Entries Tagged 'thoughts' ↓

First, lemme say I generally have loved LeGuin reads in the past. I found The Left Hand of Darkness to be thought-provoking and well done, and (of course) the entire Earthsea series was brilliant. I finally made it through The Dispossessed, and am of two distinct minds about it.

Mind 1: Her prose is, as always, good. She tackles a topical topic (especially in the 1970s when she wrote this) and gives it some good thought. Her characters are fairly compelling, if somewhat thin. The story manages to move along and come to a satisfying place at the end, with illumination often provided through natural-seeming situations and dialogue. She manages to wrench the heartstrings a few times, too.

Mind 2: It’s preachy, and becomes artistically uneven as a result. The cover material suggests this book is an evenhanded exploration of capitalism versus a radical communitarian/libertarian alternative, but that is kind of like saying Glenn Beck’s Books are “explorations.” The Dispossessed is a unilateral condemnation of capitalism and almost a love letter to a particular conceptualization of communal social society. This bias affects LeGuin’s writing style: the exposition dumps often seem like lectures or cheerleading, the worlds are created barely more than minimally, and even her characters sometimes slide into caricatures whose sole purpose is to advance her political thesis. Here is my tongue-in-cheek fantasy of what Ursula K. LeGuin might have been saying to herself as she drew up the first outline…

“Okay, where to start? I know: two civilizations. One looks just like the US, and is full of spineless, weasely capitalists who are incapable of even imagining anything outside their crass, opportunistic capitalist worldview, and basically they’d all shoot a stranger in the back for two dollars, all except the poor people, who all get shot in the back by strangers. The other civilization is like the USSR, but how it should have been, without that repressive totalitarian thing. It’s the opposite of the Americ– I mean capitalists, so the people don’t own anything and they spend all day working very hard and starving and sometimes dying, even though they never get paid and nobody really cares if they stop working, and they almost never do anything we would think was really wrong, even though there aren’t any laws or police or religion or anything… they all just kind of know what’s right and wrong. They have a bleak, miserable existence but they are soooo soooo happy. Why? Just because, all right? Maybe because they are not dirty, evil capitalists. And they all have vaguely Eastern European-sounding names. And they can have sex with each other whenever they want, without any annoying consequences, like guilt or having to raise children. And the women all want sex as frequently and noncommittally as the men. Yes, this will do nicely.

“Now for a protagonist. Hm. Tall and rugged, of course, and really, really smart. In fact, let’s say he’s the smartest guy in the world, maybe in the whole galaxy. And he is really, really good. I mean, even Americans would say he’s really good. In fact, he’s so good that he makes the rest of his nonauthoritarian communist friends look lame by comparison. He mostly does really brainy math and physics and stuff, but he also gets out and works hard, just for fun, all day long, lifting and digging and hauling and staying  nice and lean and well-muscled and getting dirty and dusty and grimy and taking off his shirt and… whew! I need some air in here!

“Okay, our character needs a love interest, and she is, let’s see… nerdy and brainy and fiercely independent and socially awkward and not very pretty, and she wants a lifelong commitment, even though she’s even more independent and strong and self-assured than the other communist women. But he loves her more than any of the hot girls he can have noncommittal sex with whenever he wants, even though many of them are presumably strong, smart, independent communists, too, and hotter than she is, and less demanding. And he likes babies! Yes, and children. And he makes a lifelong commitment to his not-very-pretty wife (note: this is not marriage, even though it looks pretty much exactly the same) even though almost nobody on his planet ever does this, and even though he could have sex with anyone he wanted, any time he wanted, with no guilt and no consequences. He’s just that great a guy. And he stays faithful to her for years and years, and they always have steamy moments when they get back together and wow, is it getting even hotter in here? Let me go put on something more comfortable. And dim the lights.

“This guy is so smart that even his own communist people don’t understand him and he has to go to the capitalist planet and make them all look very, very bad. Even the good capitalists (actually, there aren’t any good capitalists) look bad when they talk to him. And then he meets the poor people, and all of a sudden he’s singing and marching and defying the government and making impassioned speeches about property and freedom and oh my goodness I need to go lie down I’ll finish this in the morning.”

Yes, that was highly facetious. Sorry, Ms. LeGuin. The book just sometimes seemed like a Harlequin romance novel for frustrated mid-20th-Century progressive women. A hero with no flaws whatever, who does everything exactly right, all the time. A civilization with no flaws (except that this here new generation of young ‘uns is all forgettin’ the principles of the founding mothers!). Capitalists defend their lifestyle with the thinnest of straw-man arguments, and  their civilization has almost no positive side whatsoever. Yes, there’s a Soviet-type nation on the planet, but it gets dismissed and the protagonist pointedly declines to travel there, so we never get to see what might have been a much more illuminating exploration of some of the ideas being dealt with in the book. The narrative stays firmly in the capitalism-versus-utopia vein. The writing was, as always, done pretty well, but it was a propaganda piece. It was The Fountainhead for ’70s liberals.

I will read more LeGuin. She’s still a good writer. Some of her books are at the very top of my personal SciFi/fantasy list, but this book is not among them.

1. Do not operate your vehicle without your cell phone held firmly to your ear. Driving without a cell phone in this configuration is highly dangerous; it could result in missing important updates from friends and family, such as: “Take a left on Tenth Street,” “So anyways I says to my baby momma…” or “I’m right here, girl! Where YOU at?” Do not be concerned about the alarmist “scientists” claiming this will cause you to murder innocent pedestrians, cyclists, drivers of smaller vehicles, or your own children in the back seat. First of all, it would probably be manslaughter, not murder. Second, anyone with a cell phone knows that its use *heightens* your attentional focus. Without a cell phone conversation–no matter how unimportant– to keep you alert, you might become so bored while driving that you drive right into a theater full of nuns, children and kittens. Do you want that on your conscience? I didn’t think so. A phone conversation while you have passengers hones your focus to an even sharper point. Texting while driving practically makes you a fighter pilot on Adderall. Plus, if you do happen to make one of the astronomically rare mistakes people are alleged to occasionally make while talking/texting/websurfing and driving, your phone is right there so you can call a lawyer about those bogus manslaughter charges.

2. Drive a really big truck, no matter what. As we all learned in school, farmers and ranchers make up 90% of the American population, they are the best people on earth, and everyone should want to be like them. Therefore, we all need to drive their vehicles, to show our solidarity with this agricultural majority. It is also a well-known fact that, in a collision between a large truck and a small car, those in the latter vehicle are more likely to die. Do you want YOUR children to die? Then you need a big truck, so someone else’s children will die. If they’re in one of those fuel-efficient deathtraps, they’re probably from out of state, anyway. No biggie. But wait, you say, my own children don’t all fit in the cab of an F-350. No problem! Some big cars are called “SUVs,” embodying all the fuel inefficiency and homicidal potential of big trucks, with none of their ruggedness. These are an acceptable substitute for a true truck. As another alternative, remember that seatbelt laws and “children in the bed of your truck at 70mph” laws are not the kind of laws honest people need to worry about (see rule #4), leaving you multiple options for fitting your children in your pickup. Some people will tell you that we increase our dependence on foreign oil and multinational corporations by driving fuel-inefficient vehicles. Nothing could be farther from the truth! If we burn enough oil, those foreign terrorist-type nations will eventually run out, and then they will go broke and pose no threat to our way of life. And corporations? Please! Corporations are our friends, and we exist in a happy symbiosis with them that can only be disturbed if we question their ability to make us buy their products. So, every time you see an angry look on the driver of a freedom-hating, fuel-sipping weenie car as you park your huge truck diagonally across three spots at the grocery store, remember that terrorist lovers like that person don’t deserve to live.

3. Avoid use of turn signals. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “turn signal” refers both to the little wand sticking out of the left side of your vehicle’s steering column and to the flashing light effect it produces on the exterior of the vehicle when it is moved up or down. Turn signals are an archaic leftover from the ignorant days of our great-grandparents, like castor oil, phrenology, or civic responsibility. In the bad old days, it was sometimes desirable to let other drivers know which direction you were about to turn, to save them some time and frustration or to avoid killing innocent people. In the modern world, however, turn signals serve no useful purpose. You’ve seen how insanely people drive; science proves that they really are trying to kill you. Do you want them to know what your next move is going to be? Unpredictability is one of your most potent weapons in the battle of daily driving.

4. Ignore optional laws. The US legislature and, shockingly, nearly every state legislature has passed a whole herd of laws related to you and your vehicle, because the government is evil and has goal except to make your life miserable. Luckily, grassroots organizations have managed to get the least important laws classified as optional. These laws include seatbelt regulations, reckless driving statutes, and the ever-baffling speeding laws. Of course no police officer or congressperson will tell you these laws are optional–their position requires them to give you a lecture about public safety or civic duty–but it’s pretty obvious. Look at the penalties. Failing to wear your seatbelt doesn’t get you sent to jail; you just have to pay a fine. Likewise with running so-called “stop” signs or passing vehicles that are merely doing the “speed limit” in town when there’s a solid yellow line in the road. These are clearly activities that pose no real threat to others, and “laws” regarding them represent a contemptible encroachment of private behavior by Big Government. Thanks to wise citizens’ groups, legislators have created “punishments” for these “infractions” proportionate to their potential harm. A good example is speeding. I think we can all agree that serious crimes such as armed robbery, illegally entering the United States looking for work, or public urination pose a clear danger to the very lives of Americans, and these crimes should be punished with mindlessly brutal justice. But if speeding posed that kind of danger to anyone, would states like Texas or Arizona be content with *fines* for speeders? Do armed robbers get a ticket and pay a fine? Do judges recommend that repeat border-jumpers be sent to remedial “classes” for their behavior? Do chronic pot users get away with nothing more than some points on their license? I think not. Therefore, speeding is not really a crime. In fact, the faster you drive, the more likely you are to escape the murderous impulses of the psychopaths in the other vehicles on the road.

5. Your vehicle is your manhood; behave accordingly. This rule applies mostly to men. Never forget that your vehicle is the physical embodiment of your masculinity. That is why you hang those rubber bull-sized testicles from the bumper of your Very Large Truck. What kind of man would want a small, weak masculinity, like a sedan or hybrid vehicle? A pathetic sissy-man. All real men demonstrate their virility and strength through the appearance and management of their vehicles. Yes, it’s popular these days to claim that manliness is somehow tied to things like responsibility, maturity, wisdom, or caring for loved ones. The people who say these things are not man enough to own big trucks. If your truck would have difficulty killing an entire family of six in a head-on collision with said family’s minivan, then you might as well just start wearing pink lace and high heels, Mr. Girly Girl. There is a school of thought asserting that insufficient masculinity can be compensated for with a small vehicle (e.g., VW Golf, Honda Civic, Suzuki Katana or, in truly desperate situations, a Dodge Neon) that has been modified at great personal expense to look very cool, go very fast, and ride so close to the ground that stray pennies would tear off its muffler. I concede that some missing masculinity can perhaps be reclaimed by driving such a vehicle at unsafe speeds on the expressway in a way that has a high probability of hurting at least a few innocent bystanders, but even such a semi-male vehicle owner would feel up to a 30% boost in basal testosterone levels by saving up for a decent truck.

6. Bicyclists have no rights. That’s pretty much all there is to say about this one. If bicyclists are stupid enough to believe the obviously-satirical Texas “law” about not riding on the sidewalk, then they need to learn to look behind them every few seconds and dodge your truck. And they should know that those lanes with diamonds and little pictures of bicycles in them only belong to the cyclists if you feel like allowing their use. For example, if you don’t feel like waiting in the turn lane at a traffic light, or if you see the clear necessity of passing someone in an unpatriotic small car on the right instead of the left, cyclists just need to get out of your way.

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Look, I argue about Arizona’s immigration law, and about people’s response to illegal immigration in general, but it’s not because (as the rabid anti-immigrant crowd is wont to insist when anyone doesn’t toe their particular line) I think illegal immigration is laudable. Of course it’s not. It is, however, a question of costs, benefits, and priorities.

Sure, illegal immigration is illegal. It’s right there in the name. It’s a violation of U.S. law, plain and simple. But so are other things. That’s the point, the rabid anti-immigrant crowd will say: it’s illegal and it’s causing horrible, terrible harm to America.

And that’s my problem: (a) the harm it’s causing is open to question, and (b) other illegal things cause equal or worse harm. It really feels like a group of people is highly dedicated to finding the harm because they’ve already decided that immigration is bad. Which makes you wonder why they really think it’s bad.

I posit that you can’t (with good data) make a serious case that immigration is destroying America, so it’s one of many issues with pluses and minuses and some serious, serious costs if we want to eradicate it.

You want to know what causes a lot of harm, both economically and physically? Bad driving, especially speeding. Traffic accidents killed almost 34,000 Americans last year, with speeding being a main factor in about half of those cases. This costs American taxpayers (even those who don’t blatantly and repeatedly break the law) billions and billions of dollars. Those numbers are many times higher than any estimate of the costs of illegal immigration. People are breaking the law and killing Americans and getting a slap on the wrist. The law is the law! What part of “illegal” don’t you understand? Unsurprisingly, however, I don’t hear Rush or Glenn calling for the National Guard to patrol roads and root out the problem, though. Nobody is pushing for speeding to be a mandatory felony with prison time. I don’t notice anyone demanding that we suspend the constitution so we can be sure to apprehend every speeder in Arizona. Why not? Would it not be OK to give the police a mandate to check the traffic record, outstanding unpaid speeding tickets, etc., of anyone they interacted with who fit the profile of a chronic reckless driver or speeder? You know, a male between 16 and about 25? Domestic violence call? We’re going to have to also check to see if you need to be sent to jail for an unpaid speeding ticket while we’re here.

No. No one is saying that, despite the far higher death toll from illegal speeding than from illegal immigration.

If the anti-immigrant movement is really only concerned about our safety as Americans, then the question of why they aren’t pushing for tough penalties and profiling of those who commit much more dangerous crimes is a good one. It applies to speeding, white-collar offenses, safety violations in coal mines, hunting accidents, and a whole passel of other things where the illegal behavior of a few harms many. Why have the anti-immigrant crowd picked their particular crusade instead of one of the many others where the economic and human harm is so much more clear and egregious? The answer to that will tell us something about the mindset of those pushing the anti-immigrant agenda.

The facts about illegal immigration are not yet fully known (though there are some useful data on several issues), and they often shift with funding sources or ideological biases. It seems clear that illegal immigration has risen in the past two decades, though we are far from the historical peak. Illegal immigrants occupy lots of jobs, though how many of those would be taken by Americans otherwise is debatable. Immigrants pay taxes and social security (not always knowingly), and their purchasing dollars go into the American economy. Even the service fees on the money they send back home contribute to Wells Fargo’s revenue. There is some evidence that illegal immigration boosts the economic fortunes of the middle class while harming the poor. You’d think the Tea Party would be all over that.

Some illegal immigrants take advantage of social services like medicaid, emergency rooms, food stamps, education, etc. Others are arrested for crimes, sometimes violent. It is extremely difficult to gauge how many crimes are committed by illegal immigrants, but only the most obviously anti-immigrant organizations “find” a percentage greater than those committed, per capita, by long-time American citizens. Muddying these waters is the fact that some immigrants come to the US specifically because they are criminals or they want to commit crimes (e.g., human traffickers, smugglers, drug dealers), and others are recruited into crime because of their immigrant status or their legal vulnerability (e.g., the drug industry, prostitution, gang membership). Balancing these criminal elements are the many more illegal immigrants who are, essentially, family members looking for jobs and trying to stay as far from official notice as possible.

Some studies find that the net economic impact of illegal immigration is positive, and others that it’s negative, though even these clarify that it’s not much, compared to the benefits doled out to legal Americans. You can argue that even a single dollar given away to an illegal immigrant is too much, and you’d have a solid basis to argue. Would you also argue that we need to catch every single white-collar embezzler, pot-smoking college kid, or stock fraudster in America, no matter how much of our tax money that takes? Why not?

Down here near the border (and in Arizona, New Mexico, and California), the issues get more polarized. These areas bear the brunt of the costs of the Mexico-US drug trade and some of the most negative consequences of illegal immigration. We also have disproportionately large numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants who don’t seem to cause any harm. Places like South Texas, where most of the people are Hispanic, demonstrate ambiguity about enforcement; you get both strong pro and con opinions expressed, with plenty of “meh” in between. Places where Anglos make up the tax base tend to show much more consistently anti-immigrant sentiment.

Illegal immigrants do not outnumber the legals. They also don’t show some kind of rabid resistance to acculturation into American society. Overall, my take is that the majority of illegal immigrants are similar in many respects to legal American citizens, espousing similar values about family, freedom, and economic choice. Maybe that’s why so many Americans have such an opposition to them.  It would seem that most of those who cause the most problems are associated with the situation where the richest country on earth (with the most voracious appetite for recreational drugs and underaged prostitutes) is situated right next to a country still firmly in the developing world. Bad problems, to be sure, and they need some serious solving; but blaming immigration for the drug trade is like blaming BP for our dependency on petroleum.

I have problems with our immigration laws and philosophy, sure. We are ideologically (and some biologically) descended from illegal immigrants. Our forefathers in many cases hosed the Native Americans (who were doing just-fine-thank-you-very-much) to no end, squatting by the tens of thousands on their land and refusing to leave, killing the legal residents instead of respecting their laws. Well, we’ve been here two centuries, and the US is awesome in many respects, so perhaps we should forget about that, but it’s still pretty hypocritical to claim that we are “original” or “native” Americans and ban everyone else. Jesus had a parable about stuff like that.

Maybe immigrants are bringing nasty diseases like tuberculosis to the US. OK, then we need to issue a LOT more work visas. This will bring those coming here for upstanding reasons (wanting jobs) through the legal checkpoints where they can be screened for such conditions. And maybe there’s too much drug money and trafficking going on (all right; there most definitely is). Then we need to put our money where our mouth is and stop smoking weed and snorting blow. Seriously. But immigration is not the problem, in itself. It’s a red herring for entitlement, spoiled adolescent thinking, and probably a good dose of xenophobia.

This article (worded in predictably bellicose HuffPo prose) talks about a poll last week on the healthcare reform debate. Poll numbers like these are regularly cited on the right side of the fence to support the idea that the American people do not want healthcare reform. The responses for “do you favor or oppose the current healthcare proposal?” look bad for the reformers and good for the opposition: 47% oppose it and only 41% are in favor. However, if you look at why people oppose vs. support the current reform, a different picture emerges.

It seems that a healthy chunk of those who oppose the current proposal do so because they are in favor of healthcare reform in general, but the current proposal doesn’t go far enough. Lots of people apparently agree with Dennis Kucinich.

When you look at who’s actually in favor of healthcare reform in general, versus opposed to it, you get just over 49% in favor and only 30% opposed. Half in favor of reform. Less than a third opposed to it. If the Senate looked like that, the opposition would not be able to filibuster.

Notably, however, the Senate is not debating healthcare reform in general. They’re debating the current bill. If the poll is to be believed (and this caliber of poll generally is), the majority of Americans want healthcare reform, but half of those supporters want the Democrats’ current proposal killed because it’s not enough.

Here’s my quick-and-dirty Excel layout of the results  (after the cut). Continue reading →

The US-Canada hockey game (it just started as I write this) and this article have got me thinking. If you’re a person who believes “The USA is the greatest…” in some way (i.e., greatest nation ever, greatest society, greatest political power), I’d like to ask a very serious question:

How (if at all) would your feelings and behavior change if the USA were someday not the greatest?

Not that this is inevitable, but it could happen. Of course, first you have to define in what way the US is the greatest. In economic power? Military power? Civil liberties? Government structure? Moral behavior? Humanitarian aid? Your personal definition of righteousness? Some combination of factors? Defining “greatest” is itself a little threatening, because as soon as you commit to a definition of America’s greatness, there’s the possibility that someday that might measurably change.

But let’s say you define our greatness. What if it were to end? What if we slipped to second or third place? And don’t say, “stupid question; America will always be the greatest.” There’s no guarantee of that. Even if we were “the greatest” forever (i.e., billions of years in the future, when the universe dies in heat death, the US still exists and is still the greatest), the thought experiment alone is worthwhile.

How would you feel about your country if it stopped being the greatest? Maybe it would be really good, just not the greatest.

Would you still be proud to be an American, a citizen of one of the better nations on earth, but not the greatest in any obvious way?

Would you become embarrassed and deflect questions about whether you were a patriot?

Would you still love your country?

Would you continue to insist that the US was still the greatest, even if there was no way you could demonstrate its greateness?

How would you react? Just curious.

from flickr user marca-pasos

1. Are you the kind of person who won’t buy a T-shirt made in China or tennis shoes sewn in Myanmar? If so, are you also the kind of person who believes you’re “not hurting anyone” when you smoke a joint?
2. Do you believe that “more enforcement” is the answer to our border problems?
3. If the U.S. legalized say, tennis shoes, do you think that would stop all exploitation and suffering associated with their manufacture and sale to Americans? No? Imagine that.
4. Do you like the idea of American soldiers in long-term military action inside a massively corrupt, destabilized nation, with little possibility of long-term success? What if the dead soldiers were only coming home from a few hundred miles away? What if this hypothetical conflict were, say, ten or twenty years in the future, so your kids could participate?

If one consumes mainstream news, one will perhaps build an image of Mexico as a corrupt, backward banana republic forcing its scary illegal immigrants and nasty, nasty drugs on America with no gratitude for our condescending tourism dollars. Much of that is wrong. More importantly, much of it is our fault. Continue reading →

Reporting from Phoenix – Central American immigrants travel long distances to come to the US, and they like to do it illegally.

But since the Grand Canyon State began enforcing immigration laws with border cameras, immigrants are raging against the machines: They have blocked out the lenses with Post-it notes or Silly String. During the Christmas holidays, they covered the cameras with boxes, complete with wrapping paper.

One dissenting citizen, who wanted his cheap immigrant labor to continue to work for below minimum wage, went after a camera with a pick ax.

Arizona is the only state to implement “photo enforcement,” as it’s known, at the border.

The cameras, paired with other technology, photograph individuals crossing the international border at non-approved locations. Violators are then arrested, fined, and deported–or sometimes sent to prisons or jails.

In California, border cameras are illegal, but Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed a program to add technological enforcement capabilities to 500 border watch areas to generate revenue for the 2010-11 budget. The proposal is unlikely to be a part of the Legislature’s upcoming budget recommendations.

State Assembly Budget Committee Chairwoman Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) has described the proposal as “silly.”

“It’s using big-brother tactics to balance the state budget,” she said. “It’s outlandish.”

That’s certainly been the reaction in Arizona, where the cameras have incited a mini revolt.

Initially, the cameras were thought of as a revenue generator, expected to bring in large amounts of revenue in the first fiscal year of operation, and to protect the state from a wave of Mexican criminals.

But from October 2008, when the program began, to October 2009, the cameras generated much less money than expected for the state’s cash-strapped general fund.

As of September, only 38% of issued violations were paid, the report said. Most violators refuse to pay.

This doesn’t mean the program lacks defenders. The number of border-crossers dead from dehydration investigated in 2009 was the lowest in 15 years, a figure that Lt. Jeff King of the Arizona Department of Public Safety attributes to tough laws and photo enforcement.

“We believe the cameras should stay up,” said King, who is the district commander for the program.

The program was designed to encourage people to pay the fine and not fight their violations: No record is kept of violators who pay their fines and voluntarily return to the southern side of the border.

But, critics note, that hasn’t stopped people from wanting their day in court. About half of the total violations issued are still pending because people have ignored the fines or have requested hearings to challenge them, according to the state Department of Public Safety.

The violations put an “inordinate” load on the immigration courts, said Terry Stewart, a court administrator with Maricopa County. People have flocked to request hearings, and at one point last year, one court branch had cases set up through 2011.

“You just have irate litigants and irate defendants coming in, just mad at the entire photo immigration enforcement system in general,” said Steven Sarkis, a Maricopa County justice of the peace.

The most high-profile protester has been Raul García, who has achieved statewide fame through his efforts to fight the tickets with a monkey mask. The 47-year-old has allegedly illegally crossed the border at least 40 times.

His defense?

There’s no way to prove that he was the border crosser wearing the mask, he says. Lots of people, he adds, are Hispanic males between the ages of 18 and 30 with medium build, dark hair, and monkey masks.

García says he doesn’t fancy himself a criminal.

Amid empty soda cans on the floor of his white station wagon are various rubber disguises, including the famous monkey mask, a Frankenstein, koala, panda bear and a ghost mask that glows in the dark.

So far, four of García’s cases have been dismissed, and he’s been found responsible for seven. The remaining 29 are pending, said VonTesmar’s attorney, Michael Kielsky.

In December, the Maricopa County courts launched a pilot program specially designed to handle the photo enforcement hearing caseload. On one particular day, about 30 people sat in various courtrooms to fight their tickets.

Norma Gutiérrez of Cave Creek, Ariz., came prepared with a manila folder. “How do you know that is my face?” she asked the judge. “How can you tell from that blurry photo?”

With each question, Judge Don Calender’s irritation became more apparent in his monotone voice.

“Were you there at that time, yes or no?” he replied. “Were you illegally crossing into the United States, yes or no? It’s pretty simple.”

In the end, she paid the fine. Gutiérrez, 58, said she basically lives on the freeways in her work.

Among the dissenters fighting photo enforcement are members of a citizens group, the Arizona Citizens Against Photo Immigration Enforcement.

In Maricopa County — where 92% of Arizona’s violations occur — volunteers have been on the streets for about a year, gathering signatures for a 2010 ballot initiative to remove the cameras. On a December afternoon, Jaime Cantú, chairman of the group, and two volunteers gathered signatures at an Arizona State University basketball game.

As ASU fans in maroon and yellow shuffled into the game, a mother with children in a Toyota Prius gave an opposing view as she drove past.

“Photo immigration enforcement keeps people alive with kids and affordable housekeepers, whoo-hoo!” she yelled.

Many people, however, were eager to sign the petition. One couple even took a snapshot with a sign saying “BAN Photo Immigration Radar!”

“It’s a fraud,” said José Jiménez of West Phoenix, who posed with his girlfriend. “It’s a big scam.”

The Arizona Legislature is considering multiple bills to alter or end the photo immigration enforcement system. Gov. Jan Brewer is encouraging the Legislature to place a referendum on the November ballot — so voters can decide whether to scrap the system.

Another dissenter is Ferdinando Saenz, a judge for the Arrowhead Justice Court, who has called the cameras a constitutional violation. He rejects every photo immigration violation that comes before him.

So far, Saenz says, he’s dismissed more than 7,000 violations, potentially worth more than $1 million.

[note: this article was modified from Nicole Santa Cruz's well-written article in the LA Times. The original article is about Arizonans rebelling against cameras that attempt to enforce speeding laws. I changed a few words here and there because I get a kick out of stirring the pot, especially when doing so might make a point about the highly dubious practice of picking and choosing which laws we wish to enforce and which ones we feel entitled to ignore]

This article on Reason.com, by Nick Gillespie, echoes quite a few of my sentiments about Sarah Palin (and one or two about Barack Obama), in a tone that doesn’t make me feel embarrassed for the person writing. Refreshing. Also, kind of funny that Gillespie refers to the people insisting that Palin is not really the bio-mom of her son Trig as “after-birthers”, in contrast to the “birthers” who hound the President.

OK OK OK. I’ll just post some lemony snippets.

On Palin’s less-than-inspired political platform:

… Americans have heard it all before, most recently during the administration of George W. Bush, who with the able assistance of a Republican majority managed to double overall federal spending in real dollars over the course of eight years. If the Republicans are to regroup and advance in another direction, they will need something other than warmed-over Karl Rove speeches.

Continue reading →

Have you seen  this “article” on the Yahoo! front page?

http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/sex/10-things-husbands-should-never-do-552285/?zing

It was pointed out to me earlier this week, and though I thought there were some good points (e.g., the silliness of caring for one’s own children being called “babysitting”), the article annoyed me. Its tone is bellicose, critical, and patronizing. The author plays both sides of the fence to score cheap “you go girl!” points with the readers. No big deal; stuff like this comes up all the time. But when it started to pop up on the social media sites I occasionally frequent, well, that was it.

Me being me, I immediately reversed the gender role criticisms and wrote a “10 things wives should never do” article. My intent was to show how vicious, petty, and unhelpful the original article was. Alex (my wife) read the draft of my list and noticed that things didn’t always “fit.” You can’t just reverse all gender role stereotypes; they don’t always match up like that. Some do (e.g., stereotypes about both men and women talking about things the other isn’t interested in, spouses not showing appreciation for each other’s hard work on meals/household projects, or each gender believing their traditional role takes more work), but others don’t. If I wanted a list about female stereotypes, I’d have to list actual stereotypes, and then I’d have to write my own belittling insults, instead of using the ones Diane Oatis wrote about men. I was not really comfortable with that. And there were some doozies. Just read through that list and you’ll see them screaming at you. Let me tell you, if I learned one thing from that list, it was that I am thankful to no end that I married Alex instead of Diane Oatis.

If you’re looking for female stereotypes, they’re not hard to find. As Alex pointed out, in our grandparents’ day these stereotypes were dropped casually in conversation and assumed in professional publications. She suggested looking at old magazines for a list of annoying wife habits to counter Diane Oatis’ list. And those old media have them by the dozen: women are incapable of rational thought, terrible at driving, overly emotional, less intelligent than men, unable to make difficult decisions, incurable gossips, etc. It seems that Ms. Oatis and her readers have failed to grasp the point that swinging the pendulum the other way is an investment in pendulum swing, when we should be trying to get away from pendulums altogether.

Thanks to consultation with my media naranja, I didn’t write the list (though I still might, I guess). So maybe I didn’t sink to Ms. Oatis’ level, this time. Such writing does not help anything — it makes problems worse — but it’s a constant temptation. We are different, we boys and girls, and it’s easier to bust out the gender-based one-liners for guaranteed laughs from our homeboys or -girls than it is to work out how best to cooperate for higher goals.

Men and women do have important differences (if you don’t know this, I’m not the one to explain the details). But we have far more similarities, in the final analysis, and exaggerating our distinctions — especially in divisive, sabotaging ways — is not good for any of us. Whether the message comes from the Right packaged as family values or from the Left packaged as feminism, any message that unnecessarily divides men from women and encourages unneeded conflict is bad for us.

Perhaps Ms. Oatis will think about this the next time she feels the urge to make a buck from thoughtlessly fanning the flames of the gender war (I’m sure I couldlearn this lesson a little better, too). And maybe Ms. Oatis would be surprised to learn that few actual feminists would find anything useful in her list.

There are German families whose fortunes — or just their livelihoods — were derived from property stolen from Jews imprisoned or killed during the Holocaust. What are those German families’ responsibilities, now, to the surviving descendants of those Jews? The Jewish descendants had their birthright taken by force, threat, or intimidation. The hypothetical Germans are not the ones who stole the birthright (their grandparents did that), but they are living from its benefits. These Germans don’t have to be rich burghers; they may be regular folks who are providing for their children’s education, or trying to run a small business. Do the Jewish descendants have a right to take that away from them? Do the Germans have any responsibility to try to right the wrongs their grandparents committed? Or do crimes like this have a generational statute of limitations, in which — if you wait long enough — nobody owes anybody anything?

We Americans love the Holocaust. We have an appropriate, somber way of talking about it, and I don’t doubt our sincerity when we grieve for the injustice, the dead, the wounded, the orphans, the widows; but our grieving (I’m speaking of the majority who are neither Jewish nor closely associated with any Holocaust victims) is out of proportion to our responses to other holocausts that happened to peoples equally distant from us. I haven’t heard much Holocaust-like grief for Rwanda, Nanjing, or the Philippines. In addition to the pure scope and horror of what happened, maybe we love the Holocaust because (a) it didn’t happen to (most of) us, (b) The US’s actions in that conflict look pretty altruistic and heroic, and (c) such a positive response to genocide distracts us from the genocides (there were several) that many of our ancestors perpetrated, at first unwittingly but later with full malicious knowledge, against the nations that were doing justfinethankyouverymuch when the Europeans showed up and started taking lives and land.

Maybe it’s because I just finished reading Stolen Continents, and I’m easily influenced, but right now it seems to me that there can be only two possible reasons why a dozen generations of Americans have avoided the kind of identity crisis experienced by post-WWII German citizens: denial or ignorance. Our ancestors committed holocausts as systematic, cruel, and unjust as those perpetrated by the Nazis, the Chinese, the Hutus, or the Serbs. The culture of those ancestors is the culture we regularly celebrate in a patriotic furor. Some of the very people we revere as Founding Fathers ordered the massacres, land thefts, and wholesale destruction of cultures who really, truly did not deserve it.

The unformed but powerful feeling of injustice and unease I’ve felt ever since I was a kid living  near Indian reservations has lately been focusing into a clear, horrible picture of the way our nation’s history might have looked from the point of view of the people whose cultures and nations were progressively destroyed by the greed, egocentrism, and duplicity of the culture that ultimately gave rise to my current lifestyle.

I still believe in the noble intentions and acts of many of the people who founded the United States. But I can’t deny the historical record of the massive cost of our immigration and invasion. The pieces can’t be put back together again, and I am not sure what should be done to remedy things.

Map of Kurdish-Occupied Areas

(Map ganked from TheKurds.net)

I have no degrees in history, political science or comparative religion. I have no diplomatic or military experience. I do, however, sometimes think relatively logically, and I try to check my sources most of the time. Therefore, in matters of Resolving Intractable International Problems, I feel I am more qualified than, say, Sarah Palin, and significantly less qualified than, say, everybody else. But I get a thought and it wants to be shared, so here it is:

MY PLAN TO FIX TERRORISM AND ALSO OTHER STUFF

The Kurds have an incredibly raw deal in many ways. There’s that business with Saddam Hussein killing thousands of them with poison gas, but that’s just the icing on a large, ugly historical cake. They’d really like to have their own nation, apparently. So what about this:

Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia all give up some of their most Kurdishest of regions, temporarily. Say, for a fifty year trial period. Draw up a contract and everything. The Kurds get to govern this region. It’s only limited sovereignty, though. Certain powers, including the power to Take It All Back If The Kurds Don’t Deliver, are reserved for the donor nations during the trial period.

During those years, the Kurds do the following two things:

1. Prove that they can govern their new territory by way of some economic, political, and other progress metrics, including human rights (i.e., how do the Kurds treat the people who are suddenly the minorities in their region?)
2. contribute guerrilla-fighter know-how, lots of policepersons and/or soldiers, diplomatic skillz, negotiators, community-builders, liaisons, and whatever else might be useful to anti-terrorism efforts in the donor nations. Thus, the amount of land conditionally donated to the new Kurdish state by each nation might depend on how much they needed fifty years of highly motivated Kurdish human help in reducing terrorism.

This would need to be funded. The donor nations would have to pony up proportional to their ability and need, of course, but the UN (probably with lots of US funding) would need to foot a large part of the bill. The UN could also be the watchdog, making sure everyone held to the contract. This “bill” would not only include outfitting and training the Kurdish personnel (which would be LOTS cheaper than doing the same for American personnel), but would also have to involve a lot of state-building within the hoped-for Kurdish region.

As the fifty (or whatever) years drew down, the UN would evaluate whether the Kurdish proto-state had kept enough of the conditions of its bargain. If not, then power would revert to the original donors, but the Kurds would now have a much-improved place to live, even though they didn’t really run it anymore. Or maybe someone would renegotiate the contract. But if they had done what they said they’d do, the Kurds would gradually return to their new homeland, now with full autonomy.

I think there could be lots of benefits, such as:

• The Kurds get a homeland
• Maybe a civil war or two gets prevented, down the line
• Anti-terrorism efforts are advanced (by people who are a lot more local than us)
• Ties are formed between the Kurdish state and its neighbors, as well as between the neighbors themselves
• The Kurdish state gets infrastructure, human-capital, and other support to get off to a good start
• I get a lucrative consulting job in Washington because of my awesome idea to fix part of the Middle East, thus assuaging my fears of becoming an unemployed ex-junior-professor

Does this sound expensive? It is. But my less-educated-than-everyone-but-Sarah-Palin guess is that the long-term cost would be less than the costs incurred by fifty more years of business as usual. And seriously, we are going to be in Iraq another half century, anyway, so why not make some kind of a reasonable long-term plan for improving things while we’re there, in ways that will make everyone (including us) safer? Maybe not this plan. But some plan.

Sometimes I think American foreign policy is like my housecleaning habits: short-sighted, based on fantasies about messes cleaning themselves up.

What seems to have been found is a lot of good science and a little bad science, with plenty of human foibles thrown in. Of course the negative aspects are exaggerated on websites run by climate change skeptics, and minimized by people on the other side of the debate, but it’s really just science in its underwear.

Humans make judgments based on the wrong kinds of information in many circumstances. For example, we sometimes base our judgments of the quality of a group’s arguments on our perception of how consistent the group is in communicating those arguments. That is, we decide how right people are by how consistently they agree. Many groups, aware of this bias, have learned to emphasize consistency and consensus above almost all other virtues. Civil rights groups have implemented this principle for decades. Nancy Pelosi imposed it on the Democrats, after seeing the political benefits of the Republicans’ emphasis on party loyalty. Science has also felt the pressure to unite behind a single message, knowing that the public would find the science itself to be more credible if there were fewer visible disagreements among scientists. Keep the arguments in the family. Don’t air your dirty laundry.

But that’s stupid. People disagree, and their disagreements, per se, have nothing to do with the quality of the ideas they are discussing. In fact, in areas where we don’t actually know for certain what’s going on (e.g., all of science), the disagreements themselves are an important element of the method for approximating the truth more and more closely. Science can never be perfectly certain about anything, but imperfect certainty is not the same as total ignorance; imperfect certainty leads to working suspension bridges, space shuttles that don’t always blow up, cures for diseases, and therapies for mental disorders. Science doesn’t discover Truth, really; it formulates working models. And the models, in most fields, have worked better and better over time.

Sadly, the way many members of the general public see science seems more like religion or theistic monarchy, and that creates problems. Scientists are supposed to be the infallible high priests handing down wisdom from on high. With that setup, any perceived inconsistency is assumed to invalidate the entire enterprise. Always h the baby with the bathwater.

• A skeleton is found with weird features: throw out a century of evolutionary research.
• Climatologists can’t explain ten years’ tree ring data: throw out half a century’s findings on climate change.
• Red wine drinkers in the Mediterranean live longer than other people elsewhere: throw out all we know about the negative effects of alcohol.

Scientists don’t think like this; only certain non-scientists do. Individual findings almost never invalidate an entire body of work (though there are notable exceptions). Science cannot be held to some arbitrary rules of consistency completely divorced from the realities of what science is. Science, although sometimes requiring quite a lot of expertise and knowledge to carry out, is inherently mundane. The steps are humble and unpretentious. You change one thing to see if another changes. You measure two things and see if they are related. You seek the opinions of other people who understand the issues and look for a consensus. Sometimes you find it, sometimes you don’t, but you almost never find unanimity.

Finally, heed the wisdom of Gavin A. Schmidt, a NASA climatologist: “Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice. Newton may have been an a**, but the theory of gravity still works.”

Contradictions — even (or especially) my own — bug me.

1. The congresspersons opposing a government-run option in the currently-proposed healthcare reform plan are all beneficiaries of a lavish single-payer healthcare plan funded at taxpayer expense.
2. Al Gore’s monster mansion and constant airline flights continue to create, like, a thousand Pakistani peasants’ worth of carbon emissions.
3. We still claim to be a nation interested in peace, but we spend more on our military than anyone else. In fact, we spend about as much as all the other military budgets in the world, combined.
4. The people pushing for the harshest punishments for illegal immigrants are often the same ones who celebrate our immigrant forefathers. Said forefathers settled here, usually without the permission of the American cultures and nations that were already in place, and often in direct violation of the wishes of the legitimate inhabitants.
5. Our current President was elected largely as a reaction to the excesses of his predecessor, but he has since followed Bush 43′s lead in his use of executive powers, his capitulation to our oligarchy, his treatment of suspected terrorists (with the arguably small exception of the prisoners in Guantánamo), and even our overseas military involvements.
6. Several of the lawmakers in the healthcare debate — both pro and con — are accepting donations from organizations with a vested interest in making sure any new program serves corporations rather than American citizens, and it shows.
7. And finally (drum roll please)…. The GOP’s health care plan for its employees covers abortions.

That last one surprised even my cynical self, I gotta say.

…or something. There has been some discussion in the tech-aware world about a major step in the process of de-Americanizing the internet: non-Latin characters have now been approved for (eventual) use in domain names. This is a much bigger deal than it seems on the surface, btw, and it seems like one of those areas where things could go either very wrong or very right. Like the Marshall Plan after WWII. In fact, some guy named David Coursey at PC World has some comments that echo some of the sentiments from that time period:

is there any doubt that if another country had “invented” the Internet–say the Russians–that we’d all have had to learn to type Cyrillic characters by now? Moreover, do you think they or the Chinese or Japanese would have changed the Internet just to suit English-speakers. [pic]

Indeed, had the Internet been developed around a non-Latin character set, would it even exist today? Has the success of the Internet not been linked to the role of English as the global language of business and popular culture?

Ignoring the chicken-egg problem Coursey seems to miss, it is, to my mind, fairly clear that the “invention” and development of the internet were initially driven by the U.S., as much as anyone ever invents anything (strongly tied to the U.S. military, actually). Believe me, I feel the same urge to hold onto something I consider “ours” as the next guy. It’s a rabid, jealous, strangely fearful feeling, actually. But I’m not sure those feelings should always be listened to.

Mr. Coursey has a lot of “what if” questions in his little rant on pcworld. Let’s ask some more: what if the U.S. had said “Screw Germany, screw Japan; they started the war; let them fix their destroyed economies and infrastructures themselves”? Would the world now be a better place to live in? What if, somehow, inventors of automobiles, telephones, vaccines, bicycles, steel-reinforced concrete, etc. had been able to keep total control of their creations in perpetuity? And what do we now do about situations where pharmaceutical companies lobby to retain control (and forced high prices) of life-saving drugs they have developed for ever-increasing lengths of time? While we’re at it, we can wonder whether human genes should be patented.

This area can easily become a classic Prisoners’ Dilemma situation. Do we do what’s best for us and ours, at the expense of everyone else — and, in the long run, even ourselves — or do we sacrifice something in order for everyone to benefit? It’s not clear that this internet thing fully fits that definition, but it’s certainly conceivable.

I don’t deny that there is a huge potential for unintended consequences if the internet is “given away,” especially if the process is done badly. However, I also feel that part of what has made the U.S. a great nation (yes, it is still great) has been our habit of sharing the benefits of our labor. Often, international situations like this are not a zero-sum game; it is actually possible for everyone to win sometimes. I still have a basically optimistic belief that the internet, as a means of providing unfettered communication, can be a force for good: education, empowerment, economic regulation, political transparency, etc. It might turn out that giving it away is the right thing.

Mr. Coursey apparently feels at least a little similar, ending his post by saying this is a bad day for the English Language, but “…a good day for the billions of people who do not speak my mother tongue. They have rights, too, even if I am not always happy about what that means.”

Rukhsana Kauser is my new hero(ine). When the leader of a roaming band of terrorists and some of his thugs barged into her home and started beating her parents, she grabbed a hatchet, surprised the main guy, killed him with his own AK-47,  wounded another thug (with the help of her older brother), and sent the rest fleeing. She killed one of the most wanted men in Kashmir, a leader of one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world.

I’ve found this story on the BBC and other international news sites. Since no Americans were killed or heroized, I can’t seem to find it in any American news feeds. However, it is on certain American blogs: gun rights blogs. After the story is summarized or linked, there are comments like “Hell yeah!” or “Tell THAT to the gun control wonks!”

To overused a phrase of the day… wait, what?

How does Ms. Kauser’s story support the cause of personal gun ownership rights in the U.S.? Ms. Kauser did not stop the terrorists with her concealed-carry Smith & Wesson. She did not stop them with her father’s venerated Remington twelve-gauge. The only gun owners were terrorist criminals. The only guns in this story were probably used in numerous horrific crimes before one or two of them were turned on their original owners. I’m a supporter of a “personal ownership” interpretation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but apparently this has not scrambled my grasp of logic to the point where this would make any sense to me.

I suppose maybe the American gun people are arguing that she should have owned a gun, and I could see that point, but then the story ceases being a very good demonstration of either the benefits of gun ownership or the dangers of a lack of such. She defeated the militants without owning a gun, which is not how these pro-gun stories usually turn out. Still, this is perhaps the only argument I could see as supporting U.S. gun ownership. I mean, if we had roaming gangs of terrorists with AK-47s who regularly took over suburban homes by force.

I have a nagging feeling that’s not the real reason this story keeps appearing on gun ownership blogs, though. I wonder if it isn’t just because there’s a potential victim, and then there is gun-related violence done to a Bad Person. Maybe the bloggers and commenters don’t look any farther than that. If this is the case, it says some small little volumes about the mentality of some of our gun-ownership advocates.

Rukhsana Kauser is not a good choice as poster girl for gun ownership advocates. Feminists, on the other hand…

I am becoming ever more cynical. Recently, it seems to me that ingroup/outgroup distinctions, along with ingroup loyalty and outgroup derogation, are stronger for most people than the things those people say they believe. Examples (callously lumping people together and ignoring exceptions for my own evil rhetorical purposes):

If the Democrats really believed their “save the planet” schtick, Democrat public servants would have drastically lower personal resource consumption than the average US citizen.

If Conservatives truly cared about reining in bloated programs and reducing the power of the Federal government, they would have been leading the charge against our military buildup since WWII in general, and against our two most recent wars, more specifically. Or at the very least they would have felt kinda conflicted.

If Conservatives were really opposed to giving social and political power to wealthy entertainers, to those with family, interpersonal, or criminal issues, or to those with and substance abuse problems, people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly would be unknown.

Most obviously, if certain among the Hollywood elite truly cared about justice (social or any other kind), there would be absolutely nobody defending Roman Polanski.

I think these (and many other) disparate ideologies/actions are examples of people supporting their ingroup and slamming the outgroup, rather than doing what their belief system tells them is right. What we do and what we say — maybe even what we think –are deeply at odds. The immediate rewards and punishments we get from our peers continually overwhelm the future rewards we may get from holding fast to the things we believe are true. We could (and do) argue about what we should think; but I sometimes despair of that mattering, because what we think seems to have so little effect on what we actually do.

In an effort to illustrate my conflicted feelings about Kim Stanley Robinson’s extremely preachy style of Sci Fi writing, I present a hypothetical conversation between him and his research assistant:

KSR: I’m working on a novel about the rational obviousness of science, its role in all of human progress, and the stupidity of Judeo-Christian belief systems.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir.
KSR: I’ll need you to get me some texts to study: physics, astronomy, planetology, geology, climatology, chemistry, quantum theory, biology, systems theory, and so forth.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir. What about the social sciences?
KSR: Social scientists are just people who didn’t have the SAT scores to get into the hard sciences. Their so-called “theories” are unscientific mumbo-jumbo with no demonstrable usefulness or effectiveness. Human behavior is so complex it can’t even be studied scientifically.
ASSISTANT: Actually, sir, there are quite a few well-validated predictive models of various aspects of human behavior, and empirical research from the social sciences has been responsible for huge improvements in the human condition. Besides, human behavior is certainly no more complex than, say, an ecosystem or a planetary climate. Why, if we simply look through the list of Nobel Prize winners from the last half-century—
KSR: I said it’s mumbo-jumbo and too complex to study.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir.
KSR: And Buddhism is awesome.

So now there’s some dirt on ACORN, and what dirt it is! It’s like an episode of Law & Order; the kind where you shake your head at the TV and say, “This wouldn’t happen in real life.” ACORN leaders (and Nancy Pelosi, FWIW) claim the nastiness was only a few people in low positions, and that the organization itself would never condone such slimy tactics. Exactly like the response of the military and Presidency in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse debacle, actually.

The ever-vigilant GOP has demanded (and the Democrats are on the bandwagon almost as fast) that ACORN be punished. One of our great American traditions is to punish organizations by taking away their federal moneys. And I think that works. For organizations, money is like food and water; removing it gets them where it hurts. Awesomely, however, some overzealous Republicans, who apparently didn’t realize they were not supposed to upset the status quo, drafted a bill that would withhold funds from ALL federally-funded organizations with fraud complaints against them.

As anyone who pays attention might have predicted, this broad criterion turned up a nearly comprehensive list of military industrial contractors (i.e., Haliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Northrup-Grumman, and so on). Some of them have literally dozens of fraud charges against them There’s an unofficial list here, created at the behest of a freshman Congressman from Florida named Grayson.

Naturally, I don’t believe any of those massive, multibillion-dollar corporations will have any of their money cut, even if their fraud amounts to thousands of times more than ACORN’s. The Republicans will howl, and the Democrats will get all conciliatory, and everyone will work out a deal whereby the corrupt community organizers are cut off from the Federal teat, while the corrupt weapons manufacturers will get a maternal nip on the nose and then be ushered back to the privileged sucking spots. The military-industrial complex is implicated in the careers of quite a number of our congresspersons on both sides of the aisle, and (in a not-unrelated note) we Americans, by and large, are more tolerant of organizations that build bombers than of those that build communities, all frauds being equal.

Still, even if the consequences of this little drama are painfully predictable, stupid human tricks like this give me unwholesome giggles of political amusement. It’s nothing more sophisticated, really, than the thrill of watching a 5-year-old get pwned on the playground when he realizes that for every finger pointing at the other kid, three more are pointing back in his own face.