ambitions for my life.

I was lucky enough to get recruited to go to college. I ended up attending Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I was fearful, but hopeful I would become a professional Film Editor like Walter Murch and change the way that Hollywood cinema edits sexual abuse scenes. My 3rd year I wrote a thesis on this topic and realized that this was the way that America made money, sex sells and it doesn’t matter what kind of sex it is, consensual or non consensual.

I quickly was disillusioned and desperate to make an impact. Wanting to wake the public up to these facts, I looked at various different directions to go after graduation from college. A common thread within the career paths were that I wanted to work with teens who had similar experiences to mine. My sister suggested Social Work School within the laundry list of other post bachelor degrees I looked at.

My senior year of college I interviewed for a position at a Boston public charter high school as an art teacher. They were looking for a general art teacher to teach at risk kids. I was clearly well versed with this demographic, I had been one only a short time ago. I pitched a wild idea that was not what they were seeking. I spoke of teaching photography and getting grants to subsidize the whole thing and then having it culminate in a show at the end of the duration of the year. While my pitch of the program might have sounded far fetched and flaky, the hiring committee decided to take a chance and sign me on. Much to their surprise, I did secure grants for supplies, design a curriculum of both practical photography and exposure to different photographers. Additionally, I gathered support from the community around the charter school and the Museum of Fine Arts.

While there were times when it did not seem that things would come together, I persisted and kept faith in my ability and the ability of my students to live up to the expectations that I had set for them. And with the end of the year, came the showing of the student's work. While I designed the space in which art work was presented, the students edited the pictures (done in photoshop after scanning in color negatives) and co-selected their work that was to be exhibited. The student's were also required to write a cohesive artist statement for the gallery and gallery book. While I curated the show and the press related materials, the students had an active role in deciding major factors of the end products.And ultimatly, within the midst of teaching and curtating the show, I did end up being admitted to Social Work School at George Warren Brown School of Social Work/Washington University in St. Louis.

My students in Boston had become part of who I was, much like my friends from NYSSSA, and when moving across half the country, I thought of what their lives would be like; what stories would they have to tell by my age? I left though, knowing that I had given a similar gift that was given to me back when I was their age. They were armed with an impressive portfolio of work printed and mounted professionally.

It is a moment in my life that I don’t like to remember that has made me see my true calling in life. Life is about taking what has happened to you and doing something about it. By doing, I refer to actions that remedy or negate what has been done to you. I have become committed to doing this everyday.

My peers (some who have very similar stories of trial and tribulations as teens) and I have embarked on the mounting of a national not-for-profit foundation using media teaching as a way to empower and restore a voice to teens who have suffered trauma. The foundation is to be called “The Reframing Life Foundation”. The main purpose of the foundation is the research and application of media in the adolescent population who have experienced trauma. Reframing Life’s goal is to not only give a voice but create a group of peers who have similar experiences and a common experience beyond trauma. This will all happen through the power of media-making.

The Reframing Life Foundation plans to run programs during summers, weekends, and after the traditional school day. Ultimately, Reframing Life hopes to have this therapeutic method recognized by both the social work/therapeutic community and by the general academic communities.Eventually, Reframing Life hopes to provide training to individual educators/social workers and have associated programs run in public institutions.

The board of members that we have put together is small (consisting of about 6 individuals), but diverse as far as personal experience, socio-economic status, and academic background- from individuals who work in finance to individuals who are highly skilled artists (bios are posted on Facebook). We all believe in this mission for various reasons, but have a strong passion for the same goal; to provide a voice for those who feel like they have lost or have had theirs stolen from them.We are reachable by email at Reframinglife.startup@gmail.com and we also have a group on Facebook. Just search The Reframing Life Foundation under groups. I urge you to join the Facebook group and possibly inquire about getting involved in the cause.

Welcome to our Newest Author

2008-12-18T13:10:00.003-06:00

Michelle (Preciousthings) is a good friend of mine with a bit of a rocky history and a bone to pick, and her area of expertise (and her perspective) varies so widely from my own and from that of Tiro that she's a natural pick to expand our collection here. I'm not sure how frequent she'll be, but her first post coming up is a sales-pitch for her foundation, the Reframing Life Foundation.

All the legal documents were submitted recently and so status is pending, and she has to start raising funds. Since there's no such thing as bad publicity and the cause is one I believe in, I figured she might as well get the word out here as well.

If you're looking for something to throw money at, this one won't be a waste of it. Michelle's as reliable as a rock, and if she says she's going to do something, god help whoever gets in the way.

I have taken the bookmark to a higher plane

2008-12-16T07:21:00.013-06:00

In case you're wondering what I've been up to, here's some samples from the line of bookmarks I'm putting out. The process of producing them is time-consuming and error prone, but the finished product is an archival-quality print with a protective coating on the photo's side (full-blown lamination made the bookmarks slightly too thick for my preferences and cheapens the look and feel, so I found an alternative... it takes more work on my part and results in a greater error rate, but the product is worth it). On the reverse there's a small explanation of where, and how, each photograph was taken, but they're not that interesting so I won't upload the backs here.

Just a slight additional fyi, none of these images are uploaded in original quality, and none are in the public domain, but if you wish to use them for educational purposes, be my guest. There may even be a law about that somewhere, but it never hurts to clarify.

In the end, what I wanted to accomplish was for each bookmark to seem like a window through which you were viewing another part of the world. From Versailles to Marseille, from Lake Superior to the suburbs and truck stops of the midwest, each image I produce is printed so exquisitely that I challenge a human eye to find even a speck of a flaw to betray the printer. If the print doesn't make that standard, if a single piece of dust sticks to the ink or gets under the coating, I may give it away, but I will never sell it, and every bookmark that meets my standards I sign in ink to prove I inspected it personally.

I don't think there's a point to doing a thing if you're not going to do it right, and these are done right. I'm damn proud of them, and of the fact that I produce them efficiently enough to sell them for the same wholesale price bookstores buy cheap pieces of cardboard with puppies printed on them at 300 dpi.

Updates will probably resume regularly after Christmas, as until then my main focus will be trying to get these in stores, preparing presents of some variety for family and friends, and visiting relatives in other states.

They smell good too. (erm, the bookmarks, not the relatives. Happy accident of paper and ink. I only use Epson ultrachrome K3 vivid, if you're wondering, in a stylus photo R2880, Red River Paper's two-sided .13mm gloss paper. You won't find better results without mortgaging your home, and even then you won't get any guarantees.)

And if you happen to own a store and want to stock my bookmarks, I can sell them to you for $1.50 each, plus shipping... but I honestly have no idea what the shipping charges are going to look like yet, I'd have to get back to you about that. They do come in individual hanging-bags, so you don't have to worry about packaging them on site.

If you're local to the St. Louis area, I can also sell on commission. I have full confidence that my product will sell if displayed.

The Error of Intellectual Arrogance

2008-12-11T00:32:00.004-06:00

Yes, yes, I realize that the title of this piece seems to conflict with the theme of the rough I threw up a few days ago. No, I’m not schizophrenic. I’m writing my own oppositional argument for the hell of it. I also happen to believe strongly that both sides of the argument presented are simultaneously valid.

A friend of mine, heretofore “R” was not as fortunate as I was when she graduated high school and moved on to college. She was unfortunate on two fronts. On the one hand, her parents didn’t believe in her, and weren’t willing to fund more than one shot at a minimalist college education. On the other hand, R cared more about other people than she ever would about a grade.

People used to joke that R was everyone’s mommy... she’d gather messed up kids around her like a whirlpool and take care of them no matter what they did (to others or to her), and they’d all fall in love with her, every one. She was always willing to cut class, to skip a homework assignment or even skip an exam just to “be there” for someone.

But looking back, almost no one was there for R. It wasn’t anyone’s fault in particular... people tried to be there for R, but everyone’s R was a different R, and so no one really knew what was best for her, and their attempts often collided in a confused mess. R was like an onion. The longer you knew her, the more layers you could peel off, but no matter how many layers you got through, what you were looking at was a layer.

Those who understood her best were those who stopped being offended when she lied to them. One story or another, one version of events or another, one reason or another for whatever she was doing, it didn’t really matter so long as you trusted that her intentions were good. R’s intentions were always good.

She was then (and is now) a brilliant girl, and honestly I think her first attempt at college failed because it bored her. She went to a state college and found herself in a curriculum that wouldn’t have made the honors track in the high school she just graduated from. She almost didn’t graduate, because she was as willing to skip detentions as she was to skip classes, and this had somewhat of an exponential effect on the discipline problem. Fortuitously the disciplinarians of the high school knew her well enough to make allowances.

She took a year and a bit of that mess, made a whole mess of Southern Baptist friends and then dropped. She made a few other forays into the world of education after that, but mostly they ended the same way. The colleges that would have given her what she needed wouldn’t accept her, because she didn’t have the grades from high school or the “extracurricular activities” to make herself look like the prize she was.

In other words, the system screwed her, and in a roundabout way, screwed itself. She’d have been one hell of a basically-anything-you-can-think-of.

Right now, she’s working for a law office doing their payroll and (if I know R) proofreading their cases, doing their paperwork, crunching their accounts information and otherwise rendering the office in question entirely dependent on her presence to maintain functionality.

I guess my point is this. The system looks for specific things, and rewards them. But those things can be (and are) manufactured in kids, or not. Musical instrument? Either your parents started you on one or they didn’t, and (I’ve played the cello since I was three and I teach it now, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one) it probably won’t impact your ability to perform mathematical calculations. But it will impact your chances of getting in. Sports? Clubs? Same deal. GPA? Christ, I graduated with a 4.0 from high school without doing a lick of work and without learning a damn thing. R graduated with something far lower doing exactly the same thing. I went on to a bachelors in History, she went on to an office job.

Trust me, she deserves my degree more than I do.

Incidentally, I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a 2.99, and I learned more in my time there than I learned probably in the rest of my education combined. I certainly retained more there than some of my co-majors who graduated with 3.5's and above. I went to college to learn, and I dedicated myself to my classes to exactly the degree possible without them getting in the way of my studies.

My grandfather never got a college degree. An employer at Hughes aircraft happened to be a strong believer in IQ scores, and he hired him despite this lack. My grandfather ( C. H., and I really do hope he’s resting in peace) ended up Vice President for Business and Finance at Duke University. My father tells me he was always self-conscious of the holes in his education... he was self-taught and well-read, but there are advantages to having a hand guide you to the best sources of information and culture. Time spent finding is time not spent reading.

I guess my point is that a university education, while nice, is not in the cards for everyone. People who had other priorities besides primping and priming themselves for the great annual dog-show (applications season) will find their options limited and unappealing. People without financial backing or scholarship assistance just won’t be able to afford it. The single most common reason people don’t make it through college is, in other words, luck.

Luck.

Which means that in terms of evaluating your value as a human being, whether or not you have a college education should probably not be factored in. What have you done? What are you doing today? Who have you helped, and who have you hurt?

There are so many other ways to measure ourselves against each other that have so much more meaning than our grades and our education level. To most companies, an employee’s education level matters far less than the degree to which they can be trusted. You can teach them to do the job, after all, but you can’t teach someone to give up kleptomania.

So much of it is in how we’re raised. From a very young age I was bombarded by challenges, creative and otherwise. I was offered opportunities for which my parents sacrificed immensely. R had a very different upbringing (she was the left-over consequences of a broken marriage, both of whose halves had remarried with new kids into the equation), and she paid the cost her parents weren’t willing to pay for her.

So the next time you find yourself walking down the street feeling like the world is on your plate, and you pass by someone bitching about the menial, un-fulfilling, redundant job they have to do every day for eight hours because they don’t have your degree...

Feel lucky, not holier-than-thou.

The Error of Anti-intellectualism

2008-12-09T05:59:00.004-06:00

{In the interest of keeping a rate of content happening, you can expect some of these longer, unfocused articles for awhile - I'm attempting to get a product out in time for the Christmas rush, and that's occupying most of my attention. Editing and proofreading is taking a back-seat. Ironically, this means that any comments you make on these articles may actually be integrated into the articles as ideas (with references, of course) before they are finalized. Enjoy the roughs.}

I would like to say that the 2008 campaign marked the death-throes of the American anti-intellectual movement... but I don't really believe it. The problem is partly that for all that University-goers feel that the hatred leveled their way is unjustified, the reasons for that hatred are not entirely without merit. The argument gets a little confounded, however, because the people who hate intellectuals also happen to lack the educational grounding necessary to understand the reason they hate who they hate, and the people they hate aren't actually the people they should be hating, because the people they should be hating don't exist.

The example I feel like exploring today is family values. There's been this tug-of-war going on between intellectuals and "family values" for years, and neither group is making much progress because the arguments used by both sides are irrelevant to the issue at hand. The right says "You hate families!" the left says "you're a liar!" and both groups are technically in the wrong. The right isn't lying, they're just mistaken. The left doesn't hate family values... far from it! The left longs for family values in a powerful, visceral way. We all do.

The only way to really understand what I mean is to go through university yourself. In your first year, you are torn (if you're part of the majority) out of a relatively comfortable home, one that probably has functional heating and cooling, a stove, and a bedroom that isn't doubling as the living room, kitchen and dining rooms. You are torn out of a family which, even if they fight a lot, at least understand each other and have grown accustomed to living with one another. You tell yourself that this is what you want, that "getting away from X" is the order of the day.

Then one day, you wake up and realize that you're living in a forced triple with two other men, both of who work out more regularly than they do laundry. Your life is mostly confined to a two-foot-square plot of land (where your desk chair is) and a repugnant cot you never take the sheet off lest you discover exactly how many generations of students bled, fucked and pissed in their sleep on that mattress before you came to town. You're never alone, the people around you are still acquaintances at best (though friendships form fast in that sort of arrangement... it's hard not to get to know people you live that close to), and you share a bathroom with twenty people, only some of whom flush.

You are surrounded by people, and totally alone.

The backlash reaction is interesting to watch. People start forming "family" groups among their peers, and I'd bet my left big toe that if you did a study of students who felt like they'd found "close friends" in college and graphed their academic performance against those who felt "alone," you'd notice a drastic correlation. Either way, however, by the time you graduate, you have become accustomed to separation from your family for extended periods of time. Siblings graduate and settle down thousands of miles away from each other and their parents. Everyone in a family might end up going to a totally different school in a totally different part of the world. They connect at holidays and chat sometimes over the phone. The family bond is still there, usually, and sometimes familial relationships even become more pleasant (it's harder to find things to fight about when you're distant and your daily activities can so easily be lied about). But they do not become more close. Distance increases.

The University system is the bane of traditional family values. But it has nothing to do with intent, and everything to do with an accident of design. It is simply the case that people going to University to obtain their education are consciously making a trade. The place where they grew up is being given up in favor of a brighter future, or in trade for knowledge they need to do whatever it is that they want to do. "Roots in the community" are great assets for a politician, but for an Engineer, teacher, Physicist or Economist your birthplace is about as relevant as your astrological orientation. Ever seen a "we hire only Cancers" sign? Didn't think so.

That exchange is more unpleasant than you can possibly imagine, and some students compensate by joining up with Fraternities or Sororities which give them a structure that college intrinsically lacks. Other students dedicate themselves obsessively to clubs or sports or other activities where they spend enough time around a specific group of people to form close bonds. Some students isolate themselves, and these usually wash out.

Students by and large have a few things in common. At any respectably ranked University, the majority of the students are all living in generally slum-like conditions for four (or more) years, racking up enormous debt and slaving away 60+ hours per week for zero pay. Meanwhile, they are constantly tested, criticized, bullied (not all professors are good professors, and not all students are friends), robbed (meal plans are essentially high-class pickpocketing and monopoly profiteering in one go), and generally treated like human chattel, the theory being that this kind of abuse builds character. In reality I'm fairly sure it's one of those "well, I put up with this when I was your age, so bend over and pick up that soap" things, but what do I know.

My point is that anti-intellectualism is cruel. These kids are not (mostly) sitting around in delux, furnished studio apartments with catered bars and slaves to do their bidding. They're sitting around in student tenement housing, crouched over a bunch of paper-work trying to draw Ven diagrams around the pot they're using to catch the water dripping through the ceiling. At night, the squirrels fight with raccoons in their ceilings, and if you can hear yourself over the heater's clogged fan, you're probably about to lose your voice.

I lived like that my last year, and let me tell you... I will take that over a dorm any day, any time. Besides... we got what we paid for and the roommates were amazing.

When people finish undergrad and move on to graduate school, they discover that their circumstances have not improved in any meaningful way. They may be receiving a stipend, but an annual stipend tends a) to have tuition taken out of it and go into the negatives (you still have to pay taxes on it) or b) be equivalent to waaaaaaaay under minimum wage. Living conditions tend to improve slightly (after all, you may be earning zero, but at least you're not earning negative forty thousand), and if you're working a side job you might even be able to split an apartment with only one roommate and still have a roof.

When someone graduates from these circumstances and goes on to get a job, they expect two things. First, they expect that the last however-many years made them a better person than they would have been had they opted to not undergo that particular brand of torture, and second, they expect to be paid more than someone who opted not to undergo that particular brand of torture, mostly so that they can pay off the several hundred thousand dollars of debt hanging over their heads. Incidentally, barring engineering and computing students, graduates generally end up making pretty shitty salaries for quite a few years after graduation. It makes you wonder why we do it.

Why do we do it?

Well, the answer to that is complicated. We do it to learn stuff. We do it to better ourselves and our understanding of the world around us. We do it because our minds do not fare well without a challenge. We do it because we're smart. We do it because we like to associate with certain kinds of people and college is a great place to meet them. Some few do it for the money, but much fewer than you probably think.

Many of us do it because our parents did it and believe it made them better people, stronger people, and smarter people. So they want us to do it to. Now that I've done it, I honestly do think it made me better, stronger and smarter myself.

I'm broke, mind you, and pretty soon I'm going to be broker as the student loans start coming due, but I had a free ride, so those mostly covered living expenses and are consequently manageable. But I honestly believe that my life is better, more manageable and more enjoyable for having done it. The people I call friend are better people, stronger people, and smarter people for having done it. The things I read are more complicated and the rewards they offer deeper. The intellectual resources I have to draw upon are vast, and most of them are even legal. I speak two foreign languages, one poorly, one terribly, but enough to find the bathroom, order coffee and ask where the nearest police-box is.

But still, you sometimes run into people who see the pride of having made it and think they're seeing arrogance. These people make me slightly ill. They remind me of the people who roamed the hallways in middle school beating up anything that looked like it might not have failed the last math test.

Intelligence has always been a liability. It is not human nature to easily comprehend that someone might literally be smarter than you.

I can personally list at least four people I know personally who I know are smarter than me, and I found this out through observation and conversation. Tiro is one of them, incidentally. My sister is another.

The ability to identify minds that are superior to your own (in one way or another) is an important skill and one you can only obtain by pushing the limits of your own abilities and keeping an eye out for those whose limits are farther out. If you've never found the outer limit of your capability, you will find that admitting to yourself that someone you know is smarter than you is hard. It is really, really hard. You will always find yourself thinking "if ____ I'd be ____ too," and it might even be true. But ____ didn't happen and you aren't ____ so you'll never know.

Actually, that might be the purpose of colleges and universities, really, when you get down to it. Pushing your limits and seeing how far you can go. If you find those limits, even if you're disappointed with what they are, then you have gotten out of higher education exactly what you needed to.

You may not like your place, but you learned it.

Shame on you, Charter Communications

2008-12-06T15:04:00.002-06:00

Charter Communications is now throttling BT traffic by blocking user connections to seeds. Their tech support staff is unaware of this because they and their supervisors have not been informed.

How do I know this? Because I tested several torrents twice, first unencrypted, then encrypted. Since the torrents identify possible seeds but cannot connect when unencrypted, and can connect when the data is encrypted, Charter is likely using the same (idiotic) choke software used by Comcast, as of a day ago or thereabouts.

Shame on you. I'm a paying customer. You did not notify me that you were changing the product you were selling me.

Unfortunately, you're a local monopoly, because despite the fact that the government paid for your infrastructure, you still (for some reason) have managed to obtain legal ownership of it.

So I'll keep using you, because I have to. But I'll be damned if I won't do absolutely everything I can to make your existence a living hell.

To everyone else out there, in the interest of saving you a few seconds on Google:

Basic instructions for encrypting BT traffic:
http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-encrypt-BitTorrent-traffic/

Azureus (now named Vuze):
http://www.vuze.com/app

On my part, I'm going to load up my torrents at night and max out my bandwidth with encrypted torrents in order to drain as much resources from Charter as I can. I suggest anyone else in the St. Louis area who is reading this do the same.

Charter may, however, choke your bandwidth if they feel that you're using too much of what you paid for. Sometimes I wish I was rich enough to use the U.S. legal system to sue.

huh. Come to think of it I know a bored intellectual property lawyer, I wonder if he's still unemployed and looking for a break. Maybe he'll take percentage-of-winnings.

American Communism

2008-12-05T21:17:00.006-06:00

This may ramble a bit. I’m more or less thinking out loud.

It is also subject to editing without notice, I’m mostly putting it up so Tiro can get cracking on what I anticipate will be one hell of an oppositional article.

If you’ve read my blog regularly, you’ve probably run across the “Mixed Heritage” article wherein I discussed the mixed nature of our government. We are, as I have stated, a mixture of many different ideas about how to run a place, and this is a healthy way to be. If you haven’t read the mixed heritage article, you should do so, because I’m writing this on the assumption that (having read the mixed heritage article) you’re not going to assume I’m making an argument for the Stalinization of our nation.

Communism is a word being bandied about quite a lot these days, mostly in ALL-CAPS AND WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO HATEE BARAK HUSAIN OBAMA for no apparently logical reason. I should like to spend this second paragraph warning any of these people who happen to be reading this that they shouldn’t be here. Finding out what Communism is might lead them to have to reevaluate their position on something, which I gather can, in some individuals, cause seizures or spontaneous combustion. If “them” is you, please go somewhere else.

I will now proceed to strip several ideas down to their core principles. You may disagree with me if you like, but you’ll probably be wrong.

Capitalism: In the presence of a government actively ensuring competition and punishing unethical business practices (false advertising, theft, murder), The Market will produce the best possible outcome.

Socialism: Intrinsically, people have equal value, and society should pursue a more level distribution of wealth. (Suggested methods vary)

Libertarianism: In the absence (or minimized presence) of government, The Market will produce the best possible outcome.

Communism: Public ownership of the means of production is the best method by which to achieve a socialist utopia.

Anarchism: cops iz always takin’ my weed. Wtf man. Down with the man. (You think I’m kidding, and I’m about to say I’m kidding, but I’m not. I honestly believe this is the core belief of anarchists everywhere, in some form or another.)

So, with the exception of Anarchism (I’m kidding L, don’t kill me), I think we can agree I’ve been essentially fair to all viewpoints expressed above. Libertarianism and Capitalism (as core principles) differ in the degree of tolerated government interaction with the market, communism is a particular brand of socialism which seeks to produce the socialist ideal through a very specific course of action.

Now. You might be wondering what my point is. After all, Socialism and Communism are two great evils that have been put down like the dogs they are, right?

Not sure where to start, but China seems as good a place as any to get where I want to go with this, so let’s start there. China’s system is based on communism, and attempted very strenuously to hold to the communist party line through the tenure of Mao. After Mao, however, the system has integrated capitalist and (other) socialist elements at a cautious pace until now we face China across the table as our major economic (and military) rival.

Conversely, our system was based on capitalism, but we have included more and more socialist and communist principles along the way in order to prevent or repair holes torn in the market by reality. Examples? Anti-trust laws, welfare, social security and (here’s where people start shouting at me) stock options.

That’s right. Stock options.

Stock options are employees being paid, partly, in percentage ownership of the company they work for. What does that sound like? That sounds like communism. Does it work? Arguably pretty well! Employees who have mass amounts of stock in a company are more likely to be actively engaged in that company’s success. After all, if the company is worth more, so are they.

Yes, yes, there’s caveats, but when you get right down to it, stock options are capitalism taking a good long look at communism and cherry-picking a good idea out of all that useless, excess crap.

One could even make an argument that we’ve been actively engaged in subversive communist activities since the Dutch first started trading commodities on blackboards.

Essentially, when a company starts selling itself (the obvious sexual reference is actually not intended, for once), it stops being privately owned in any meaningful sense. Oil companies tend to be owned by millions of people. Problem?

The people working at the bottom of the chain can’t afford stock. Their wages do not fluctuate with company performance, so neither does their performance. They see CEOs at the top of the chain making more when the company is doing better, and they wonder “why does he keep getting a raise, and I can’t even make my medical bills?

With CEOs making salaries in a ratio of 411:1 them:worker or worse, you can kinda understand why the bottom rung is pissed. And there’s no pretending that distributing half of a CEO’s salary would not significantly increase the income of the rest of the employees. If a CEO makes a paltry 4 million annually in even a company that has a full thousand employees, each employee would make an additional 2,000 dollars each year if the CEO’s salary was reduced to only “mostly” extremely ridiculous.

This is why people think CEO salary caps are a good idea, and you’ve got to admit that from almost every angle they’ve got a pretty solid point.

There are, of course, a few economists (self-correctionists, I call ‘em, I think Tiro might be one) who believe that CEO salaries are a natural result of market pressures, and that forcibly reducing them will cause companies either to find ways to circumvent the law to offer bonuses and such and court the CEOs they want, or cause companies to base themselves in foreign countries to avoid the salary caps. I don’t know the technicalities of this route of argument, Tiro could better inform you and hopefully will in the comments.

I crunched some numbers today in response to a comment on Sodahead where someone claimed that a better way to reinvigorate the economy would be to offer all taxpayers a 1 million dollar tax rebate. Seems like a dumb idea, doesn’t it? His numbers don't quite add up, of course, but nonetheless:

If you crunch the numbers, it turns out that giving everyone in America (women, children, dependents, unemployed and most of the illegal immigrant population included) $2,000.00 each, is actually cheaper than the bailout plan by over half. It would cut down the rich-poor gap slightly, give the housing industry a leg up and give people some disposable income or at least a break from their credit cards. The car industries might not even need to be bailed if their customers weren't so damn broke, and if the rate of mortgage foreclosure is pulled back a bit, the lenders might be able to recover without government aid too.

Downside? People probably wouldn't buy American cars (they fail to compete with the foreign market in every meaningful way, especially in gas mileage and trade-in value), and given how the mortgage giants have been running their business up through now, chances are they'd still fail, and then where would we be? We'd have expendable income and an unemployment rate of "which way is Canada again?"

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are moving overseas and the service industry is overpopulated by teenagers and college students eking out a rent check. Eventually, (ad-absurdum) you’ll have two options for getting out of the serving-coffee business: make your living by investing in foreign markets, or die. Starting your own business will be impractical, as they’ll all be ritualistically devoured by larger corporations once a month, and while large chains distribute amazing deals nation-wide at affordable prices, they also don't buy locally, so if you want to get your goods into them, you'd best have a billion dollars behind you putting your product into instant international circulation. Best of luck. (The tone of bitterness is due to this being a very personal problem right now.)

Eventually, education in America will catch up to investment potential, and the only hindrance to new investment strategies will be distribution of wealth. At that juncture, it might not actually be unwise for the government to start "sharing" the wealth, perhaps by giving each Taxpayer an "investment fund" paid into directly by a percentage of their taxes, which they can use only to invest locally or abroad. Foreign infrastructures would get a huge boost from the influx of investment, Americans would see a huge influx of wealth and our Nation would become a venture-capital source the rest of the world can use to bring itself up to our standard of living. It's a pretty shiny win-win-win situation. A good place to be.

But there’s really only one way to get there, and that’s to grow the middle class until everyone is in it.

Which is really the point of the middle class, actually... it’s a comfortable level to live at that is attainable by just about everyone, if the system is balanced right. The best standard of living sustainable on an even playing field is essentially the definition of the middle class.

Which is an extremely roundabout way of saying that by growing the middle class, we’re becoming socialists. We just think that the best way to get to the socialist Utopia is a capitalist system tweaked to encourage the expansion of the middle-class. Ironically, we might be right.

So it’s about time we abandoned all this random dissociated hatred for “socialists” and “communists” and just started looking at what works and what doesn’t. Lumping the baby in with the bath water is what got us into this mess in the first place, and any good suggestion this late in the game is going to involve creative economic thought, not purism.

Purism never works, ever. It never has, and no matter how many times you end an argument by calling someone a socialist, it never will.

Princeton Proposition 8

2008-11-28T09:56:00.004-06:00

Holiday season has seen Tiro and I being... well... lazy.

But in the spirit of me-not-stopping-my-devouring-of-turkey and you-still-getting-to-read-stuff, I think this deserves a special vote from us:

http://www.americablog.com/2008/11/princeton-proposition-8-to-protect.html

Give it a look-see, it's the best protest idea I've seen in years.

What Funny Animals

2008-11-23T23:55:00.004-06:00

What funny animals we be.

It takes some effort to accomplish this, but try, just for a moment. Look at yourself in the mirror, or at a friend (it's actually harder with strangers) and try not to see them as people. Try to see them as animals.

If you accomplish this, you will see what I mean. We are ugly, weirdly-colored, inconsistently hairy apes with bad posture. Compared to the sleek functional lines of a Lion or a Wolf, we look freakish and lame. I was noticing this today, and it made me wonder why I hadn't ever noticed it before. I dropped it, then manually reassembled the ability to see through the gauze, and was amazed at what the process made clear to me.

Essentially, every time we look at someone, we make a series of assumptions. Their posture, their clothing, their color, their expression, their hair-do, the state of their makeup... all these things become information. We don't even see them, we see what they mean.

If you can't get this exercise to work, there's a similar exercise that can help train your brain up for it. Look at the words you're reading right now and try to let them mean nothing. Attempt to actually see the words. See their shape. Reduce them to meaningless pictographs, and then attempt to make a decision about how pretty (or ugly) our written language is.

Hard, isn't it? When you look at these symbols, you don't see the symbols, you see what they mean.

Well, it's the same when you look at a person.

This is intuitive, if you think about it, and explains how cultures vary so widely in what they find attractive and unattractive, and even how our sense of what is attractive can change over time. It's all about what a certain appearance means to us.

But think about the greater implications of this.

Not only is everyone racist... Everyone is racist, sexist, and everything-else-ist (is that a word, yet?) against everyone else, including themselves (oddly enough) and their best friends. It is so damn hard not to see stereotypes when we look at people that we never realize we're seeing them. We see them all the time, and everywhere we look. We can't see the wall because the wall is so big that we've never seen anything else.

Snakes and Lions are both bloodthirsty predators, but lion cubs are "cute" and snake babies are "gross" or "scary." Odd, huh?

Even your friends suffer from a stereotyping of a sort. Think about it. You know someone really, really well. They go away for a year, become a totally different person, and come back. Who do you see, when you see them again? I run into this all the time with old friends (and enemies) from high school. I run into them, they presume I am the person I was when I last saw them, and everything becomes awkward and weird because they're talking to someone who isn't there. When I think about it, the feeling of bitter resentment, annoyance and (strangely) long-suffering paternal patience that boils up when I run into those situations is extremely similar to what I feel when I tell someone overseas that I'm Canadian to avoid a beating. It all comes from the same place and accomplishes the same thing.

On the other hand, with effort, you can sit down and stare at someone, and peel away those layers, and get down to that ugly-looking animal. It gets easier with time.

So maybe with practice we can learn to peel away only the layers we want to peel.

It's a dangerous process. Get in the habit of looking at pretty girls and seeing ugly animals, and you'll live a miserable life. But it might be worth experimenting with, because in stripping away those layers, sometimes you learn where, and what, they are.

Mixed Heritage Addendum

2008-11-19T18:32:00.000-06:00

I forgot to mention this in the "Mixed Heritage" article, and I feel it is a little too important to be added there as a comment:

In a proportional system, if the percentage of the vote backing the president drops too near 50%, small interest groups have incredible amounts of pull in the coalition. If a president has 51% of the vote and a group represents 2% of the population, they can make unreasonable demands and have them met, so long as the president wishes to retain his post.

Since in Israel, at least, government posts offer immunity to criminal prosecution (it can be voted out, but it's tough), and since (as aforementioned) corruption tends to be a problem in proportional systems, it is very *likely* that the president wants to hold onto power at almost any cost.

This is actually the chief reason why I am not the biggest fan of proportional systems, and why I would never suggest that the U.S. should adopt Israel's system. Components of that system are clever, but the consequences sometimes outweigh the benefits.

America

2008-11-19T06:45:00.003-06:00

In the last eight years, America has lost sight of something.

America was never a nation. There's a nation named "The United States of America" but, of course, the nation itself is not America. America isn't a continent either. Sure, there's a continent named "North America" and a continent named "South America," but that isn't what America means when someone says it.

America is an idea.

When did we start fearing that America would go away, or be crushed by terrorism or oil addiction or any of these other petty problems. Sure, failure to coexist with our environment, failure to convert to alternative energy sources, failure to keep our government in line and our rights reserved... these things may one day destroy "The United States of America," but America is immune to them, much as the idea of Rome survived to this day, and the idea of Sparta still invokes images of Three Hundred.

Ideas are more important than actualities. Actualities are only the limited attempts by mankind to emulate ideas. Rome was only a free nation if you didn't happen to be a slave or a resident foreigner, and Sparta was one of the nastiest places to live in the history of the world, even for Spartans. People will live, fight and die for actualities only so far as they can be convinced that those actualities are the best existing representation of the idea they're looking to live, fight and die for.

The real crisis in America today is that people are starting to look at what we have become, and wonder if we're straying a little too far from the idea.

According to Gallup, about 10 days ago 84% of Americans thought the nation was headed in the wrong direction. The average on RCP for the time period leading up to 11/11 is 65.8%. That number is improved over previous averages.

The only way to get back on track is to start thinking about what America (the idea) really is. How do we get there? In what ways have we strayed?

Most importantly, the next time someone tries to take away our rights to provide us with more "safety" we need to ask ourselves if we'd rather live free, or live long enough to die in the pages of the book "1984."

Which brings us to the point, more or less: If Bush gets his way in his last few weeks of lame-duck-ness, that "next time" will be pretty soon. Please to be writing angry letters to your congressmen and women.

(Even if you're a firm believer that warrantless domestic surveillance is in the best interests of the Nation, you should probably consider that surveillance is costly, and that the warrant system is the method by which competent minds are allowed to determine which surveillance operations are worth spending money on. A friend of mine put it best last night over a board game: "If surveillance for terrorism is like searching for a needle in a haystack, Warrantless [surveillance] is like increasing the amount of hay.")

On Great Oratory

2008-11-18T14:00:00.002-06:00

"Great is our admiration of the orator who speaks with fluency and discretion." - Cicero

"Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place. We should be talking about not being satisfied with past solutions. We should be talking about a permanent revolution." - Aaron Sorkin via Sam Seaborn, The West Wing

Just a short post today, as I've been rather quiet lately.

As Maxwell mentioned, we're working on an article on the subject of same-sex marriage, which is requiring a lot more effort than many of the other posts here. In my work on the piece, I've been studying a number of speeches, articles and letters, and have even picked up a copy of "Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student" (Connors & Corbett, 4th ed., 1999). Although I've had my share of formal and informal training in writing, most of it has been either creative writing and literary analysis or technical writing. Aside from a brief flirtation with debate in elementary school and a required public speaking course in high school, I have had almost no training in 'classical rhetoric.'

The more I study it now, the more I regret this. We often talk about the (supposedly) vital role of science and mathematics in our educational system, but what about rhetoric?

Personally, I believe that great orators themselves are the best teachers - and in my recent studies, the work of two individuals have consistently reappeared: that of John F. Kennedy and of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While their names have both been in the news lately (you all know why - and I adamantly refuse to get any more into the subject that has so thoroughly dominated our entire national discourse that that!), I realize that I am still simply blown away by the power of their work every time I read it. And while both have their sound bytes and classic quotes, practically any sentence out of their work stands on its own as a monument to great oratory. I'll leave you with this, a line I came across recently, from Dr. King's Nobel Lecture, The Quest for Peace and Justice (the full text can be found here), and with a question: aside from these two greats, who are your favorite orators?

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"Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meaning can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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- Tiro

Going through Oklahoma? A tip for you.

2008-11-17T21:35:00.001-06:00

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Today may be a little off-the-usual, but I've little else to do here and I don't have access to any of my reference materials or a library, so I'm not going to tackle anything serious until I get home tomorrow. It may be a couple days before you see the fruit of the upcoming article, incidentally. Tiro and I are diving into the subject of gay marriage headlong, and you can expect some exciting results. I expect Tiro's article should be ready soon, my own will probably come some time thereafter (traveling kills any attempt at conducting research).

As an aside, if anyone lives in a rural area or knows of an organization in a rural area who might be interested in spreading some articles around, Tiro and I are looking to make an actual tangible impact with these upcoming articles, and that means reaching an audience that doesn't already agree with us.
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But that's all for later. Today, I am writing a review.

A hotel review, to be specific, for a place called "Travel Inn" in Claremore, Oklahoma.

And I should specify, I don't usually bother. This case is special.

After a long drive, there are really only a few things I require of a hotel. A bed, a bathroom, and an internally-controlled AC unit (if the weather isn't ideal). An internet connection isn't precisely necessary, but I do tend to prefer one, if I have options.

I expect to pay somewhere around 50 dollars per night to receive these basics, and if these are all taken care of, I don't consider that I have been ripped off.

So when the man behind the desk informed me that my night at Travel Inn would cost me 40 flat, I was initially slightly concerned. After all, a rate that low usually means something is terribly wrong with the room you're about to be given, or the competition in the area offers something they don't.

When I walked into the room, I wasn't surprised to see that the dresser was standing free in the middle of the room. ... but then I realized something, or rather a series of somethings.

1. The dresser was also the TV stand, and was positioned deliberately to allow one to watch TV while in bed.
2. The room came with both a refrigerator and a microwave, and no annoying mini-bar or taped door.
3. There were plenty of power outlets available because someone had gone to the trouble of actually plugging a surge-protector into the wall (You would think this would be common in hotels, it isn't, and it's amazing)
4. The decor is obviously all home-job, which explains the rate, but it's a pretty good home-job, and everything is clean, including (and especially) the bathroom.
5. The alarm clock is far enough from the bed that I can't whack the "snooze" button while I'm still sleeping.
6. Rather than a plethora of nonsensical adds, coupons and TV guides, the room comes with a simple (roughly 6x8) stand-up card with a Papa-Johns number (room delivery), a list of all channels, the check-out time, an assurance that there is coffee in the lobby and the number for the hotel.
7. When they said free wireless, they meant it, and if you don't like the hotel's wireless (who knows, you might just be that way), you have three others to choose from in the local area that reach your room.

The list rambles on a bit, but the essential point is that "Travel Inn" in Claremore OK is amazing, all the basics are handled and more, the room is clean, the rate is (much more than) reasonable and the next time I go to Houston I'm stopping here both ways.

This isn't bought or paid for, I just think it's nice to support businesses that are going above and beyond, and besides... as far as I'm concerned, this hotel totally redeems Oklahoma for that "scenic overlook" and puts the state back in my good graces.

... Oh! Also, I didn't have to haggle for that rate. I have worked at a hotel desk before, and I am more than capable of haggling if I need to, but honestly, if someone leads with their rack rate, I really appreciate not having to waste the time. I made one halfhearted attempt to add triple-A (reflex, but let's be honest, if you're running a clean, well-run hotel with in-room refrigerators and microwaves and your rate drops under 40, you aren't even making a profit on average) and then just signed myself in. It was nice not to have to expend the effort, so to speak.

And yes, that $40.00 included the tax, which was another nice surprise. My card was charged for exactly $40.00.

Never been quite this pleased with a stop on a long trip, before. ... halfway inclined to stay an extra day and check out the neighborhood (the price is right, after all) but I should be getting back if I want to have the prints ready for the Christmas stocking-stuffer rush, and I still need to find a laminating machine before I can do that. So, home I go.

Travel

2008-11-15T00:03:00.002-06:00

There's a peculiar comfort to traveling that comes from knowing that you aren't obligated to do any work at all. I remember it from my youth, when traveling meant a break from practicing the cello and doing homework. It wasn't that I never blew off my obligations while not traveling (quite the opposite), but while traveling there was no sense that I should feel guilty about the time I spent in that back seat reading a good book or toying around on a Gameboy. It wasn't as though I could really be doing anything else. Tetris is still a warm-fuzzy for me.

Traveling alone is rewarding for other reasons as well. Your schedule is broadly your own, particularly on the first day of a two-day trip. How long you drive for and where you stop for the night, these are things you have control over, and no one is on hand to second-guess you. You may pay for it in the morning but the reward can be worth it. In this period of enforced inactivity, you realize what things are really important to you. They are the things (and people) you miss while traveling.

The people you miss might surprise you. I remember trips where I found myself missing people I thought I disliked. I enjoy arguing, perhaps that's why. This trip the list failed to surprise me, however, as I've been missing them for quite some time now. I suppose in a sense I've been traveling for months now.

The things you miss usually don't surprise you... conveniences, things you forgot to bring, games, TV, books. This time I'm missing shampoo, but that's easy enough to fix. The activities you miss tend also to be about what you'd expect.

But the people I missed this time around really got me thinking.

I really do think I'm in a constant state of traveling. Really, the trips of the last few weeks have not come as a terribly great system shock, because in one sense or another I've been living as a guest for months, be it a guest on a sofa or a guest in my own house. I don't mind too terribly much and I don't feel too terribly guilty. After all, this time was given to me as a graduation gift where others received cars or (in a few rare cases) houses or expensive whatsits. I wanted time, and received it.

Economically, it may be an insensible option. I am teaching and writing, yes, but in general I'm racking up a rather large deficit which will eventually need to be handled. I am also, however, learning. I am becoming (through practice) a better writer. I am becoming (through teaching a five-year-old) a better teacher. In writing articles I educate myself more often than I suspect I educate my audience.

Travel time is a miraculous thing.

Really though, I think I'm turning this into an article because I wonder, from a philosophical standpoint, how many people are traveling, even now, without realizing it. How many people are sitting in apartments because buying a house feels like settling down? How many people are living out of suitcases, or breaking up relationships because they're getting too serious? It's an interesting conundrum. What makes a person happy enough that they want to settle down? People settle down because they have to all the time, that's not the same thing. I think people who get settled, rather than settling themselves, are stuck traveling for the rest of their lives. But really settling down, wanting to settle down in a place, I think that's a function of people.

Really, in all this time I've been traveling, I've had all the other comforts of life at hand. I've had the internet, soap, clean water, a bed (albeit a "borrowed" mattress on the floor, it is a rather nice "borrowed" mattress on the floor), clothing and a roof over my head. But people have been scarce. I've traveled literally thousands of miles on wheels in the last couple weeks to see people, and I'll likely travel a few thousand more (on wings) in the coming months to see more.

It really drives home the point, I think, which is that home has nothing to do with a place, or a particular pub, or a particular grove of trees. Home is where your people are.

And sometimes, you have to travel for a good long while to figure out who those people are.

School Vouchers, An Overview (Part 2)

2008-11-13T01:26:00.003-06:00

" I add this, that rational ability without education has oftener raised man to glory and virtue, than education without natural ability." - Cicero

As promised, the conclusion of the previous post.

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The Anti-Voucher Arguments

1. Competition

Although many goods are better provided by the free market, opponents of voucher programs claim, education is not one of them. Direct competition for tax dollars would encourage schools not to develop innovating new ways of educating students, but rather to devote increasing amounts of funding to marketing and recruitment, while providing the minimum amount of educational quality necessary to attract students.

Additionally, as in other highly regulated markets, such as medical care, 'asymmetric information' problems may exist. In other words, parents may not know what an appropriate measure of 'quality' in education is, or they may not be able to determine the validity of claims made by schools.

As competition relies on the open market to set prices, it is almost certain that different programs will be available at different prices. If voucher programs are set up so that schools are paid a set per-student fee, parents would likely be required to pay the difference themselves, and thus schools would become stratified by socioeconomic status, with wealthier children receiving better educations. Conversely, if voucher programs pay either whatever is asked by schools, or if prices are negotiated between school administrators and government representatives, we no longer have a market based system; prices will become arbitrarily large in the first case, and the second case essentially puts us back where we started with publicly run schools.

2. Improving the current system

Another central pillar of the anti-voucher argument is that many of the benefits promised by voucher programs do not actually require such a program to exist; instead, they can be reaped by simply fixing the current system.

School choice programs already exist, both through charter school programs and through direct 'district wide' school systems, where students can attend any one of the districts public schools. For example, although primary and secondary education in New York City is run by a single Department of Education, different systems are in place in different boroughs. In Manhattan, the Bronx, and some areas of Brooklyn and Queens, students are not automatically sent to a specific high school, but must apply to the schools of their choice.

Such programs, opponents of voucher programs argue, deliver the benefits of competition promised by voucher programs, without many of their failings.

3. Subsidizing the wealthy

A central pillar of the pro-voucher argument is that, by giving parents a say in where their tax dollars are spent, vouchers offer parents and children a choice in where they will attend school - not necessarily so, opponents contend.

From an article by Greg Palast, author of Armed Madhouse, '[a]ccording to No Child Left expert Scott Young, 76% of the money handed
out for Arizona's voucher program has gone to children already in
private schools." (NOTE: As the article begins with a description of the various civil rights that the Bush administration has supposedly taken from US citizens, and proceeds to call NCLB everything from blatently racist to a tool of class warfare, I must be skeptical of this number. Personally, I'll give Mr. Palast the benefit of the doubt, and point out that even if the true number is different, there's still an important conceptual point to be had.)

The argument says that, in systems where private schools can still charge whatever they want, it's likely that, even with vouchers, lower income families that couldn't afford private schools still won't be able to afford them. Thus, children from wealthier families who were already in private schools will continue attending, but with government subsidized tuition, while children from poorer families will be left in public schools with even bigger financial troubles.

Of course, there are certain to be some families for whom private school will be affordable with the adoption of vouchers, but opponents claim that private schools can still discriminate based on "on the basis of prior academic achievement, standardized test scores,
interviews with applicants and parents, gender, religion, income,
special needs, and behavioral history" (from the NEA's Talking Points on vouchers).

4. Separation of Church and State

From a legal perspective, opponents of voucher programs argue that, as, according to one source, 85% of private schools are religious, voucher programs amount to an unconstitutional governmental subsidization of religious groups. (Strangely, I haven't seen much from voucher proponents claiming that requiring tax dollars to be spent on secular public (and especially charter schools) amounts to unconstitutional discrimination against religious groups.)

While many opponents may believe this whole-heartedly, at least as of 2002, the US Supreme Court does not. In the 2002 case, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the court constructed a 5-part 'Private Choice Test,' ruling that for a voucher program to be constitutional (quoted from the linked Wikipedia article):

- the program must have a valid secular purpose
- aid must go to parents, and not to the schools
- a board class of beneficiaries must be covered
- the program must be neutral with respect to religion
- there must be adequate nonreligious options

In the particular case argued, the court ruled that since non-religious schools were available, and parents were not required to choose a religious institution, the program was constitutional.

Of course, this ruling could be challenged, or the ruling as is could be used to argue that, if a specific program does not pass the Private Choice Test, it should be dissallowed.

5. Other arguments

As with the pro-voucher camp, there are many other arguments made in opposition to vouchers. Among them:

- Decentralized control of education may lead to disparities in education and educational quality.

- The creation of voucher programs may ultimately lead to more government control of private schools, and possibly to the teachings of the religious groups who sponsor many private schools. Some critics who espouse this argument oppose public funding of education altogether, on ideological grounds, and oppose voucher programs as well as the very existence of public schools.

- The use of free markets and consumer choice to allocate taxpayer money removes accountability to the actual payers (i.e. citizens in general), whereas the current public system keeps schools accountable to both federal and state governments as well as the local populace through the existance of school boards, and local referenda on budgets.

- On empirical grounds, opponents argue that there is no conclusive evidence that, all else equal, private schools actually do a better job of educating students, or, even if they do, if those benefits will be seen under various proposed voucher plans.

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To conclude: as with many ideas, voucher programs seem great in theory, but may not actually work in practice.

There is empirical evidence on both sides of this argument (the literal question of "do voucher programs work?"), but results are often clouded by issues such as selection bias, methodological differences that make results incomparable, and other questions, such as "how do we define quality in education?"

The free-market conservative in me definately recognizes the possible benefits of actual competition between schools, but there are many troubling potential problems with essentially all voucher programs - personally, I think the most troubling is the possibility that vouchers will be largely spent on children who are already in private schools.

Then again, the conservative in me asks, "you mean, its a good thing that these people are paying for education twice?"

Once (or, if) we've agreed that education should be provided to all through a taxpayer funded system, it should simply be a question of asking what the best delivery mechanism is, and putting that in place. There are definite issues (not necessarily problems, but issues, certainly) with the current system, including the way allocation and pooling of funding affects quality, the effect of teachers' unions, the 'double taxation' of private school, and how, if at all, we should be using quantitative testing (standardized or not).

Hopefully, as more voucher programs, charter schools, and public system innovations are tried, and we gain access to more information on the results, the best course will become clearer.

For one particuluarly interesting example of this, take a look at The Equity Project (official site, Wikipedia article) -- the basic idea is to pay teachers $125,000 a year, and use teacher quality as the main driver of educational acheivement. The school is set to open September of 2009.

- Marcus Tullius Tiro

Miscellaneous Sources

http://www.heartland.org/custom/semod_policybot/pdf/16856.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelman_v._Simmons-Harris

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006461

http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/friedman/Welcome.do

http://www.nea.org/vouchers/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_vouchers

School Vouchers, An Overview (Part 1)

2008-11-13T01:21:00.002-06:00

"A mind without instruction can bear no more fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation" - Cicero

Earlier, the subject of education was raised - among other subjects, the issue of school vouchers was raised. Like many issues in politics, the subject of school vouchers is a complex one, where reasonable people can disagree, and even the facts themselves are sometimes unclear.

As discussed earlier, most governmental philosophies maintain a place for collectively funded education. If we agree on this, though, there is still the question of provision: should such education be directly provided by the government, in state-run schools, or should the government simply act as a 'single payer' (the fancy economics term for this, a sort of 'buyer side monopoly,' is monopsony) and purchase education on the open market, or should a combination of the two be used? Of course, the same question can be asked of any government service: should the government maintain its own military, or should it use taxes to hire private mercenaries, or both?

Ignoring the existence of school vouchers for the moment, the current system in the US follows mainly the first approach. To grossly oversimplify, all individuals are taxed, these monies are pooled at some level, and then spent to fund state-owned and operated schools for all the children in a community. Additionally, while students are required (under most circumstances) to attend school, parents can opt to send their children to a privately owned and operated school, so long as the school meets certain government standards, and the parents are willing to pay the prices charged by the private institution. Of course, should they choose this option, parents are essentially paying for their child's education twice, or are giving up the 'free' option of public schooling.

Voucher programs offer an alternative to this, with a simple mechanism - funding 'follows the child.' The specifics of programs are more complex in practice: some may place a cap on the tuition which may be charged, while others may simply pay a fixed amount of per-child funding to all schools. Regardless of the details, though, there are some fundamental concepts common to all voucher programs, and corresponding arguments for and against them.

(NOTE: In the interests of full disclosure, let me say that I attended a public magnet high school, the Bergen County Academies (school site, Wikipedia page). I leave it to you, our readers, to judge whether this has biased my view of the subject.)

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The Pro-Voucher Arguments

1. Competition

Generally the central argument used by proponents of school choice, the 'competition' theory says that when schools, both public and private, must fight for students - and the government funding that follows them - tuition decreases, the quality increases, and innovation is encouraged. But is this really the case?

Testing this empirically is notoriously difficult, because of issues such as selection bias. Imagine a private school in a district has higher mean SAT scores than the public schools in the district. Does this mean that teacher quality is higher at the private school? Or does it mean that the students who tend to go there would score better no matter where they are? Or, does it mean that the private school simply teaches more to the SAT than to other tests or subjects? Or, do the students who go there tend to be from higher income families, and are therefore more likely to get outside tutoring and assistance for the SATs? Or, does the fact that a private school even exists reflect some factor unique to this community?

Nevertheless, we can examine these issues, and many studies have done so. In a review of the existing literature, Belfield and Levin (Belfield and Levin, 2002) examine 41 empirical studies, and find that "a sizable majority of these studies report beneficial effects of competition across all outcomes." Of course, the study also cautions against the "validity of inference from point estimates to public policy."

Another natural consequence of the competition argument is that failing schools must be allowed to close, and, should a school close, both public and private entities should be given the opportunity to take over and reopen the school.

2. Empowerment

Another argument advanced by proponents of voucher programs is that of empowerment, on both an economic and a moral basis. Voucher programs, combined with policies that give public school administrators more freedom to develop their own curricula and approaches to education, allow the people 'on the ground,' those actually educating our children, to develop innovative approaches to the problems facing our educational system today. The needs of children in suburban Portland are different than the needs of children in south central L.A., proponents argue, and principles - and teachers as well - should have the freedom to address those needs differently, and they should be allowed to fail or succeed in the open market.

Additionally, supporters claim that voucher programs recognize that parents, not bureaucrats, are the ultimate judges of what is best for their children. By allowing parents to choose the school their children attend, voucher programs encourage parental involvement in education, which, according to some studies, has been found to have a significant, positive impact on educational outcomes (though there is at least one study, I believe, that has found the opposite result).

Incentives may be more properly aligned under a competitive system, as well. The past decade has seen a rise in the use of standardized testing and regulations, not least of all in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB). Under such a system, powerful incentives exist to simply "teach to the test," a phenomenon that has been seen in response to NCLB, as well as the increasing importance of the Advance Placement (AP) Program, with its standardized exams. With a voucher program, as long as schools meet some minimum standards set by the government, the market - i.e. parents - ultimately decide what aspects are important, and may include standardized test scores, facilities, extracurricular offerings, job or college counselling and support, or a host of other factors.

3. Other arguments

There are many other arguments made in support of vouchers. Among them:

- Teacher unions hurt students, and may hurt teachers as well. As private school teachers are generally not unionized, this may also encourage public schools to be 'deregulated' away from being closed shops.

- Systems could be designed that reward parents for choosing less expensive schools, thus helping to control the costs of education on the whole. Such systems include Educational Savings Accounts, which allow parents to use the excess of the voucher minus school tuition to hire tutors, offset the cost of tuition later in the child's life, or cover other educational expenses.

- School choice teaches students democratic values through real-life experiences. Some proponents even point to studies that show private schools are more likely to teach civics than their public counterparts are direct evidence of this.

- Although the original idea of public education was to provide broad, universal education that would put all citizens on a more equal footing, the current system actually has the opposite effect, magnifying the socioeconomic disparities in our society.

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Next post: School Vouchers, An Overview (Part 2), which covers the major anti-vouchers arguments, and includes some concluding remarks.

-- Marcus Tullius Tiro

Announcing: Tiro Posting for himself!

2008-11-13T01:16:00.006-06:00

I just now figured out how to add authors to blogs, which will make this whole frequent guest-article thing much, much simpler.

From here on out Tiro should be able to post under his own name, hallelujah.

I'm on vacation in Texas. Incidentally, Oklahoma's idea of a scenic overlook:

(apologies for the low quality of the panoramic, but frankly this scene wasn't worth the effort required to do a better stitching, so I just let Hugin do whatever it wanted)
is misguided, and should rather look more like this:

Which at least has a sort of nostalgic or symbolic effect, rather than being a sad attempt to be subtle about announcing the only place in your entire state where the ground swelled enough to necessitate a road-cut. (albeit a shallow road-cut, it was made somewhat more interesting by the retired-geologist-lady who happened to be at the overlook simultaneously and made good conversation... nonetheless I suspect they only did the road-cut out of boredom.)

But I'm not being fair. Not everyone can be Chicago at night:

and besides, it's not like oklahoma is any worse than Kansas.

No, I don't have any pictures of Kansas. That's right, I didn't even bother, the last time I was there. Kansas, you are officially less interesting than Oklahoma.

And now the Melatonin is kicking in and I'm getting a bit loopy, so please forgive whatever horrors I have visited upon you today, of which I am yet unaware.

Not you Kansas. You're not a real state until you have a hill. I don't want your forgiveness!

And that really shouldn't be my ten cents for the day.

... but apparently it is.

Mixed Heritage: or Why our Government is so Messy-Looking.

2008-11-09T01:08:00.007-06:00

I keep running across articles and polls and whatnot where people run off at the mouth about how a two party system “is bad” or how third parties “are useless” and on and on and so forth, and I thought I’d take today’s slot as an opportunity to offer up a different way of thinking about the problem.

Two party politics is a consequence of a winner-takes-all system.

In a proportional government (which the United States is not - Israel is though) parties are allocated seats in the house based on what percentage of the vote they accrued in the election. The system for selecting a president depends on the nation - In Israel's case (though it's not nearly this clean or simple in application, of course) the president's party needs to obtain a coalition of other parties, which "lend" the leading party their votes. So long as the coalition represents 51% of the nation, the president remains president. When he can no longer maintain the coalition, a new election is held at the first available opportunity.

In a winner-takes all system, however, you have complications. since you require 51% of the vote to get any power at all, your vote is better spent on one big party than on supporting minor third parties which will (as they prove year, after year, after year) accomplish nothing at all. Third parties can serve to occasionally lure votes away from the party they are most similar to (thereby theoretically forcing those parties to adjust their platforms to lure the lost votes back home), but in practice this mostly just results in the party least similar to the third party winning the election.

One could easily argue, in fact, that the easiest way to mop up the problems in the U.S. electoral system would be to eliminate third parties.

However, I think that this is a simple-minded and hackneyed approach to things. Yes, third parties often serve as nothing more than a protest vote, but protest votes are important, and people have a right to cast them. I would rather switch to a proportional representation system than narrow down to two parties... most notably because a two-party system tends towards polarizing the nation into two groups that hate each other irrationally.

But proportional systems have their own flaws. Which individuals hold each position is determined by the party, not by the people, and who has a job is important. When you take the power to punish culpable individuals out of the hands of the electorate, corruption becomes a very real and very significant problem. Israel is rife with it, and I think it’s fair to say that they’ve got it worse than we do.

There may be no easy solution. I’ll give it more thought, but I suspect that no democratic system of government is perfect. Perfection is something you seek, not something you obtain, and besides, no system of government is the right government for all things.

On a very local scale, for instance, communism works! Russian peasants living under the Tzar lived in communes, and the system was incredibly effective on a small scale. It shielded people from death should their own crops fail (as tended to happen in the unforgiving soil of Russia), and guilt and shame were ample motivators when you knew everyone you were failing when you failed.

It simply doesn’t work on the macro scale, because on the macro scale you don’t know everyone, and guilt, shame, personal trust and loyalty start to matter less and less the farther you get away from the people you ostensibly govern.

Democracy itself fails on the macro scale. It isn’t possible for everyone in a community the size of the United States to vote on every single issue, even if you concentrate those issues very locally. Instead, we elect sets of representatives. One set for local concerns, one for State concerns, and one for National concerns, and we tell them to vote for us, and they keep getting our vote so long as we feel they’re doing the job fairly well. This isn’t democracy, it’s a Republic.

But we do want to vote personally on certain things, so our ballots are long, and new taxes and amendments and whatnot come before our eyes personally for review. This part of our annual routine is democracy in the actual.

Welfare is a little bit of socialism, along with Medicare and Social Security. All these things just happen to be necessary, as well, so we find other words to describe their origins, or attribute them to “liberalism” in general.

Our government works as well as it does because it is a mutt. It is a mixed breed, and the mixed heritage goes back so many forks in the family tree it’s almost dizzying.

I will personally promise you (for what it’s worth) that there has never been a government (not one that lasted five minutes) that was only one “kind” of government. It just doesn’t work. Even the Feudal system needed the Church to remain semi-stable, and the church was (theoretically, if not always in practice) a meritocracy. People need different things at different times, and they need it delivered in different ways.

Being a mutt is okay. You’re not as pretty, but you’re lots less likely to die of weird, inbred genetic disorders.

That’s my ten cents for the day.

Community

2008-11-08T00:35:00.000-06:00

In re-reading an earlier article I wrote about welfare (in which I described it in the context of it being a “public good”) I stumbled upon a broader point I had failed to expand, and I would like to expand it today.

A community is defined not by the individual contributions of the members of the community, but rather by what the community accomplishes as a whole. An army would not work if each individual member of the army just pulled their own weight, they must also pull the weight of their brethren, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally. We presume that this is an essential component of army life, but when that lesson is applied at home, in a domestic setting, someone always comes out of the woodwork screaming “socialist” or a variety of other words that have, over time, become epithets in spite of themselves (Liberal, communist, etc.).

Thus, any attempt to discuss the ways in which our community at home has become xenophobic and lonely tends to be brought to an abrupt, awkward end without accomplishing anything.

This came to my mind earlier today when engaged in a conversation with the mother of one of my mother’s student’s. We were discussing Chicago on the night of the election. I expressed how surprised I was to see that people seemed, for that one night, to be giving each other the benefit of the doubt. She said that a friend of hers had noticed the same thing in New York, that people on the subway were actually looking at each other and engaging with the people around them.

Think about that. We live in a place where looking at and/or talking to the people around you is so strange that people remember it when it happens.

That’s wrong.

Why does being a nation involve being scared of our compatriots? Sure, one in every few thousand are going to turn out to be racist bigots or mindless criminals, but every time you fly you take a bigger risk than you take when you smile at the man across the bus from you, or shake hands with a stranger. Yet people will fly thousands of miles, hours and hours and hours bumping elbows with a man or woman next to them, and never even say hello.

When did other people become so uninteresting to us?

When did our people become so uninteresting to us?

We should be a people. Our government is of us, for us, and by us. We should be a community which, together, accomplishes great things. Yet we have fallen to a level where we view each other only as competition, as speed bumps. The potential for our neighbors to be an asset really never crosses our minds. People die in their homes and sometimes aren’t found for weeks. What the hell happened here?

I think communism scared us and we rebounded too far from it. Someone drowned in the lake, so we took our children out into the desert and never taught them to swim. Here we are, all watching porn, dating over the internet but too afraid to meet, forming web communities for the acquisition of random casual sex with total strangers of unknown age. On the subway, we fantasize about the girl on the other side of the car, but we will never, ever, ask her what her name is. We are all dying of thirst, but too afraid of water to drink.

We need to consider how much of our political jargon these days is knee-jerk, and how much of it is well grounded. We’ve gotten too far from the 60s for our own good health.

Where’s the love, man?

It’s time to start taking care of our own, and before you start equivocating consider that by being born American, you implicitly agreed that your own was anyone who happened to turn up on your shore with his family in tow, willing to work for a living. Even if you don’t like his or her “type.”

For anyone for whom this didn’t jive back in the day, the motto was inscribed in stone as a reminder: “give us your hungry, your sick and your poor.” If you don’t like the motto, you’re free to go live in one of the other great free nations of the world that aren’t in any way dependent on the prosperity of America. I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but I’m sure you’re more creative than I.

We are a nation built on the idea that a mass of immigrant thieves, religious nuts, political exiles and greedy merchants could come together under one banner and agree to disagree. The sons and daughters of this ragged band of criminals and outcasts turned out okay, I think. We’re a bit ugly, but we get the job done. It sure is a whole lot of work though, remembering that our ancestors were every bit as downtrodden, dirty and unwholesome as the people jumping our southern border today. The greater part of them didn’t even speak the same language as one another. Hell, English became our nation’s language by a pretty narrow vote advantage over German, if I remember correctly.

We are a community. Communities do right by their own. We haven’t been. This is unhealthy and wrong. If adding a dash of socialism is the answer, so be it.

That’s my ten cents for the day.

p.s.: If you're wondering about the picture, it's the South Grand coffee-shop, back before they "cleaned it up" (it subsequently went out of business. The thought of there being no more "Jane's Addiction" milk shakes caused me to literally tear out some hair in grief).

For Fuck's Sake

2008-11-06T22:13:00.004-06:00

I have returned from Chicago, and we have a new president. My own home state has added another diversion from its 104 year record of only having voted for the losing candidate once. I should probably say something about how we've “made history” by putting the first black man in the white house, but honestly I find those kinds of assertions droll and demeaning. We have an educated, well-spoken, stable, proven and reliable new president, and that is what matters right now.

In the next four years, he will be faced with the worst financial situation in our history and be expected to “fix” it, something no one, even a president, can do on his own. An economy is, after all, a sum of parts, not just of the nation's, but of the world's. In order to repair what is broken, Obama will need the support (and to an unprecedented degree, the trust) of all Americans, but he will also need the support and trust of the world.

Fortuitously, Obama seems to have no difficulty inspiring people at home or abroad. It is important, however, to realize that while this makes his job possible, it does not make it easy.

If nothing else, it seems highly likely that someone is going to try to kill him while he's in office. One attempt has already made news, I'm certain others have been suppressed. He has a capable and trustworthy (and healthy and white) vice president ready to step in should the secret service fail to protect him. I suspect he had his own death in mind when he picked a VP so obviously ready to be president, and I suspect Biden would do an adequate job of carrying on the task at hand, should the job fall to him.

But he would not do the job Obama would, because he would not inspire us the way Obama does. He would not inspire the world the way Obama does.

Even if you think McCain was the man for the job. Even if you're mad as hell about how the election went...

When Bush faced 9/11, the nation (even the Democrats) stood behind him because he was The President of the United States of America and the crisis was bigger than party lines. The crises we face today are no smaller. If anything, they are larger, because they impact the entire world, and because they will kill more people before they are over. These deaths will be mostly quiet and anonymous, and there will be no one obvious to blame, and no one to go to war with. There will be no vengeance for these deaths.

The economy has crashed. We see numbers that go up and down, and people in suits whining. What we don't see is people losing their homes and starving to death on the street. Even here. In the rest of the world, it will be worse.

The climate is changing. Warming, cooling, these terms are misleading and foolish. They are narrow. The currents are changing, and this is killing the whales (migration patterns rely on currents). The warm air moves places it didn't before, and this is bombarding our coasts with hurricanes. Deserts are expanding, the ice caps are melting, waterways are drying up and filling with silt. Some of this is nature, some of it isn't, but the causes are irrelevant when considering the effects. People are going to die. We must do what we can to limit the devastation, and that will broadly be Obama's job too.

So for fuck's sake, whatever party you align with, when he needs you,

Help him.

That's my ten cents for the day.

Grant Park

2008-11-05T12:21:00.008-06:00

nuf said.

To Orson Scott Card, regarding Energy

2008-11-04T00:02:00.003-06:00

I feel compelled to respond to an article Orson Scott Card wrote today regarding Obama’s energy plan. I freely admit that I idolize Card as a writer and as a thinker, and it’s frankly painful to disagree with him as wholeheartedly as I do today. But nonetheless, I do.

(his article can be read at http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-11-02-1.html)

Coal presently accounts for 55% of our electricity, which we (all of us) spend brashly and foolishly because it is cheaper (much cheaper) than it should be. I myself leave my computer on at night when I’m not using it at all. I leave my phone charger plugged in when the phone isn’t plugged into it. I sleep with the light on some nights, without ever considering the bill at the end of the month. My family is on the bottom rung of the middle class and a few years ago we nearly lost our house. We often need to borrow from extended family to make ends meet. Electricity should be a more visible concern than it is.

Energy has resisted market pressures because the true costs are hidden. Nuclear power plants produce waste by the barrel and need to store it in hollowed out mountains so it doesn’t kill us all in our sleep. This is a cost people can see and understand, and so the cost of nuclear power includes the cost of shipping and storing and otherwise dealing with the waste-product of nuclear power.

Coal power, at present, is cheaper than it should be, because the waste is simply dumped into the air around us as though by putting it there we magically make it disappear. This is not the case. Eventually, someone is going to have to pay the market value of that waste, and the issue at hand is not paying it or not paying it, but whether we pay it now, or our grandchildren pay it later.

Frankly, I’d rather handle my own debts. Coal and Oil (though natural gas is cleaner - we could do with a little more utilization of that resource) are both limited resources and resources that generate invisible waste byproducts. Out of sight, out of mind doesn’t cut it anymore. It is a direct violation of the market. When we pay cheap prices for our coal and oil energy, we are literally being lied to. The market value of those products has been artificially deflated, which is making it impossible for cleaner, easier alternatives to get a share of that market.

As the price of energy rises (and whoever takes office, the price of energy will rise in the coming decade), it will become cost-effective to turn to alternative sources of energy. Under Obama’s plan, that will happen sooner rather than later, and this is a very, very good thing.

Here’s why.

China is presently chewing up a great percentage of the world’s energy resources. While they are doing their level best to install dams and solar panels, they are handcuffed by a variety of complicated circumstances, one of them being simply their level of industrial development.

We do not share in those handcuffs. If we turn to alternative energy sources, not only do we shed our dependence on foreign oil, we also drive down the cost of those resources for China and for other developing nations. This will make it easier for their markets to grow in the short-run, and might allow them to make the curve in time. If they do not, their markets will crash when oil and coal inevitably run out. Both are limited resources.

If we remain dependent on oil and coal, the day when it runs out will come that much sooner, and it seems very unlikely that anyone, including ourselves, will have made a sufficient transferal to alternative energy sources in time to prevent the resulting crash. Since people will see these resources coming to a close, part of this crash will inevitably be a massive world war resulting in the deaths of millions, as nations fight desperately to the death over the remaining sources of power.

I do not want this future, and neither do you. It is better to bite the bullet now, when we can take it. Later, it will take us.

That’s my ten cents for the day.

Stephen Colbert

2008-11-01T02:20:00.008-05:00

[message 11/02/08 - toy with this one awhile if you would, I'm going to be spending my writing time the next few days on my novel, just got over my block, somehow]

So the original plan was to come up with a 101-things list like those that exist for Chuck Norris, but as it turns out, Tiro and I are woefully insufficient to the task, working alone.

So instead, here's a few starters. Click on Comments below this article and give us a hand filling out the list. I figured Halloween was a good day for an article like this, since it involves almost no work on our part.

The starter list:

1. When Stephen Colbert ran for president, the president ran away.
2. Stephen Colbert is a Republican. Everyone else is a Republican't.
3. Stephen Colbert has razed the bar.
4. In Soviet Russia, America is Stephen Colbert.
5. Stephen Colbert is the reason all the rum is gone.
6. Stephen Colbert is so hot the Smithsonian Institute leaves the AC on through winter.
(Matt)7. If you look up Stephen Colbert in the dictionary, the dictionary turns to solid gold.
(Matt)8. Stephen Colbert was not born in a hospital, he delivered himself by C-section... without leaving a scar on his mother!
(Matt)9. If you're ever caught in an avalanche, say "Stephen Colbert" three times and the snow will instantly melt in awe.
(Matt)10. If you trick-or-treat in a Stephen Colbert mask, you will not receive candy, you will receive car keys.
(Matt)11. Stephen Colbert can spin straw into gold in exchange for your future children who will also be spun into gold.
(Matt)12. Stephen Colbert can cure cancer with the Mr. Miyagi hand rub.

I'll edit the list as you add things, and yes, on the main list, I'll credit your registered name 'n all that. Get crackin'.

History's Worst Left Turn: Israel in Palestine.

2008-10-31T00:46:00.015-05:00

*note: 1/6/09 - if your head has been under a rock, Israel has mortared a U.N. school in Gaza, killing 40ish, most of them civilian. Ostensibly the school was being used as a Hamas mortar base, but for lack of any reliable information (so far), I am without opinion. Israel has decided to open a "humanitarian corridor" in Gaza, whatever that means. If I were to offer advice, it would be to refrain from forming an opinion yourself until the facts are in. If Israel actively resists U.N. efforts to investigate the school incident, however, I will consider that facts enough for me. Neither side is allowing foreign reporters in, and no reporters appear to have the balls to go in anyway or sneak in from Egypt. When reporters follow the rules, investigative reporting is dead.*

I intentionally delayed this article, because I wanted Tiro’s discussion of the concept of Raman and Varelse to predate it. The concepts will weigh heavily in my discussion of the difficulties between Israel and the Palestinians, and how we should approach both groups. The downside is that the delay has resulted in the article being rather hefty, and covering rather more territory than one article should.

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians comes in and out of the news in phases, and each side of the conflict has found themselves, at various times, painted as mindless, hypocritical, evil-minded terrorists who scream a lot and brainwash small children. Israel gets the paint whenever they perform a “retaliatory strike” that kills hundreds of civilians (thankfully, they’ve mostly realized that this practice is counterproductive), and the Palestinians get the paint whenever some idiot launches a rocket into an Israeli settlement.

I’ve been back and forth on the issue myself. I think both groups have been acting like ass-holes a significant portion of the last fifty years. They both do their share of crying and bitching and moaning and painting. It becomes difficult sometimes to separate the marrow out from the meat.

There’s a few bits that are easy, of course:
1. “Israelis have killed more Palestinians than Palestinians have killed Israelis” (exact estimates vary, but they all basically agree on “a lot more”). This is true, however I wouldn’t say it’s for lack of trying on the Palestinian side. Frankly, Israel is good at killing people, Palestinians more or less suck at it. Rocket strikes used to be an all-day every-day thing, but they rarely killed anyone because the weapons were difficult to aim. That doesn’t change the fact that all-day, every-day, there were Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank (though to be fair, none of Israel’s borders have ever seen many consecutive hours of peace) trying as hard as they could to kill Israelis. As far as I’m concerned, when it comes to attempted mass murder or genocide, failure to succeed does not absolve you.

2. “The Wall around the Gaza Strip is working.” The wall was a stupid idea. Statistics indicate that since the construction of the “wall” suicide bombers and rocket strikes are down, but the wall went up in a transitive period, so it’s hard to know where to apportion the credit. The wall itself (in fairness most of the wall is a fence) was expensive to build, is easily climbed, and does a better job of blocking legitimate trade (food) than it does of blocking weapons. Smugglers don’t care if they have to throw a carpet over some barbed wire or toss a ladder against a wall, and there’s a refugee camp along the southern wall that (for diplomatic reasons - Egypt refused to give up “even an inch” of Egyptian land, but also didn’t want the refugee camp and so refused to accept a gift of land from Israel) exists half on one side of the wall, and half on the other. If you want to send anything explosive from Egypt into the Gaza Strip illegally, you just send it there.

It is impossible to grow enough food in the Gaza Strip to feed everyone living in the Gaza Strip, and the trade consequences of the embargo make it impossible to feed them at all. That said, those people (I wrote a paper doing exactly this once, so I include myself) who attempt to compare the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with South African Apartheid are reaching.

Under Apartheid the intent was to force residents to leave the “Bantu-stans” to do manual labor in South Africa to pay the monetary indemnities imposed on them. The “stans” were put on the crappiest land possible, deliberately overpopulated (massively) and divided into as many small “tribal” territories as possible, separated by tracts of South Africa proper. It was slavery. There is no analogous situation in the Gaza Strip. Aside even from the fact that Israel gave the Palestinians a massive stretch of perfectly viable coastline and a sufficient amount of land to live on (let’s face it, Palestine sucks for crops everywhere if you don’t irrigate) Israel’s government would absolutely love it if the Palestinians all got together under one government and settled into a daily routine that didn’t involve suicide bombing and rockets. Governments that exist are way, way easier to negotiate with than governments that don’t exist, and Israel (quite frankly) hates fighting wars. They’re costly, both in lives and money. It’s much cheaper to settle violent matters through the intervention of Mossad. As we’re learning in Iraq, a completely decentralized enemy loses every battle, but since none of them have the authority to concede defeat, it’s basically impossible for them to lose the war. Israel would like it very much if the Palestinian areas stabilized and grew prosperous. That would solve so many of Israel’s problems that the notion of Israel actively working against this outcome is patently ridiculous.

3. “Palestinians had Palestine before the Jews came. They’re just trying to get it back.” Don’t be stupid. The term “Palestinian” wasn’t even a nationalist term before Israel came into being. The land in question was shared between Jews and Arabs. There was occasional fighting, but for the most part eking out a living on Palestine’s worthless soil was hard enough without making trouble with the neighbors. Hell, the reason the location was chosen for the formation of Israel was that there was virtually no one there to cause a ruckus (most people could think of thirty or forty places they’d rather live, and did so if it were even remotely possible), and the allies figured any local Muslims who felt uncomfortable under the new government could just up ship and move to one of the (many) neighboring Muslim territories.

Which would have worked fine, if any of the neighboring Muslim nations had been willing to take them. Jordan didn’t want them because it already felt it had too many of “those people” and none of the other nations wanted the immigration either.

Point being, of course, that Israel invented the modern cohesion of the “Palestinian people” by existing. This is a war between two recently invented peoples, one of which (the Israelis - I realize the Jews existed before Israel, but Israel is a surprisingly diverse nation with an identity independent from the founding religion) now vastly outnumbers the other.

4. “Israel controls our government.” ... I don’t even know how to argue against this one. It’d be like getting in a fist-fight with a ten-year-old cripple. The United States has every reason, logically, philosophically, and morally, to be Israel’s ally. It would be a terrible mistake, particularly now, to break down that relationship. That means we act often in their interests, because their best interest often coincides with our own. I’ll go into greater detail in a few paragraphs.

-----------------

By now, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that my sympathies mostly lean towards Israel. In terms of nationalities, you are correct. However, in terms of the people, my sympathies are with the Palestinians. Most of them are innocent. Like everywhere else in the world, the greater percentage just want to get on with their lives and be left alone. This is as true in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as it is in Israel itself.

Hell, even in the Bantu-stans, most people wanted to get on with their lives. The reason the system was possible was that the South African government understood just exactly how much people would take before they went to war. (They miscalculated a bit, thankfully, and I’ll do an article later about how glad I am to see factions springing up within the ANC... a one-party system is unhealthy and I don’t believe that was ever the ANC’s intention, let alone Mandela’s.)

Even here, in America, we get wrapped up in politics about once every four years. The rest of the time we get up in the morning, go to work, make a buck, and go home to spend it on beer and pizza and toys for our kids. That’s what life is all about. Living.

So when someone comes along and twists your entire life around, makes it so the only options are “with us” or “against us,” everything goes out of whack. When you have to wave flags and march and hold up AK-47s (or stick a yellow ribbon on your SUV) or be called a traitor to “your people,” a line is drawn in the sand.

We see images of people shouting on soap boxes, screaming that they’re going to see Israel wiped off the map (it’s been all talk ever since the six-day war, of course... god damn but that was a beautiful piece of work and an article all in itself), but what we don’t see is people getting up, going to work, making a buck, going home, and spending it on beer and pizza and toys.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the point.

Raman. Varelse.

It may, in fact, be true that the Palestinian authorities and Israeli authorities cannot ever get along. They may be Varelse to each other. They may be incapable of communicating, or (as Tiro so aptly put it) incapable of coexisting culturally. But the people on both sides are not. They are people. The only battle lines drawn between one working mom and another are drawn from above.

I think it is important to remember that when you speak of defeating an entire people, what you speak of is genocide. Their army, their leaders, these are fair game. But to defeat a people, that is murder. When the Palestinian authorities rail about destroying “Israel,” they speak of genocide. Whether they “mean it” or not, or have “the capability” is irrelevant, particularly since they are speaking to a people who already went through that shit once. If Mexico started calling for the extermination of all Americans and launching rockets into Texas, how long would we put up with it? Sure, there’s no way in hell they’d ever accomplish anything, but there’s only so much of that kind of thing a government can put up with from its neighbors.

I’d give an analogous example from Israel, but there isn’t one. There have been no calls for genocide on that end, certainly not from anyone with authority. The government of Israel has been remarkably willing to make concessions of land, barring a few strategic locations from which Missiles were having unacceptable casualty-generating success. Even possessed of overwhelming military superiority, they agreed to divide Jerusalem and share the holy land. This is not South Africa. This doesn’t even resemble South Africa.

But he-said she-said doesn’t matter. What matters is you have two peoples spread out over a patch of land. All things being equal, both peoples just want to get up, go to work, make a buck and spend it on pizza, beer and toys. But certain small groups (capable of generating remarkable amounts of public drama) are unwilling to share, and they’re getting ordinary folks wrapped up in a fight they don’t want.

A professor I took a class from once whom I respect immensely (Professor Victor T. Le Vine) once told a story about a person he knows in the West Bank who expressed that they were glad of the fence surrounding them. They said the obstruction made “retaliatory raids” from Israel less frequent. They were better able to live their lives. Whether the raids are reduced because the incidents needing retaliatory action are reduced, or because the fence makes a huge, expensive obstruction if you want to move men or tanks over the border, is irrelevant.

What was important was that they could get on with their lives with less fear.

They’re not Varelse.

Hamas may be, and Al Qaida, and all those other little fringe groups that have been around since the formation of the Hash’Ashins back 1600 years ago or so. These groups (or at least their leaders) may be Varelse, and it seems likely that they are. But the people for whom they claim to fight are not, and it’s important that we remember who it is we’re fighting against, and who it is we’re fighting for.

Radicals of every tribe, nation, religion and creed are dangerous animals. They have managed to convince themselves that they have a mission more important than human life. We see it here in the hypocrites that blow up abortion clinics (abortion is murder, but not apparently the fire-bombing of an inhabited building). In Timothy McVeigh, as well, among others. We see it over there in Al’Qaida. It is important that we realize that a people cannot be held accountable for the errors-in-programming that spring up amongst them.

If your neighbor bombed an abortion clinic and someone retaliated by bombing your entire block, would you consider that justice? Of course not. That’s a ridiculous way to handle crime and punishment.

I realize it may be “hard” in the new era to separate out the Raman from the Varelse. Children walk up to helicopters and take the pins out of grenades. Mentally challenged individuals explode bomb-vests in crowded marketplaces.

I think, however, that it may be worth our while to try. To kill Varelse is arguably not a sin. The conflict is inevitable. To kill Raman though... that is troubling.

So my stand towards Israel, quite honestly, is that to take any “side” is to take the wrong side. Supporting “Palestine” is as foolish as not supporting “Palestine.” This construct exists only in the abstract, while the people exist in the actual. If you must support something, support the Palestinian people.

By this I mean to suggest that if you want to do something nice for the Palestinians, work to get them a government that works for them. Right now, their options are all demagogues who are long on power and short on common sense. Palestinians don’t need more land, they need a government capable of trade-relations and coordinated irrigation. You don’t have to look at many pictures of Israel compared with Palestinian-controlled territories to know which government is working out better for the people. And yeah, hatred is still a factor, but over time that will iron out. It always does. It just takes a hundred years or so of not killing one another and a hundred years more of getting addicted to each others’ coffee brands and textiles.

As far as the United States goes, there are a number of simple, strategic reasons why our friendship with Israel (yes, the construct, but it’s a democratic nation in the actual, so the construct is representative of the people to an acceptable degree) should be continued and enhanced.

1. We need a landing strip in the Middle-East. Anyone remember D-day? Me neither, and thanks to our bases all over the world, neither will our kids. Maintaining an effective military presence in Iraq is impractical because there isn’t a government there to legitimize us. We will constantly be fighting a war. However, should we withdraw from Iraq and need to return later, our good friend Israel will probably be more than willing to allow us to land our army on their airfields.

2. We need an intelligence agency capable of working in the Middle-East. Remember that national intelligence estimate (the N.I.E.) that said it was highly unlikely Iran was still working on nuclear weapons? That came from one man. Yes, we had (at that time) exactly one agent in Iran. Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence Agency, which has hundreds of agents there, told us he was full of shit, and I’m inclined to believe them. We just don’t know how to handle that region, but Israel does. A good working relationship between our agency and theirs is essential. We allow them to use our satellites, and they allow us to use the information generated by their spy networks. The gain is very mutual.

3. We often find it diplomatically prohibitive to take care of certain kinds of situations (assassinations and the like) but Israel does not. They can get away with it because they are not us (so we can’t be blamed) but they are under our protection (so they can’t be retaliated against). The system is pretty cool, actually. They took out the Egyptian nuclear program by assassinating half the scientists and making the remainder flee the country. They bombed the Iraqi attempt into the ground. Saddam didn’t have nukes when we got there in large part because Israel had already taken care of the problem for us.

They need us too, of course:

1. Protection. Israel is pretty tough on its own, but they are a cashew nut. We are a coconut.

2. Mossad is great, but the CIA has more toys, and Mossad benefits from these quite a bit.

3. We give them technology, often willingly, but sometimes not. They stole their first fissile material from the U.S., for instance. I’m cool with that. They got away with it because we had friendly relations and we didn’t want to mess them up. I’m cool with that too.

4. Support in the United Nations. Israel is not a member of the United Nations Security Council, so they do not have a voice there. We do.

So you see, we have with Israel the perfect diplomatic relationship. We get something, and they get something. Both the give and the take are valuable and the net trade for both parties is a profit. There is no problem here. The Israel lobby is so successful partly because they have a damned easy case to make. There’s no particularly good reason why we would want bad relations with Israel.

Oh, and I'm deliberately ignoring the whole issue with Britain making promises to everyone. Someone crossed his fingers behind his back a few too many times and suddenly the whole world's accountable and thousands have gotta die rather than deal with the reality of the situation? Not buying it, and neither should you.

That’s my ten cents for the day.

Tomorrow: Halloween. But check back Saturday and Sunday.

Marcus Tullius Tiro - Common Ground, or the Lack Thereof

2008-10-29T15:35:00.003-05:00

Tiro

"As the old proverb says, 'like readily consorts with like.'" - Cicero

In his Ender's Game series, which began as a short story published in 1977, the science fiction writer Orson Scott Card constructs a philosophical framework for understanding 'otherness,' which he termed 'The Hierarchy of Alienness.' The Hierarchy is one of those supreme examples of philosophy: something which largely unknown, or at least unnamed, before one hears it expressed, wholly self-evident after one has heard it, and largely non-trivial.

With much gratitude to Wikipedia and to card himself, I present the Hierarchy here, with some notes, first: within Ender's Game universe, the hierarchy originated in the fictional The History of Wutan in Trodheim, and, though Card describes the terms as coming from the Norwegian-derived language of Trondheim, they are (except for one) actually Swedish term. Additionally, within the Ender's Game universe, the Hierarchy uses the term 'alien' to refer to humans who are from different cultures, as well as actual aliens, in the sense of differing species. I hope you will agree with me, though, in that the hierarchy is still offers some relevent insights into relations within our own species.

The Hierarchy

Utlanning (from Swedish: "outlander" or "foreigner") - these individuals, while 'strangers' in the traditional sense, are members of a person's own species or culture. Americans from different cities, Europeans from different countries, or, say college students from different dormitories at the same school could all be considered utlanning, depending on the level of detail one is considering.

Framling ("stranger", from the Swedish främling) - this term refers to strangers who are of the same species, though from another world or culture, one who is "both substantially similar to and significantly different from ourselves." In the Ender's Game universe, this term is used to describe humans living on different worlds, but it could be used to describe the relationship between, say, natives of Britain and America, who share, for the most part, a common language and a largely common history.

Ramen (Card's original term) - these are strangers of who are of another species, and yet capable of communication and peaceful coexistence with, in Card's model, Homo sapiens sapiens -- although this does not ensure communication will take place; nor does such communication ensure peaceful coexistence. While Card uses the term to describe the relations between humans and certain species of aliens in his books, one could take this term to refer to, say, Americans and Chinese: while the majority of the members do not share a common language, and many of their customs differ significantly, there are many who can and do communicate between the cultures (and many individuals who are simultaneously members of both communities), and, obviously, peaceful coexistence is possible. From a slightly different angle, men and women (and, by this, I mean the standard, traditional Western view, which for the most part sees gender and sex as the same, etc.) might consider each other to be ramen. The two groups are certainly different in fundamental, physical ways, but there is a large body of shared culture between the groups (of course, one could make an equally strong argument for these groups viewing each other as framling, etc.).

Varelse (from Swedish: "creature") - pronouced 'var-ELSS-uh,' this term refers to strangers from another species who are simply not capable of communication with Homo sapiens sapiens. In the truest sense, they are aliens, "completely incapable of common ground with humanity." In Card's view, a meeting with true varelse must eventually, over time, lead to war.

Although I found the entire Hierarchy interesting when I first encountered it, the concept of the "ramen/varelse border," if you will, struck me as fascinating. In the Ender's Game universe, humanity is engaged in a war with a species that is deemed varelse at first, although later war is averted when the two groups manage to develop a framework for communication. Later, Card describes the differences between terms as originating not from the 'stranger' being named, but the one doing the naming. At one point, one of Card's characters remarks, somewhat cynically, that "As far as I can tell, intelligence is intelligence. Varelse is just the term Valentine invented to mean Intelligence-that-we've-

decided-to-kill, and ramen means Intelligence-that-we-haven't-decided-to-kill-yet." As a response of sorts, the character who first constructs the Hierarchy aknowledges this in one of her later works:

"The difference between ramen and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have."

—Demosthenes, Letter to the Framlings

In terms of internal human affairs, the entire concept seemed to finally give a name to that which had constantly bothered me about the current 'war' between Western/American culture and radical Islam. What if it truly is the case that, even though we can find a collection of words and a grammatical framework that allows us to speak, we cannot communicate? Is it, therefore, not possible to even consider reconciling our differences and laying down arms until we find a common tongue - not a question of Arabic or English, but a question of ideologies?

Of course, the concept is certainly not limited to this one case. The territorial and sovreignty disputes, now and historically, in Ireland, Georgia, the Middle East, the Balkans, and so on -- many of these are between groups who often share some language or culture, but is this enough? Are there insurmountable differences in fundamental world-views that not only make peace difficult, but outright impossible?

That said, at first blush, this may not seem like (or, in fact, be) a new idea. The concept of needing some common ground, a shared framework, before conflict resolution con proceed is old news, even to those who are new to the issues. What I see as novel is the idea that it may not simply be a question of choice: the answer may not simply be that both parties should 'grow up,' make some concessions, and at least agree on some basic rules. Card's hierarchy takes this a step further and says that this may not actually be possible - that under certain circumstances, we lack even the ability to image what common ground would look like - and under these circumstances, war is inevitable.

In a sense, we see this in our daily lives, especially in the twin fields of politics and religion. Though the vast majority of us see the world in a mix of objective and subjective terms, share at least some common ground with others, and firmly believe that there are areas of grey in between the black and white, there are those who know a singular concept of Truth. This is not to say that either world-view is correct: practically by definition, the concept of 'correctness' is fundamentally intertwined with truth, and, if we allow for some common framework, I, for one, believe that practically any viewpoint can be argued. But in the discussion on, say, drug policy, there are those who hold views which are fundamentally, irreconcilibly different, for whom the basic axioms and the rules one can apply to them are in conflict.

-------------------------------------

As before, there are many things still to say, and many ideas still to examine. I hope, for now, though, you take something new away from the Hierarchy, as I did.

As always, your most humble and obedient servant,

Marcus Tullius Tiro

===============

Tomorrow: The long-delayed article - Israel.

Namer of god

2008-10-28T00:21:00.005-05:00

As an “agnostic,” one finds often that you are alone in the world. There are millions of you, but it’s extremely hard to set up an “agnostic” church, because most churches are religious institutions devoted to the worship of a certainty. The closest thing to an agnostic church I’ve found in this life is the Unitarian church, followed closely by the church of Satan, the latter of which has an ideology (and a stupid, intentionally confrontational and misleading name) and the former of which is broadly rooted in Christianity.

If I were required to be anything that already exists, I suppose I’d be a Unitarian, for lack of any better options.

But I’m not. So I’m not. I’m a searcher - agnostic in the true sense, I’m open-minded and looking for a path through the muck and the mire, guided by my own conscience. I love discussing religion, but most of the interested parties have already made up their mind one way or another, so the conversation tends to take the form of Preach-equivocate-preach-equivocate and essentially resembles the sensation of me banging my head against a brick wall. Eventually I get dizzy enough to make concessions, a phenomenon I think explains most of the success of organized religion.

I digress.

I don’t have a religious community, but I want a religious community, and since a proper one doesn’t exist, I’m going to make one. I’m going to start a religion.

The religion I’m forming has no particular ideology. It is quite literally a church of agnosticism. There’s a sense recently that people have started worshiping books at the expense of god, and I feel that this is problematic. God is being taken out of his/her/its own picture.

The only requisite for being a member, a “Namer of god,” is an open mind. You don’t even have to stop being a Catholic, or a Jew, or a Muslim. Keep your old faith if you want it. The only rule within the bounds of the church is toleration. You may seek converts to your old faith within the bounds of this new one, but should they choose to seek god in another manner, you may not obstruct them. If you do not believe that your current religion allows for such tolerance, then this is not the place for you. But if you’re sick of all this fighting, bickering, killing, maiming, stealing, lying, cheating, men and women who claim that their way is the only way, then maybe this is right for you.

One day, I hope to set up sanctuaries where people who are willing to listen, to try to understand, to seek truth rather than begging for revelation like a dog begging for table scraps, can gather and talk, can sermonize, can argue, can shout and cry and pray in whatever way and language they damn well please, and do it all under one roof: a statement of solidarity in their differences.

We all want to get to god. I think all this my-way-or-the-highway crap is just that. Crap. I think it detracts from the brotherhood of man. I think it detracts from god’s vision of the world. I think it causes unnecessary pain and suffering, and distracts believers from what really matters, from the greater good, and from the humanity of those around them.

So I hereby declare the formation of the Namers of god, those who seek the name of god however they might choose to. Those who are tired of being the black sheep, the lone operator. Those who are tired of being stereotyped as atheists, abused as non-believers, harassed and distrusted for their “ungodliness.” We will be a bastion for the lost, the confused, and all the various believers who, for minor differences, have begun to feel themselves estranged from their establishments. I think this is as good a time as any to make our own way in the world.

Let there be a new, less exclusive club of god, and for a symbol take whatever the hell you want and wear it out. You can borrow mine if you’d like, or wear another. It doesn’t matter, so long as when someone asks "what does that symbol mean" you reply "It means I'm a Namer of god."

-

In truth, I started this religion quite some time ago, but I’ve been the only member, and the idea has been refining since then, mulling about in brain-juices and being bounced off unsuspecting minds in one form or another.

My personal beliefs are ultimately irrelevant to the religion, but I feel they should be outlined nonetheless, in case anyone should feel like jumping on board for the hell of it, or just wants to know where I’m coming from:

I believe that god exists in the unknown, and is responsible for the unknown. You could say he/she/it exists in the cracks of our knowledge. As we learn more, god becomes bigger, because the cracks in our knowledge become more numerous and larger (the more complex our image of the universe becomes, the more questions we have in proportion to our answers). But god also becomes farther away and less relevant to our daily lives. One way to put it would be that as soon as we know something, it becomes our responsibility.

Metaphorically speaking, think of god as a good parent and our species as a child. That which the child cannot understand, the parent protects them from (to the best of their abilities), but that which they can understand becomes more and more their own responsibility to deal with. Laundry, Yard work, Dating, homework, one by one things that the child’s parents help with become things that they don’t. Eventually, food, lodging, clothing, and all other bucks get passed, and the child is responsible for everything. The child will ask his or her parent for advice from time to time, and receive it, and when unforeseen circumstances deal them a bad hand, the parent may bail them out. But the parent no longer intervenes directly in their daily, hourly, minutely life.

Sure, that means the child has more responsibility than he’d sometimes like, but that’s just part of growing up, and responsibility is a necessary side-effect of freedom. Furthermore, it is the responsibility of the child to grow up, even if he/she might not want to.

One could extend that principle to say that mankind may have been bound by god to rules before, but those rules are being reevaluated as we grow. Christianity in many ways envisioned itself as a growing-up from Judaism... much of the new testament is a tract of liberation, promising to mankind that a new pact has been formed with god. You get less allowance, and you’ll have to get a job, but you can own a car now and go on dates, and your curfew is midnight now, rather than ten. You get to wear cotton and eat pigs. That sort of stuff. A pretty grand idea if someone hadn’t come along and started mucking up the principle.

In short, in my estimation, it’s time for mankind to move out of the nest altogether and start taking responsibility for itself. It's time we stop justifying our actions and start understanding them.

But that’s mine. Take up the mantle of a Namer and show me yours.

------------------------------

Anyway, if anyone wants to take on the mantle and feels the need for some officialness (after all, the point of this whole mess is to form a community of sorts), email me at Karrakis@gmail.com and I’ll start building a roster, just for fun. Who knows but that one day, we might graduate to having a forum!

This is the symbol I’ve taken up. Whether you take it up yourself or craft your own is your own beef.

That’s my ten cents for the day.

Tomorrow: The same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to take over the world.

The Bear Necessities

2008-10-24T04:00:00.005-05:00

I would like to begin by explaining my usage of the two major keywords you’ll see in this article today.

State:

A state as an entity is probably best defined as a group of people who want to be considered a State. However, for the purposes of this article, which are more practical than philosophical, a State is an entity which has a monopoly on the use of force in a given region. You’ll see in a moment that this begs the question a bit, but I don’t particularly feel like arguing semantics today. As Quine put it, “'Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.”

Monopoly on use of force is the one thing that all states have in common from beginning to end, a thing which defines and in truth demarcates the beginning and end of a “State” in the sense used in this article. I am here deliberately avoiding any argument regarding exactly what a State is, because such an argument would distract from the essential purpose of this article, and for the purposes of this article the definition of “State” that I use is sufficient.

Government:

Often a part of a State, possessed of the function of creating and enforcing Laws, be they so simple as feudal taxation or as needlessly complicated as Roe vs. Wade. A government must enforce these laws, and people living under the government’s rule must obviously know the laws in order not to break them, so the government must also have a mechanism for educating the public.

A friend of mine recently put up the feudal system as an example of a system of governance in which education was not an essential component. But feudalism was a contract, in essence, between peasants and lords, lords and kings, kings and Pope. The church was a necessary component in feudalism (if nothing else, divine right of kings requires divinity) and it acted as the ultimate authority. Education was most certainly a component of the church, and it was the education passed down by the church which gave kings their authority.

Kings often ignored the pope for their own personal reasons, but excommunication was a catastrophe for a king, and such instances were more analogous to an argument on the senate floor than a laughing denial of authority. That the church had authority was not in question, because the authority of kings flowed from the church in the same manner that the authority of lords flowed from the kings.

It is meaningless to argue about whether this is actually the case. If it is not the case, then the system of which you speak is not feudal. If the system is not feudal, then the ultimate authority does not go to the church, but instead to the government. If the ultimate authority goes to the government, it must be above the church. If it is above the church, and the church teaches the laws of the land, then the church is a state institution (England). If the church is independent from the government altogether, preaches against the ruling authority and is simultaneously the sole source of education, then the government quickly loses legitimacy and its denizens cease to identify with it. Rebellion becomes inevitable.

A Government, then, is defined by its ability to enforce Law and provide Education. Education legitimizes Law, Law legitimizes internal monopoly of force. A government is a tool a State uses to maintain a monopoly on the use of force.

From that reasoning I extrapolate that the essential services provided by the kind of state under which we live, and the kind of government under which we live, include:

1. Defense
2. Education
3. Law
4. Law enforcement

Offensive capability is nice, of course, but so long as our borders are defended, waging war is not to be considered a necessary function. I say this so as to specify that when I speak of “Defense” I speak of defense, not a runaway “defense” budget.

With these four services taken care of, our government and our State (the combination of which I heretofore shall dub “S/G”) can exist as such. It wouldn’t do much, but it would exist.

This is, however, bare bones. For our government to suitably perform the function for which it is ultimately intended, the following come highly recommended as well:

1. Market Controls (Trust busting, some oversight and occasional intervention to prevent bank failures like the one we just saw averted).
2. Research Funding (I’ll lay out a priorities chart for this in a later article, the issue is large enough to merit one of its own)
3. Road building, maintenance and repair (including railroads)
4. Mail Service (this should arguably be listed under necessaries, but that category is restrictive for a reason and the inclusion of Mail in this category should serve to elevate your impression of what I mean by “highly recommended”)
5. Safety Net
6. Intelligence Network

Most of these are obviously necessary, and I seriously doubt anyone at this point would say that complete government non-intervention (which would allow monopolies, strong-arm tactics, copyright violation and patent theft) is healthy for markets, so hopefully I won’t have to waste time arguing for number 1 too much. I considered including 6 as part of “necessary” 1 (Defense) but opted not to mostly because I wanted to emphasize its importance, but also because it’s technically possible for a state to get along without one.

I do think it’s necessary to make the case for number 5 as an abstract concept. The safety net enables risk-taking, risk-taking enables capitalism. If you don’t have one, the other doesn’t work. People argue over how wide the net should be, and what it should be made of, but they shouldn’t be arguing about whether it should exist.

My overarching point, I think, is that our government does all these things, does them at least competently (mail arrives), and is probably going to continue doing these things for the foreseeable future. Everything in the highly recommended category is presently accounted for, and everything in the “necessary” category is accounted for to the minimum necessary, at least.

This frees us up to consider improvements in other areas, and to view budget cutbacks to things that do not fall into one of these categories non-fatal.

More to the point, it frees us to consider the relationship between the necessary, the highly recommended, and everything else. By this I mean to imply that When the necessaries are doing well, and the highly recommended categories are doing well, everything else is doing well. When everything else is doing poorly, something is awry in one of the categories above. Since everything not in these categories (I may have missed a few, feel free to remind me of any that come to mind) can be taken care of in the private sector, it’s safe to say that one of the best things we could be doing is diverting funds from unnecessary expenses (the war in Iraq, building bridges to islands with a population of 50, squabbling endlessly on the senate floor over the definition of “marriage,” propping up dictators and intervening in military coups in nations with gross national products that couldn’t buy a plane ticket to New York if they had the inclination) to the necessary and highly recommended ones.

You’ll notice something about the necessary and highly recommended categories as well. With the exception of HR6, they’re all domestic. This might indicate a bias on my part, but I don’t think so. A state which performs all functions expected of it at home and adopts an isolationist foreign policy is still a state. A state which performs all functions expected of it abroad and fails to do all the things necessary at home is at best an occupying force.

Right now, I think Education is our weakest link, in the long term, followed shortly by foreign oil dependency, which falls under one necessary and one HR category, Defense and Research respectively.

At present, Law enforcement, Law, Market Controls (yes, I realize the economy is crashing, but I’m in the camp that considers this a symptom, not a disease), Road repair, Mail, and Intelligence are fairly healthy. The Safety Net could use some work, but honestly I think the problems with the safety net are closely linked to the problem in Education. Solving Education should fix both the safety net and the economic issues we face. It should also help with R&D related to alternative energy, in the long run.

We don’t really have that long, however, so at present we need to shift funding, resources and attention away from non-necessary and non-HR categories and into Education and Research. Research should, in solving the energy crisis, simultaneously fix the defense issue (dependence on foreign oil means that foreign embargo can turn our lights out at will) associated with energy.

That means non-essential programs should be ready to tighten their belts for awhile. Those who can do with a little less for a time should be ready to pay higher taxes (sorry rich folks, but that doesn’t include people who get by on 20k per year in roach-infested apartments). In the short term it'll hurt a bit, but in the long term you'll get back what you lost. As the Wiccan say, threefold return for good or for ill. Really can't figure out why people have such a problem with that religion... it's full of simple ways of saying common sense.

That's my ten cents for the day.

Tomorrow: The promised Philosophical rambling.

Utilitarianism (or, a Case for Liberal Conservativism) - Marcus Tullius Tiro

2008-10-22T17:20:00.005-05:00

The following is a guest article by Marcus Tullius Tiro:
========================================================

"O tempora, o mores!" - Cicero

Greetings, all.

When Maxwell asked me to join the conversation here, I was originally going to write a piece about Orson Scott Card's 'Hierarchy of Alienness,' and how it relates to the geopolitical and military crises of the day, but, after reading the previous post, I decided to postpone that for the moment. Instead, I'd like to introduce myself, discuss the concepts of welfare and public goods, and describe a philosophical framework that has always seems obvious and natural to me, but that I have yet to see in practice.

First, myself -- I am a native-born American, in my mid-twenties, and I'm currently working towards a doctorate at a relatively prestigious American university. I certainly don't claim to be an expert on most of the matters that will be discussed here, but I do believe that my education has given me the tools to ask the right questions, at least. Most relevant for the moment, I consider myself to be a sort of 'utilitarian libertarian' -- a philosophy that I shall lay out here.

On a technical note, though, the term 'public good' has a precise meaning in the world of economics: it is a good or service that is both non-rival and non-excludable. Non-rival means that if one person uses some of the good, it does not stop another person from using it (i.e. if I uses the park, there's just as much 'park' left for Maxwell), and non-excludable means that absolutely anyone in the society can use the good (i.e. I don't need a membership card, etc., to get into the park). Under this definition, there are few things which are really public goods; traditionally 'public' goods may be rival - if 5000 people decide to use the same section of public beach on a Saturday afternoon, I may be hard pressed to find a spot for my blanket - or they may be excludable, depending on where you draw boundaries - anyone living in Townsville can use the Townsville pool, but people from New City can't. Naturally, a whole host of terms has grown up for these concepts: 'club goods' may refer to public goods that are excludable, 'collective goods' may refer to things that are actually provided by and owned by the government instead of as actual public goods, etc.

And, on to the philosophy. Permit me, if you will, to construct a thought experiment: we have a group of people. Let us not assume anything about these people other than that they will act like humans do -- some will work hard, some will be lazy; some will act 'good' out of morals or conscience, while some will take advantage of others when they can; some act charitably, some will be greedy, and so on.

While the group (let us call them 'the society') could be left alone, to form (or not form) some type of governing body, let us instead impose a system of government, one that is based on a relatively simple philosophy: there are times when, left to their own devices, people will act in ways that are not beneficial to themselves as individuals; in these cases, government should intervene. John Nash, now of Hollywood fame, thanks to A Beautiful Mind, is probably the best known researcher in the field of game theory, which deals with (among other things) these problems -- one can show, in a host of examples, that these problems occur. If there's interest, I can provide a few examples.

Now, armed with our philosophy, let us build.

Military -- This is almost trivial: if the society in the next valley decides to organize a raid, coordinated efforts will likely be required to repel them. Since everyone stands to lose from not fighting back, any particular individual could choose to avoid fighting, knowing that the other members of the society will take up arms in his place. Thus, left to their own devices, it is possible that people, on the whole, will end up acting in a way that ends up being bad for society, and for themselves, individually. Additionally, there are issues of coordination, training and the need for capital investment, and so on -- on the whole, military force ends up being something that the government should be providing.

Police -- Along very similar lines to military, one can make a relatively strong argument that government should be providing this as well.

Now, let us reflect for a moment. It is comforting to see that the one role of government that is common to practically every system of government -- protection from threats, both foreign and domestic -- derives from our basic assumptions and philosophy, rather than having to be taken as an additional assumption. In a similar vein, we can continue to build a government that takes an active role only when a solid case can be made for involvement, based on the idea that individuals, not just 'the society' as a whole, will be hurt otherwise. Fundamentally, this is a 'conservative' ideology, but it leads one to a number of conclusions that are traditionally seen as more 'liberal.'

To return to a favorite topic of Maxwell's, take education. Education - by which I mean universal, standardized intellectual training that teaches students not only what 2x4 is and who their vice president is, but also why we should care about these things, and gives them to tools to come to their own conclusions - benefits everyone. It benefits students, obviously, but it also benefits parents, it benefits people without children who live in the area, whose home values rise with education, it benefits employers, for whom it is easier to find qualified employees, and it benefits us all by giving us the tools to try and elect better leaders. As Aaron Sorkin said, speaking through the character of Sam Seaborn of The West Wing:

"Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes. . . . Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense."

I'll return to this topic later, if Maxwell will grant me another guest column!

------------------------------

To conclude, the past pages have laid out a philosophy, or, if you wish, an ideology. It is an ideology that clearly makes implications about what is right and wrong in government and society, but I believe that it is fundamentally better than many of the prevailing ideologies today, because it has clarity and simplicity. We can debate endlessly about how best to educate the youth of our country, and we can debate what conditions, if any, make abortion acceptable, and so on, but we mostly agree on the basis of this philosophy. And building a stable basis, and defining our terms, is, in my most humble opinion, the best way of starting a debate of any kind.

-- Marcus Tullius Tiro

============================

Tomorrow: I will expand Tiro's idea of necessary government functions and attempt to compose a prioritized list for a government with limited economic resources.

Public Goods

2008-10-20T23:10:00.004-05:00

A park is only a park if it is owned by a community. Without the people within it, a park is not a park. A park owned by a single person is a garden, but you do not go to the garden, or take your kids to the garden, or go play soccer in the garden.

You go to the park.

Here in St. Louis we have a park we call the “botanical gardens” but really, it’s a park. You go to the botanical gardens, you take your kids to the botanical gardens. Admittedly, they probably wouldn’t let you play soccer there, but it’s still a park. There’s people there. You’re never alone (unless you sneak in after dark. Then you are, and it’s more than a little bit creepy, too.

I bring this to your attention because today I’d like to discuss a little piece of communism that has crept into our lives, beloved by us all without our knowing. It is the public good.

A public good is something owned by a community and maintained by a community, intended for community use. It could be something as simple as a Television that all denizens of a home share between them, rather than buying a television for each person in the house. It could be something as large as a lake or as essential as a Levy. It could be something as standard, as obvious, as necessary to a community as a park. What community is a community without a park? Sure, there are rural areas where they don’t have parks, but that’s because the entire community is in a park, of sorts. They don’t have to protect a little pocket of nature, because nature is all around them. Even there, though, you find parks. You find them behind school-houses, where the enclosed green and playground equipment form a safe environment for children to run around in, free of the less friendly parts of nature, like poison ivy or rattlesnakes. You find them near government buildings, and sometimes you find them demarcated simply by a fence that says “such and such national park” but which means “The stuff on that side of this fence is nature, but the stuff on this other side is a national park.”

You may be wondering, at this juncture, what my point is. After all, who could argue that parks are bad? That would be silly. Everyone loves parks.

Which is more or less the point. People who don’t use parks, or have kids, or play soccer, or even particularly like trees, they all pay for the park. No one questions whether they should pay for the park, they just do. No one asks why they pay for the Levy, that’s obvious. No one asks why they pay the salaries of the park rangers in the national preserves, they just do. If they get upset it’s over not being able to mine for or build inside the fence. They don’t mind paying for nature preserves they just argue over where they should be.

But when someone gets an unemployment check, all the world is torn asunder.

Welfare, too, is a public good of a sort. It isn’t visible, like a park or a wildlife preserve, but it’s every bit as essential as the levy. You just don’t know how important it is to pay for welfare until the levy breaks, not to lay on the metaphor too thick. When you need it, suddenly it’s important. But it’s more than that, too. When people need it, not even you, and it isn’t there, then that’s a catastrophe for them and for you. They die, your streets are lined with dead bodies. They starve, your streets are lined with beggars. They get angry, your door is beaten down by an angry mob. They get angry and hungy?

Let’s just say that most of European history can be explained by the lack of a welfare system. When you have no safety net, you have nowhere to go but to arms. Everyone would rather have a peaceful, nonviolent way to get food, but if they don’t have it, then they’re just going to resort to the other way. We all would, given the need. Welfare isn’t only in place to protect the mob from you, it’s in place to protect you from the angry mob. It is the levy that stands between your wealth and someone realizing that they have nothing left to lose.

So no more of this talking about “doing away with” welfare. That’s stupid. Do you do away with a levy? No. Do you do away with a park? No. Welfare needs to be repaired. The system is broken, the bureaucracy is bloated, but we can’t do away with it, even if we just want it gone so we can rebuild it. It is a levy. If you want a new levy, you build it before you demolish the old one. If you want a new welfare system, the same rules apply.

----

The next few days may be somewhat dry. A good friend of mine is writing a guest article which should segue well into the Israel question and give us all some food for thought. I'll try to post a little something every day until he's ready though, even if it's only a photograph or a link to something entertaining.

Science has been wrong before, too

2008-10-19T23:19:00.001-05:00

I was browsing the interwebs today, as is my wont, and I found myself in an argument with a kid who said that “science” had told someone something. It is irrelevant what it was that “science” had told her, it is the same tired argument that has for centuries assailed the scientific community. “Yes, we see the evidence, but science has been wrong sometimes too.”

No, it hasn’t.

Science cannot be wrong, because science has no opinion. The scientific community can make errors, yes, and individuals do it fairly often, if not daily. But “science” as an entity exists only in the lower-case. It is a method, a way of thinking, and membership in the scientific community is limited, objectively, only by one’s willingness to apply the method to an end. To your life. To a petri dish.

“Scientists” are only people who apply the method. It has nothing to do with their degree. If a person with a doctorate informs you that the sky is red, that the ocean is pink, that your underwear are made from rainbows, they came to that conclusion unscientifically. In that moment, they were not acting as a scientist.

To say that “science” has said something implies a complete lack of understanding regarding what science is. I believe that this may fuel most of the controversy between “science” and “religion.”

Proponents of the truths of religions, whichever religion they may be championing, find that they may assault “science” without evoking much of a counter-reaction. They cannot assault the ideology, the ideology of science is water-tight. It says nothing that common sense does not validate. Instead, they assault individual claims, and think that when they claim victories (at great cost) against those individual claims, they have won a great victory against science. But they do not evoke much of a counter-reaction because there's simply no one home when they throw the rock. Sure, if it's something being worked on all the time, something fundamental, like evolution, then there's people inside that theory all the time, applying the method, getting hit by the rocks, but the dinosaurs? Remember when that guy set up that museum to teach kids that the dinosaurs and people lived in harmony together? Not much reaction. People laughed.

That war is over. They are the insurgents now, small pockets of people who do not want to join the world as it is now. Science had already won, way back when Christians started using soap and doctors started using disinfectants to combat the unseen-but-obviously-there. It won when we started flying planes through the sky (ever flown in a plane designed by someone who didn’t believe that air was physically present?), when the lightbulb was invented, and when we started colliding electrons, too small to be seen by the naked eye, in gigantic machines covering acres of land.

Sure, religion is still around, and I’m not here to knock it. It adapts, just like everything else. It is a necessary component of human life. I myself am a Namer of god, I’m not going to knock anyone else’s beliefs. But when people are ready to watch the world end rather than admit that we’ve thrown things out of whack?

The kid I ran across was using the “science has been wrong before” argument to downplay the importance of global climate change.

Science has been wrong before.

The world is ending, but science has been wrong before, so let’s not bother doing anything about it.

That is some fucked up shit.

Detritus

2008-10-18T23:53:00.000-05:00

I must break with my pattern for a day. Israel may come tomorrow. I wish to think out loud.

There is a phenomenon that is common to all great works of art, be they books, or paintings, or games of chess. I do not think this phenomenon has a name yet, so I will give it one. I shall call it the Detritus Phenomenon.

When the great statue stands, finished at last, so real it nearly breaths and so glorious it blots out the sun, it is surrounded by cast-off, by waste, by small pieces of rock, or clay, ground into the floorboards by the passage of uncaring boots. This cast-off material, this detritus, is endless. The weight of it grows greater until it fills the nest of the creator and he no longer bothers to throw it away. A thousand lost sentences for every one published, dried paint scraps and ruined prints, expensive ink and paper discarded because they were not good enough, were fouled by dust, or were touched by the ghost of impurity. In the end, to create greatness, we must also create detritus.

A spotless home, a swept floor, a well-organized desk, even a clean background check: These are the greatest tragedies of mankind. Does man believe that this detritus goes away when he discards it? If you move it from one place to another, does it mean you have become clean, or only that your mess becomes another’s? It takes so much energy to move detritus, so much time, that we must eventually choose between two imperfect options.

We may leave the detritus be and become mad,

Or we may move it away from us, and become less.

Let us embrace the schizophrenic dorm room, the scraps of paper covered in dust, the scattered notes, the books bent out of shape, the unmade bed, even the wastebasket overflowing with tissues, used condoms and junk mail. Let us embrace the studio apartment with more paint on the floor than on the canvas. Let us embrace the worst writing of man, left scattered across the four winds of the internet, assaulting us at every turn. There is no escape.

To create beauty, you must embrace madness.

Insanity shall be our gift to man.

Detritus defines us.

The Not-So-Inevitable Victory

2008-10-18T02:31:00.004-05:00

The War

Here is the math.

The government we’re propping up in Iraq has an 80 billion dollar surplus. This is not being spent either to defray our costs, or to revitalize the areas that have been devastated by this conflict. It is also not being spent to stabilize the government or to build up the local military. It is not being spent. This would be understandable if there wasn’t anything in Iraq that needed doing, but there are quite a lot of things in Iraq that need doing.

Any reasonable governing body in the situation in which the Iraqi government finds itself now would be in horrendous debt. The Iraqi government isn’t. Thus, I must conclude that the Iraqi government isn’t a reasonable governing body.

Of course, the alternative is that there’s just no one with the authority to spend the dough. Since this basically amounts to the same thing, this need not alter any conclusions.

The war is costing approximately 341 million dollars per day. The United States has a population of 301 million, meaning that the war is costing each individual one dollar and thirteen cents daily, or 412 dollars per year. Bringing the 80 billion dollar surplus (annual) of the Iraqi government into play (or to put it bluntly, taking it away from them) would reduce the cost of the war to approx. 121 million dollars per day, with a cost individual of 146 dollars per year.

Most of the money spent on this war is, whether directly or indirectly, being borrowed from foreign countries, and will later need to be dealt with, either by (ideally) paying it back plus interest or (less ideally) making war on the holders of our debt. Since making war on our lenders would negate our ability to borrow our way through the war, the expense of such a war would likely have a very similar economic impact to simply paying our lenders back what we owe, and I think it’s safe to say no one wants us to be that much like France anyway.

So.

Since the estimated population of the nation I used includes non-workers and children, It can be concluded that bringing the 80 billion dollar surplus of the Iraqi government into play would save a family of four 1164 dollars per year.

Ending the war outright would save the same family 1648 dollars per year.

To any of you making a healthy living wage, that may not seem like so much. But 137 dollars per month is a significant chunk to most families these days, and it can certainly make the difference between health insurance or no health insurance, rent or no rent, electricity or no electricity, house or no house, food or no food.

So that’s the math. Now, the philosophy.

As I mentioned two days ago in my first post, I’m of the opinion that a war without understood victory conditions is a dangerous animal. Back in the olden days, a war would end with the taking of a city, a hostage, a field, or the turn of a battle. A signed document, perhaps. Today, things are not so simple, apparently.

We crushed their army, dismantled their government, established hegemony over the bulk of their people, and still we must retreat. This is a different world than the one the makers of this war grew up in. The goals are not the same.

They told us there were WMDs, which of course there were (In a sense... Saddam had already used some forms of poison gas on “his own people” if anything is ever so simple), but there were no nukes because Israel had seen to that prospect already. We dismantled the government structure entirely, rather than simply chopping off the head, and were left attempting to construct an entire bureaucratic system from zero. No mail, no police, neighborhood security outside the “green” zone ensured only by the surprisingly earnest efforts of local gangs and/or tribal groups.

Anbar was not our success, it was a coalition of tribal leaders who opted to do our job for us.

Then, they told us we were making Iraq into a democracy. What an absurdity! A democracy is built not on majority rule but rather on the principle of minority rights, something which I cannot see taking root in the Muslim world any more than it jives with the Christian world, or the Satanists. Religious motivation is dangerous because it does not compromise. Absolute truth divides the world into good and bad, us and them, the living, and the dead.

We have lost Iraq, not merely because of money, but because we do not speak the same language. Literally, of course, this is true (at one point we had only seven Arabic translators working in Iraq, and one of them was fired because he was homosexual... irony’s a bitch), but my intended meaning is metaphorical. We say “we will make you free” and they hear “we will make you us.” The ground in the middle east is not well suited for the growth of plants like Democracy. Not yet.

Iran though... Iran speaks the language, both literally and metaphorically. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, in the end. God knows we will not be there to take part.

Whichever president takes office, we will be withdrawing from Iraq. The money is not there and our nation has jumped headlong into an economic crisis and dragged the world down with it. We have bigger fish to fry than Iraq right now.

It isn’t a matter of whether to end the war in Iraq, or even really when. It’s a matter of how.

That's my ten cents for the day.

Tomorrow: Why I "support" Israel, and why you should too.

The Value of a Good Education

2008-10-16T20:07:00.006-05:00

Education.

The word is bandied about these days in conjunction with phrases like “charter schools” and words like “vouchers.” It has become a little confusing, trying to figure out what all the gibberish means for schools. Thus, before I discuss education, it seems proper to engage in a quick summary of the terminology.

Vouchers are a system by which parents can choose where their school taxes go. In other words, in an unaltered voucher system, they may send their kids to private school and use their tax money as part of their tuition. At face value the system seems fair enough, after all, who doesn’t want control over where their money goes?

Upon closer examination, however, problems appear. First, the vouchers do not cover the whole amount of tuition to a private for-profit institution. In truth, the vouchers don’t really cover even half. This means that generally, low-income families cannot take advantage of this system because they can’t cover the rest of the tuition. Second, school taxes were never meant to be a one-family, one-tuition system. People without children pay school taxes as well, thus distributing the load around the entire community. The end result, then, is that people opting into the voucher system are effectively opting out of the shared responsibility of ensuring the education of their neighbors. Vouchers reduce funding to public schools, and for all that “throwing money at the problem” won’t fix our schools by itself, they certainly need at least enough money to maintain their buildings, pay their teachers, and buy textbooks, desks, and other equipment like overhead projectors and computers. Without that base amount of financial grounding, a school cannot rise to the occasion no matter how much it tries.

One other major problem is a social one. The history of vouchers is rather nasty - an invention of a south forced to integrate their schools. In other words, vouchers allowed white parents to take their kids and tax dollars into segregated private schools. While the intention of modern vouchers is no doubt better, the results sometimes look disturbingly similar. Black students find themselves left behind as the generally-better-off white students evacuate to better schools, taking their funds along with them, along with the investment of their parents in the public school system.

Proponents of vouchers tend to believe that they promote free-market competition among schools. I don’t see it, but this might be a failing in my education, rather than in theirs. I’ll ask an economist friend what he thinks of that, and get back to you on it.

Which brings us to Charter schools.

“Charter School” is a term bandied about often as though it has only one meaning, which it doesn’t. The only things one Charter school is guaranteed to have in common with another is the “charter” which prescribes what each school is required to produce in terms of results. They are also public institutions and thus they cannot charge tuition.

My favorite example of a charter school actually failed due to parental intervention, and I think the story is important enough to put down here at length.

There is a lot of research floating around regarding effective education, almost all of which has been ignored. Some of it is bunk, some of it isn’t, and both the bunk and the not-bunk hide under the same veneer of “science” that shields all social scientists. Some of it actually has been gathered more-or-less scientifically, much of it hasn’t, but a surprising amount of it, when actually applied, produces remarkable results.

One of these not-bunk experiments produced the surprising result that parental involvement in a school environment was counterproductive, and extremely so. The reasoning behind it is simple, thankfully. In order to function properly a school must have authority over its students, and that authority must be absolute while the students are in school. If the authority appears to be diminished, the student’s response to that authority becomes diminished. They do less homework, the attend less class. If you’re young enough you might remember the fallout from this from your own days in high-school. Teachers you respected, you skipped less, you did more homework for, and by and large you learned more from. This authority also allows the creation of an environment in which school work is prioritized over other concerns.

The problem with parental involvement in school education is that they assume their own ultimate authority over their children and the school must as well. This produces the result that the authority of the school is diminished to a level below that of the parents.

Anyway.

This particular charter school, like most charter schools (that I know of) was an elementary school. It put into play a great deal of the research that was being ignored, testing different principles and practices and measuring the results. The results were great. The kids were learning and their graduates went on to bigger and better things. But parents were cut out of the loop. You can understand how this might upset them, particularly with their kids being that age. There were no teachers’ conferences (again, that I know of) and Parents were not allowed to contact their kids at school unless it was an emergency. Within the school, the school was the ultimate authority.

What is less discussed, of course, is that within the school, the school was the ultimate refuge from the parents. The presumption that all parents are good parents is frankly just wrong, and charter schools of this kind put students with that kind of parent on more equal footing with students born of the other kind.

The details are unknown to me, but essentially the school buckled under parental complaints.

For me though, the more important lesson is that it was working.

See, we’re doing a really, really bad job of education at the moment. Our students receive and education which is at best second-rate and at worst incapable of retaining accreditation. What we need is a new system altogether, and the only way to get this system working is to experiment with different methods until we find one that works. We must also overcome a few well-known institutions that entrench the old system, most notably the teachers’ union. I don’t think it needs to go away, I just think it needs to be replaced with a system that has its priorities straight... or to put it more bluntly has priorities in line with the national long-term best-interest.

It is absolutely essential that we do so, for a number of reasons.

First, we’re not a manufacturing giant anymore. The economy of our future is unavoidably going to see much of that sort of work shipped overseas. It already has. Our brawn, then, has become devalued and the value of our brains is on the rise. If we fail to make those brains worth their price, the brain-jobs will be shipped overseas as well (some of them already have been), and then we will have nothing. Our economy will collapse under the sheer weight of a rising service industry dependent on our sons and daughters whoring themselves out to the inherited rich as paid (sort-of) slave-labor. I do not see this as a favorable future for any of us.

Furthermore, as we fall behind in education, we fall behind in solutions and answers. Does this seem general? It is. Sweeping, rather. In every field, we will fail to excel. Our sciences will struggle to keep up with our neighbors, including our space program and all of our medical research. Our businesses will cease to innovate, our inventors will run up against a wall. We’ll fail to keep up in alternative energy and military technology (these days it should be easy to see how the necessity of the latter relates to the former). We will not overcome the challenges posed by global climate change.

University standards for admission will by necessity drop lower and lower each year until the only requirement for going to college is having been born. High School will become middle school. Middle school will become elementary school. University education will cover the same basics High School now fails to, and ultimately a graduate education will be necessary in order to achieve the same level of erudition that was previously attainable from an undergraduate degree.

This is already happening.

Part of it is, of course, the baby boom ending. More university seats exist per student than ever before, and universities must have students paying tuition to make their bottom line. You would think, of course, that the increased demand for students would decrease tuition, but on the contrary, the only value the university sees in this new breed of students is their tuition money, without which they cannot offer competitive scholarships to the now-fewer students they really want. Regardless, the value of a degree at an American university is diminishing rapidly.

So how do we reverse this decline?

Charter schools are a good start, but they’re only part of the solution. Early-childhood education is essential, and it seems likely we’ll have a champion of it in the White House soon, so that’s another good start.

A redesign of the property-tax system would also help - at present, city schools receive less money per student than suburban schools by a wide margin.

Paying teachers more? That would increase demand for the job, and consequently increase the quality of the people in it. Certifications should be adjusted to be more demanding, and this can only happen if the pay on the far side of the flaming hoops is enough to compensate for the trouble. People are people.

Perhaps the most gripping challenge, however, will be the problem of parents. Good parents are grand, but bad ones must either be taught to become engaged with their children, or cut out of the loop. They are the single greatest influence on their kids, and should that influence be a bad one, there’s only so much the schools can do to raise students' sights.

Another problem is healthcare. Obesity, sickness, and general malnutrition are all counterproductive to education. Sickness results in missed classes (or death, in the case of missed vaccinations), malnutrition reduces attention and mental endurance, and obesity can result in social isolation of a sort difficult to overcome.

Education is, additionally, a feedback loop. The more people you educate, the more people you have that can educate. I think the largest problem we have is that education is presently producing a deficit. We need more brains than we’re making, so the ones that end up teaching in low-income districts (barring the ones who do it for the right reasons, thank god for them but they are few, I think) tend to be the bottom of the barrel. The job there is the most demanding and the pay should reflect that, but the schools lack the funds to comply. Even worse (for those of you dense enough to believe this does not involve you), if the feedback loop continues to fail to make the bar, soon teachers in high-income areas will be failures as well, and the wages necessary to attract good teachers to private schools will rise to the point where the tuition system will collapse under the weight.

In the end, the things we need to do are numerous. But High School is way, way too late. By then, the value of a student has been established, it just hasn’t been determined yet. If you have failed a student up until ninth grade, you will accomplish little with them after that point.

Whatever reform we start with, then, the proper time to start is birth.

That’s my ten cents for the day.

Tomorrow: The War

The Debate is Done. Good Day to You.

2008-10-16T00:19:00.003-05:00

*addendum 12/31/08 - The plan outlined herein never exactly got finished... frankly, it began to feel pretentious and like it might be a waste of time. It also got boring to string everything out, and planning tomorrow's article today just isn't really how I work best. The short answer is "fix education and you fix everything," and that's why you can't find the 'final' post of this series.*

Hello.

My name is not, of course, Maxwell Evans. It is a name constructed from my middle name and the street I grew up on, namely Evans Avenue, in Kirkwood, Missouri. I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a major in History. I play and teach the Cello. I'm a photography buff.

So.

The final debate between Barack Obama and John McCain ended several hours ago, and I would like to take this opportunity to make my first post memorable by outlining a theory of mine regarding the nature in which the issues that matter to us all are interrelated. The actual argument will unfold over several posts and terminate in a suggested priority-list for reform within American government and society.

But today, I will begin by merely outlining the theory itself.

My theory is that no single issue is breaking us down. Rather, what has torn us from our perch is that we treat issues such as healthcare reform, education, economy, the war, energy and environment as separate issues. This mind-set has permitted us to squander almost every resource we have through inefficiency, stupidity, greed, or (surprisingly rarely) malice.

As a solution I propose that we should extend the principles of “pay as you go” legislation to more than just the budget.

When we start a war, for example, we should plan in advance which domestic programs are going to have to go, and how much taxes will increase and on whom. There needs to be an acknowledgment, furthermore, that a war of aggression is a gamble. Wise gamblers go into the casino knowing exactly how much they are willing to lose. Before any war of aggression against an opponent (like Iraq) with no possible way of seriously impacting our national security, we should set a spending cap, beyond which we will admit defeat and come home. Victory conditions, furthermore, should be carefully and clearly written down, so we never again find ourselves in a mess where we can’t admit defeat, but victory is undefined.

Money given to an organization must come either from taxes or from another organization. The money cannot come from nowhere as it so often does, and it certainly shouldn’t come from a foreign country. Like a credit-card, huge balances make for huge interest payments, which increases the national debt, cuts down on our ability to fund domestic programs and forces us to increase taxes. Any dollar borrowed is two dollars spent, and when budgeting the interest from the loan should be included when considering the cost/benefit ratio.

If you don’t know exactly how much you’re going to end up paying in the end, you shouldn’t be borrowing at all.

I digress, though. Money isn’t the only impact one policy has on another, and these should be considered as well. Shafting education is a great short-term way to free up funds for something else, but the long-term cost to everything else is devastating. Healthcare reform should focus on prevention not just for cost reasons, but also because this will significantly improve the lives of average Americans, which will in turn improve their net productivity.

A spending freeze right now would be a terrible idea, because not funding certain things actually costs more than funding them. Take road repair, for instance. It is significantly cheaper to keep a bridge in good repair than it is to constantly rebuild it, not to mention the cost in lives when it collapses.

That’s my ten cents for the day.

Tomorrow: Education reform, and how it relates to the economy, the energy crisis, the environment, healthcare reform and more.