Angels and Pinheads

Most conventions are seen in an economic framework anymore. So the question of legitimacy has been historically important for reasons of heredity: Only a legitimate child could inherit a parent's property. Even Henry VIII, desperate for a male heir, could not change this law--and he changed plenty--to favor FitzRoy. It was easier for him to kill his wives and create a religious schism than to advance a bastard.

Given the seriousness with which this question was viewed, one wonders what is afoot in contemporary society. Recent studies have shown the illegitimacy rate for children born in the United States is a bit over 40%; it is 33% in Ireland. Ireland! There are some generalities about childbearing that seem to be agreed upon--children should not have children, illegitimacy is bad for for the economic success of both the parents and the child, illegitimacy is a good predictor of high risk social and criminal behavior, single parent households are bad for child development--but despite the agreement on these subjects, there seems to be little effort to discourage the behavior. One could argue that an effort is underway to remove the "social stigma"--whatever residual persists--completely. Television shows now track the pregnancies of young girls--presumably to show the viewer that, while no one would dare impose a judgment, illegitimacy is not a good idea from a utilitarian view--yet these same girls end up on the covers of magazines and are known by their first names by everyone.

One could muse that legitimacy, more than a hereditary clarifying tool, was emphasized because it was learned by the societies over the years to be valuable. If that is the case, the culture is doing a huge, uncontrolled experiment. The effect might be liberating--but it might not be anything more than a revival of ancient and long-discarded errors. If that possibility exists, there is a lot at stake here and contemporary philosophical debates like the financial responsibilities of sperm donors are angels on pinheads.

Lame Duck

lame duck (Online Etymology Dictionary)
mid-18c., "any disabled person or thing;" especially Stock Exchange slang for "defaulter."
A lame duck is a man who cannot pay his differences, and is said to waddle off. [Thomas Love Peacock, "Gryll Grange," 1861]
Sometimes also in naval use for "an old, slow ship." Modern sense of "public official serving out term after an election" is recorded by 1878 in Amer.Eng., from an anecdote published in that year of President Lincoln, who is alleged to have said, "[A] senator or representative out of business is a sort of lame duck. He has to be provided for."


Lincoln did not know the half of it. He was speaking at a time when the government and the people governed were intimate; when the government was an extension of the people. But those days are long gone. The modern politician knows the world far better than we poor souls and the lame duck period allows him free range to inflict the nation with his vision of truth without having to worry about those pesky little problems like responsibility to the voters. It is no accident that this Congress passed so many controversial laws; this gaggle is much more comfortable when given free rein.

The political lame duck is one of democracy's great defiant and arrogant Bathoes; when he acts, it is the democracy that is disabled and "waddles off".

Mr. Assange and the Overburdened State

What to do with Mr. Assange...Some cry "Treason!"--but he's not a U.S. citizen. Some say "Spy!"--but he only publicized what was already exposed by the American Manning. (Who is a traitor.) The libertarians are thrilled with his exposing insincerity and duplicity of government--as if this were some news.

Truth is not the question. What was published were copies. True copies. But does truth always have to be said? Is it important to the moral balance of the universe that the lady in the stupid hat--who spent all day working with it and wears it proudly and confidently into the world--knows that everyone around her thinks it's stupid? Or is that truthful insight gratuitously cruel and self important?

But Assange is more than arrogant and gauche; he is destructive. He has a plan of chaos and disorder and the victims of that plan are us. Read what he said to Time magazine: "It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society."..... (If leaks cause U.S. officials to) ...."lock down internally and to balkanize," ...(they will)... "cease to be as efficient as they were." What he wants is to make the system inefficient. He wants the system not to work.

For some reason those with confidence in state power often attack it by asking more of it than it can do.

Well, which part of the system should fail. The electrical grid that runs the respirators? The economic grid that controls contracts and exchange? The military grid and its fail safe mechanisms?

The world is getting more dangerous. Imagine a malicious soul in a commodity exchange computer. Or a bank computer. Or a military one.

The well-poisoner does not want to kill anyone; he wants to destroy the village.

MI-6 Times One Hundred and Fifty Thousand

There is a thesis abroad that says democracies inherently discourage the successful, competent and ambitious from running for public office because of the debasement that politics demands of a candidate. While this may protect the democracy from the dangers of powerful and potentially dangerous leaders, it does inflict the nation with the less able, the silly--the Bathoes--who become leaders by default. With that in mind, look at the following from The Washington Post:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

We have come a long way from the days when we worried over the Clinton staffers who could not pass security clearance to chair their own meetings. How can anyone take a security system with almost one million top-security clearances seriously? Imagine a one hundred mile pipe with one million joints. The Wikileaks fiasco is not just understandable, it is inevitable.

One wonders if we are applying old concepts to new and impossible circumstances. We don't consider nuclear warning shots as reasonable; the two are incompatible. (At least I hope we don't.) It is an oxymoron. How could anybody create a top security intelligence system that employs 800,000 people, 1900 private companies and 1200 government organizations? Security aside, how would they exchange information? Secure skywriting?

Who are these people?

The Budget of a Thousand Cuts

The following numbers are a summary of this year's budget and where the money goes. The hubbub centers on how to deal with the deficit, decrease spending or raise taxes. Now I am very opposed to the transfer of financial decision-making from earners with a vested interest in the result to politicians pretending to have no non vested interest in the results but I look at this simple chart and I can not figure out where the spending cuts will come from. I simply see no alternative to a grossly inefficient tax increase with its attendant decrease in productivity and taxes. That translates into a slow, gradual decline of GDP and living standards for the producers.

National Budget: 3.83 Trillion $

Non-discretionary Budget: 2.417 Trillion $
Components:
1. Social Security: 730 Billion $
2. Income Security: 580 Billion $
3. Medicare: 491 Billion $
4. Medicaid: 297 Billion $
5. Interest Nation. Debt 251 Billion $
6. Vets Benefits: 68 Billion $

Discretionary Budget: 1.415 Trillion $
Components:
1. Military National Security: 895 Billion $
2. Nonmilitary Security: 520 Billion $

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/05/budget-and-citizen-cuts.html

STARTing in any Direction

Any treaty purporting to control and/or limit nuclear weaponry seems on its face to be reasonable and desirable. The current START Treaty under discussion raises several interesting questions. The first is the curious decision to include defensive weapons with attack ones. What could possibly make a nation create and include that equality? One could argue that offense=defense might decrease some effectiveness and desirability of research but, with the obvious danger of offensive weapons and their availability to misuse, it is hard to understand why that equation would become a priority.

The next question is more difficult. What does a treaty mean? Historically treaties created boundaries that could be drawn on maps and compliance could be confirmed from watchtowers. Agreements now are quite different and depend very much upon the nation's honesty and motives. In 1972 the U.N. wrote an agreement that outlawed the development of bioweapons and all the nations eagerly signed--except a few like Israel, South Africa and the United States. The year following its ostentatious signing, Russia opened the first of its bioweapons research center under the umbrella program Biopreparate. At this facility they meticulously developed horrifying hybrids of killer germs, some aimed exclusively at children. At the risk of sounding like "Guns don't kill people, people do", agreeing to outlaw certain weapons and research does not matter much if the party or parties are insincere.

This just raises the truly uncomfortable question: Is anybody here serious? Or is this all the usual public drama and international verbal placebo? Or is this simple the reflex of the lost, to start in any direction.

Knowing the propensity of the Bathoes for posturing and insincerity, one does worry.

Wikileaks and Stuxnet

The recent leaks on government communications will have some interesting effects. First, it will exaggerate the nation's serious problem in finding good government workers; no one with job expectations will want to work where his opinions or musings are periodically made public. Second, those in government will stop being public. Meetings will be done in silent or on notepads passed around written in invisible ink. A lot of information to explore now, a lot less in the future. And the reason these self appointed moralists who leaked the information give: more transparency. The righteous always seem to confound themselves.

Yet these diplomatic leaks are minor invasions compared to Stuxnet. This story, if accurate, signals a new era in international antagonism: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/11/26/secret-agent-crippled-irans-nuclear-ambitions/ So far it looks beyond the capacity of terrorists but at some point nations will be able to infiltrate the computer systems of enemies and disrupt the systems or turn them in some way, either against the host country itself or trigger actions from the host country against anyone, friend or foe. Imagine taking over a country electronically and using its own computers to attack its own ally or to raid a stock market or currency, all by proxy.

Most of these problems are just over the heads of the administrators.

Capital Punishment

Ingmar Guardique, a San Salvadore illegal, was convicted yesterday of murdering Chandra Levy, a young intern in Washington D.C., nine years ago. The evidence was orderly and convincing. Capital punishment is a possibility.

Now what is to be done with Condit? This guy, a typical sleazy politician who had an affair with the victim, was almost lynched by the media. Well established legal minds debated his motive and how he carried the murder out. Dominick Dunne said he had strong evidence Condit had arranged the kidnapping of the girl and had her sold into slavery in the Middle East. Every profound and nodding head declared him guilty. Some began to connect the dots and wonder aloud if Condit had killed Joyce Chaing. He lost his election, was vilified and whipped out of the fort. Now what? We're sorry? We're sorry but you brought a lot of this on yourself? Or is this a random punishment we voters inflict, the price for being in the nation's Capital?

But this is not just an occupational hazard for the powerful and well-connected. Richard Jewell comes to mind. Working as a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, he finds a suspicious package and leads many people to safety before it explodes. It turns out to have a pipe bomb in it. Rather than lionizing him, the press turns on him as the likely perpetrator and virtually indicts him before Eric Rudolph is caught and convicted as the real bomber. In a twist of brutal irony, his lawsuits against the people who defamed him were ruled invalid because he was a "public figure"; the press makes him a public figure, destroys his life, and then escapes his legal response because he is a public figure!

Plausibility should be left for coffee houses. Responsible people simply can not behave like this without any recourse on the part of the defamed--unless you bring back dueling.

Mapping the Future

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility. --Four Quartets


Ancient maps are wonderful and wonderfully human. They are the confident and altruistic sharing of knowledge, carefully researched and drawn, beautiful and elegant, often the products of the brightest and the bravest. And usually they are wrong. Time and better information displace them gradually, sometimes suddenly, and they become an artifact, a relic of their time. Their more modern usurpers reign awhile , then they too are gone. They appear, are the obsession of every sea captain, every explorer, and then are trumped and worthless, pushed back on the evolutionary trail and fall from the culmination to a mere contributor.

Importantly, every seaman and explorer knows this. They know the limits of these observations and recollections made flesh. They swear no fealty but work within the map's limits.

Explorers, mapmakers and sea captains should be more prominent in our society.

There is an interesting story about China's recent contribution to the massive tome of Unintended Consequences. In the 1960's the State decided to control the population growth and limited each family to one child. One child per family would make the huge population manageable and stable. As males were preferred in families the effect was to discourage the birth or survival of infant girls. Over time a noticeable change developed in the population: The usual 50-50 gender birth rate tipped 4% in favor of males. Jobs for women went unfilled, women were lured to population centers for better work. Now there are small towns and communities that have no women at all. Family farms and businesses are at risk. Men expecting to raise families with local wives are getting older. Some communities have resorted to raiding--RAIDING--neighbors for women.

In an effort to stabilize the population, the government created shortages. But they started with a really good map.

Nature Girl Sarah vs. Academic Man

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."--Sarah Palin
"Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes."--Paul Krugman


Palin got a lot of criticism for the quote above, some by Paul Krugman, so it was interesting to see Krugman's new and improved opinion last weekend on ABC. Inadvertent honesty? A lapse into truth? An outbreak of sincerity? Or just a new personality change in a major character of the Washington Wrestling Federation?

There are similarities between professional wrestling and American politics. Both demand intense posturing, laughable insincerity and faux action. Indeed, there are few pursuits which can be defined by posturing and insincerity. Professional wrestling can be at least understood as entertainment and drama that both the actors and audience agree upon. Politics is different there: In politics the aim is deception; entertainment, like Rangle or the guy who thinks Guam will be tipped over by too many marines, is an unintended but merciful comic diversion.

At a recent lecture, Andrew Ross Sorkin spoke about his investigations writing his book Too Big To Fail and opined that most of the principals--perhaps all but Jamie Dimon--really did not understand the problem or its implications.

There are negatives with the people who think that 90% of life is just showing up. It's hard to make progress or a contribution when you are just treading water. Sometimes problems demand specifics, hard thinking and difficult choices. Hard choices usually mean deciding against someone with a good argument, an argument you recognize as good. But in the world of cartoon wrestling characters, everything is straightforward, all the decisions obvious.

Indeed, the only time they show their human side is with deceit.

Happy Meals and the American Way of Life

This little graph on the astonishing failure of the nation's individual states to develop a competent educational system in comparison to the nations of the world was picked at random. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e20133f5cbd3b4970b-popup
Any crisis would do, the graph of the Dow vs. the price of gold over the last years, a graph of the national debt, of the individual state debt, of personal debt, of student debt, of the Ogallala Aquifer, of American production over the last twenty years...on and on. This country faces countless problems that demand analysis and action. And what do we do? We ban the inclusion of toys in McDonald's Happy Meals. And why? Because people are overweight.

Ponder that a moment. All the incredible problems facing the culture and the country and a city declares war on a children's snack.

The science is profound: Children seem to be fatter, children like Happy Meals, Happy Meals have calories and other things that currently are out of favor and are associated with obesity, toys in the snack box are enjoyable to kids, stopping the toys will make kids less fat.

Aside from the stupidity of the gesture, why would responsible adults turn to such trivialities when so many important things are screaming for their attention? Has the failure of the educational system trickled up to leadership? Are we led by symbolists? If everyone lights just one little candle? Perhaps some or all of these contribute to this intense shallowness but there are glaring overriding reasons to chose such a soft target: It is easy and it allows for significant posturing.

An easy target. Posturing. The avoidance of the significant. All part of the physiognomy of the un-serious. And the Bathoes.

Some Rich to Demonize

According to Politico, Meg Whitman in California alone has spent $163 million in her race against Democrat Jerry Brown. Florida Republican Rick Scott is spending more than $60 million in personal and family money in his race against Alex Sink. According to data at the Center for Responsive Politics, the Democratic committees – including state party coffers – raised $776 million thus far and had $90 million in cash for the final month, compared to $508 million collected by the Republicans who had $55 million available for the last lap of campaigning.

What could explain this? Who would put this amount of money into something with no expectation of return? And under these circumstances, who is a candidate to be a candidate? The careless rich? Anyone who can inspire the careless rich?

The word candidate comes from the the word "white" as "clothed in white"--as ancient Greek candidates were. They were clean, unsullied, candid and straightforward. They were without ulterior motive. Can anyone believe that of these "candidates"?

These are rich deserving of demonizing.

Charlie Sheen to Marry Lindsey Lohan

It is disturbing that, despite the access to information, the scope and depth of the mortgage problem is so poorly covered. Perhaps it is complex, too complex for the casual reader, but it should not be too complex for the average voter. The Interstate Recognition of Notarization Act itself deserves intense scrutiny. On the other hand, this incredible abuse of American citizens, this astonishing lack of ethics, this amazing immorality may be a reflection of us all. Perhaps we do not deserve better.

Subprime Morality

John Mauldin is an investment advisor who has a weekly newsletter. It's an eclectic collection of financially oriented interviews, summaries, opinions and occasionally simple forwards of other letters. Recently he has sent out three letters on the subprime problem. It is available at: http://JohnMauldin@InvestorsInsight.com

It is not for the faint of heart. Starting with this incredible quote from Bernanke, "The subprime problem will be contained", it tracks several parallel problems in the development and potential endgame of the subprime problems for banks, underwriters, investors and homeowners. More important is the insight it gives into the thoughtless black heart of what is masquerading as American capitalism and finance. He starts with the relatively minor housing problem which promises to become major as the subprime problem expands. False appraisals rose 50% last year; over 19,000 claimed the first time house buyer's tax credit but did not buy a house and 74,000 who claimed $500 million in refunds already owned a house; one in twenty-one residential mortgages are in foreclosure.

But enough of the small stuff.

Homeowners can be foreclosed upon and evicted only by the entity that holds the loan paper. As the Savings and loan industry declined, mortgages were shunted away from local institutions and into mortgage backed securities which were pooled together into Real Estate Investment Conduits. There they were divided into groups or tranches based upon various qualities like risk of default, interest rate and the like. The designation of these various mortgages into tranches was presided over by the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, jointly owned by Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. It was legally impossible for these various organizations to hold the mortgage paper of the various mortgage loans. Thus the transfer of the title of the different properties was never done, the "chain of the title" was broken and the borrower now does not know who to pay. In essence, with a broken chain of the title, the borrower does not have a lender.

Consequently the banks holding these "broken chain" loans hired experts ("Foreclosure Mills") to evaluate the chains. They found these poorly documented titles and began to fix the broken chains by forgery and fraud. The title insurance companies that insured these titles balked and refused to sign on to this obvious illegality so the banks, desperate for protection against this chaos, went to the government and the Interstate Recognition of Notarization Act was created which gave a blanket approval to the fraud the foreclosure mills had perpetrated. This was passed by both, BOTH, houses of Congress but Obama pocket vetoed it--no standup guy he. Now the entire mortgage industry is under question. People foreclosed upon might get their houses back; people who bought foreclosed properties might not own them. The entire industry is in peril.

And the banks knew all the time. Richard Bowen from CitiMortgage repeatedly wrote to his superiors (including the esteemed Robert Rubin) warning them of the problem. He estimated 60% of the mortgages were defective and, as time went by, it increased to 80%.

When any of the mortgages were found on sampling review to be defective, they were recycled back into the general pool. Sometime they used the defective paperwork to renegotiate with the borrower for better terms for themselves. The taxpayers are responsible for some of these through Freddie and Fannie--perhaps 400 billion-- but 1.7 trillion, TRILLION, dollars in securities are not guaranteed and may well go to court. Bank of America's exposure may be 400 Billion. International clients and federal agencies (with subpoena power) will be involved.

The final letter describes Ameriquest and its predator employees as they behave like highwaymen and pirates in the field of contract law. Fraud, forgery and malicious insincerity was the norm. A specific sad story, Carolyn Pittman's, shows the callous disregard of these people as they repeatedly return to loot what little this poor woman had left.

Won't someone please call a cop? One only wonders how this will be resolved. Will the mortgage system collapse as borrowers strike back with righteous vengeance and withhold loan payments? How will the Washington Bathoes respond, having already shown their colors with The Interstate Recognition of Notarization Act? Certainly someone will call for a transfusion into the system.

But can morality and character be transfused?

Economic Generation

"In every country of the world, regardless of its stage of economic development, form of government, or age structure, the highest rates of entrepreneurial activity are found among those who are age 25 to 34. The rate of new business ownership in Japan today is just 1.3 percent, the lowest in the world, followed by France at 1.4 percent and Belgium at 1.6. In China, by contrast, with its (for now) oversized population of young adults, the rate is 11.8 percent."

This quote, from Phillip Longman in an article from BQO, puts quite a different slant on the demographic changes in the West. The decline of the birthrate in the West is more than the dénouement of the welfare state's Ponzi tragedy, it strikes at the very heart of the West's economic generation. Not only will there be less for more, less will be created.

The assumption here will certainly be that the older population will not start new businesses because of the investment in time and energy, but mainly financial risk. Governments cannot--despite their delusions of grandeur--improve time and energy in the population but they can influence risk. Whether through encouraging the creation of investment funds or changing tax structures, the government should look to improving these statistics or building their own new ones by encouraging the older population's participation in new ventures.

But it is difficult for insincere myopic followers to lead.

Macroeconomics 101

"Aggregate private consumption spending plus private investment spending plus government spending plus exports minus imports equals production."

This is classical modern macroeconomic theory. So if the government increases spending to fund a successful new copper mine, that is an increase in production. If it funds an unsuccessful mine, that too is production. If the government just gives the money to the miners and has them sit around and not dig, that is production. If it funds a mine, successful or not, then fills it in, that is even more production. If it taxes the copper miner so he can't expand his own mine then takes those taxes and digs a failed mine, that is a wash.

Doesn't this just sound like the old "Broken Window Theory"?

Work

Hegel, and later Marx, felt that the basic act, the inherent characteristic, that defined man and allowed him to define himself, was work. Work. This is a bit different than the earlier notion that man worked to stave off the pain and terror of hunger or cold. There is in Hegel a notion of success as well, a rising above your contemporaries, but he felt that achievement was quite attainable even among the poor and the downtrodden in the very act of their work.

Capitalism has always had a production bias but, when seen in the context of Hegel, it could be just an accident of our predisposition. There is a theory that the Reformation flavored capitalism with just enough self-sacrifice and tight-fistedness to allow it to flourish in the West. This idea also draws on similar qualities in the Japanese feudal culture and implies that the capitalism success in these two cultures is no accident.

If that notion is true, however, we might be in some general trouble. As the strict self-control of Protestantism and Calvinism fade in the West and as the feudal ideals are eclipsed in Japan, what is left to motivate the capitalist?

Consumption, a part of the overall economic equation--and a famous debilitating disease.

Chilean Miners and K 141

A debate has popped up over which economic system is responsible for the rescue of the Chilean miners. (This, in Chile, where the social security system is privatized.) Only socialistic, non individualistic behavior could allow men to survive underground and could altruistically mobilize citizens for their rescue, say the socialists. Only capitalism could create such wonderful technology and tools for the rescue, say the capitalists. Beneath all this wrangling is the belief that politics and government have a morality, that some systems--but not others--act with righteousness in mind.

It is reminescent of another international claustrophobic nightmare. In August 12, 2000 the K 141 Kursk, a cruise missile sub Oscar class 11 and the largest attack sub ever built, sank in 354 feet of water 85 miles out of Sevenomorsk in the Barents Sea. The sinking was proceeded by an explosion, presumably of the hydrogen peroxide supercavitating torpedo propellant, that measured 2.2 on the Richter Scale then, two and a half minutes or so later, by a second explosion that measured between 3.5 and 4.4 on the Richter Scale. 118 men went down. At some point 23 men retreated to Compartment 9. Everyone died.

There has been a lot of discussion. Why would the Russians use hydrogen peroxide propellant when the British had declared it too dangerous two decades earlier? How long did the men live in Compartment 9? There was a fire; was that from the emergency oxygen source? Did the fire kill the men in Compartment 9? Why did Putin stay on vacation when the country was overwhelmed with the tragedy? But these all beg the real question: Why did the Russians refuse the aid of the British and Norwegian diving teams that are experts in submarine rescue?

There are a number of answers here and, while the truth is not known, none of the possibilities are nice. The government gave up on the men, the sailors were presumed dead, and, the favorite, the government did not want to ask another country (and culture) for aid. They did not want to be seen as inferior in technology and expertise.

The important notion here is that governments, while comprised of people, are not people any more than armies or corporations are. By necessity governments have qualities and interests that may actually be opposed to the interests of their citizens. In the thirties, German Jews were Germans; the American soldiers exposed to radiation at Bikini were Americans and so were the untreated men from Tuskegee; the Russian government denied the very existence of the Chernobyl disaster at the very time the men charged with stopping the disaster climbed into reactor knowing full well they would never survive.

Sometimes government behavior is foolish, sometimes stupid, sometimes outright evil. But no government is any more or less moral than the post office or the LSU lacrosse team is. (But as the Chernobyl example shows, people are often a lot more moral than their governments.) Some may fit better with human nature but the people who make up the government are different from their subjects. Why? Emergent behavior? They sell their souls to the devil? Sunspots? Who knows. But no one should try projecting human qualities on to the structure of an inanimate object; they should just be as careful as they would be around any machine or animal they did not know or understand.

Hi, it's not Brett

Now that phone call sources are so readily identified we don't see a lot of obscene phone callers anymore. For a long while, though, they were common: Breathers, guys who talked dirty, guys with elaborate routines to pull a girl into a conversation that ended up in some obscene alleyway. The obscene caller has always been of interest not because of what he does but rather what he did before the invention of the phone. Whatever the thrill is in what he does, it is unlikely that it was quite the same with obscene shouting or obscene notes or obscene smoke signals. Certainly graffiti does not seem to fit the bill. What outlet did the perverse phone caller use before the phone?

Or is he new? Is his perversion created by the phone's availability rather than tapped in a more modern way? Indeed CD's, TV, movies and the like all seem to be logical extensions of preelectronic passive pornography but how do phone perversions fit in? And once opened, what happens when caller id closes this outlet? Does technology create and destroy behavior among us? Once opened, does it move on to new areas when closed? Konrad Lorenz thought that the ability to kill among mammalian species was naturally inhibited by the proximity of the combatants but when man developed the technology to kill at long range he became much more abstract and dangerous a killer. Does technology however seemingly innocuous, carry these great risks?

More specifically, Brett, what the hell were you thinking?

On Winning and Losing

It would be of interest to survey men and women separately as to the notable events they felt were of the greatest influence in their formative years. The academic world might well blush as it is likely sports and particular sporting events or moments would likely be high on the list of the men. Higher than most classroom experiences.

All the usual subjects would be rounded up-- the value of hard work and its correlation with success, surrendering individual for team goals, the importance of preparation and practice, the need for self control during competition, the subtle relationship between athlete and coach and how to take instruction, good sportsmanship, comradeship, how to eat and exercise--and all would be seen as important to some degree among the men surveyed.

The most complex sports lesson, though, is how to win. Physical skills, preparation, practice, diet, training are all important components but not learning how to win can trump them all. And it is not easy to learn because one can not learn to win unless one learns to lose. The heart is tender in the hardest athlete, shy in the gruffest competitor. and can easily protect itself in the shade of indifference. Pledging oneself completely to the task at hand carries great risk as failure can be devastating. So failure--losing--must be understood and managed. While the individual submits completely to the event, he must somehow make his investment total yet contained. He must understand that the struggle is not with his opponent but with himself, to perform as best he can and recognize that and nothing more is at stake and is enough. The outcome is not a judgment, it is a conclusion. The outcome is his own preparation and effort coming to fruition. Sometime the opponent is faster, quicker, stronger and will be victorious; such qualities are unlearned and are gifts of God. But the opponent must never be more committed or more dedicated, he must never fear failure less. Only when one learns that the outcome is nothing personal can losing become tolerable. Then the athlete can dissolve his fear of failure and learn to win.

The same is true of love.

Westboro Baptist Church and Retirement Plan

The Westboro Baptist Church is in front of the Supreme Court this session. The Church is small, eighteen members or so, and inbred, all of its members are members of the Phelps family, and unaffiliated with any known church, Baptist or otherwise, in the world. Their credo, such as it is, is the United States is being punished for its tolerance of homosexuals and national tragedies are generally attributed to God's judgment of the country's moral laxity. The Church focuses on military deaths and tragedies of national importance to demonstrate and raise awareness of their point. (They also hate most other creeds but that is beside the point here.) The Court is now hearing a case in which the father of a soldier killed by a roadside bomb in the Middle East sued the Westboro Church for their disrupting the dead son's funeral. The Church, defended by the Church lawyer, a daughter of the Church's pastor, argues the Church is protected by the Free Speech and Freedom of Religion clauses in the Bill of Rights. The Church is defended by The Phelps Chartered Law Firm, the family law firm.

It is easy to look at this as a necessary irritation a free society suffers where the edge of a long bell-shaped curve is protected. But there is another aspect here, Section 1988, 42USC Section 1988 "The Civil Rights Attorney Fee Act". This is a law created to pay attorneys who represent deprived clients. Think ACLU. This is a law that forces the people , usually the government, to pay for the lawyer of their opposition. Every time the government sues one of these peripheral shard groups, or are sued by them, the taxpayer pays both sides.

This looks like a fertile field for the entrepreneurial mind. Take some sacred core beliefs--religion and speech--mix with some tender societal events--soldier funeral or mining disaster--and shake well. Bill $350 an hour.

Fortunately lawyers and ministers are above such behavior.

No Pressure Video

I thought the content was so offensive that it should be seen only by eyes attached to jaded minds. It has become such a big deal on the Internet that I suppose everyone has seen it. The conservative political front has gone nuts over this--I think for good reason--but I can see a less agitated, "It's a bad SNL skit" response. I'll try to explain my agitated one.

Any comedy skit, like SNL, has a history and a context in which they are seen. They are also self selecting: People who watch them have found them entertaining before. People who do not like them or are offended do not watch. This clip was not entertainment; it is an advertisement, a political one, but an ad aimed at the general public. It was created by people with the intent of influencing others to agree with their position. I have heard people who actually thought it was an attack on the position of global warming. In essence, it was seen as a parody of their position. These people failed on every level I can think of from aesthetics to persuasion and I think should be held responsible for that failure.

This debate, the debate over global warming and our response, is exactly that. A debate. A discussion. It is not a war. To present it as a war between well established positions of good and evil is inherently stupid and is offensive to those who are trying honestly to wrestle with the question. Regardless of how urgent the question is, belittling the debate is always an unsuccessful way of starting a debate. Certainty and arrogance are always off-putting--whether in the legislature or the dining room--unless you are a Churchill. These guys are not Churchill.

Utilitarianism is fraught with danger. Modern philosophy has even tried to change its name (and exile it under federal protection). Essentially it places a value on results not acts, hence its new name "consequentalism". Sometimes it smacks of tragedy, the bad effects of good intents. (Is an act of loyalty with an unintended bad result immoral?) More often it is a battlefield decision--sacrificing 10 men for 100 (or 11)--and here it gets sticky, particularly if the battlefield is politics. Showing administrators killing people under their responsibility for a greater cause the victims do not support is not humorous for people who know it has been done before.

There is a larger question here, the question of the astonishing insensitivity of the creators. They seem to be genuinely surprised by the response. That is the reaction of the dogmatist, the man so self absorbed in his own righteousness he is unable to see uncertainty and degree. To him the response is the classic physiological "all or nothing" response and that response occurs in the lab without a brain.

Extortion Companies

HotPotato, a social networking startup, has been bought by Facebook with the purpose of shutting the company down. They have "moved to Facebook" but have deleted all their data. The HotPotato company writes that this "was a difficult decision."

I doubt it. They started with 1.2 million in investments and will sell for 10 million. This is all in one year--a good return. What is difficult is the emergence of "extortion companies", companies that introduce a competitive parallel technology and threaten a major company's market so the major company simply takes the upstart over and doesn't use it or its technology. Or it may develop an advantagous innovation which creates a problem for competitors but is not worth the cost of adoption.

A tenet in free economies is the willingness of the economic community to test itself and each other, to allow innovation to force change upon established leaders--or to disrupt them.--so that products and processes improve. The creation of companies for the sole purpose of annoying existing successful entities or buying emerging companies with an advantage for the sole purpose of dismantling them is a perversion of both sides of the competitive equation.

Aka Akhenaton

I have always thought that Obama looked like Amenhotep IV aka Akhenaton. Of course his statues change with his reign --and, I think, his religious vision --but the long, long face is pretty consistent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GD-EG-Caire-Mus%C3%A9e061.JPG

Amenhotep has always been fascinating. He was unknown to history until his temples were uncovered in el-Amarna in the 19th century and gradually quite a story emerged. He was the son of Amenhotep III and assumed the throne--either singly or as co regent for a short time--in about 1350. He seemed to be an interactive, concerned leader as he dealt with the problems of empire, particularly the growth and incursion of the Hittite Empire. But his main contribution to Egypt was his startling attempt to reverse, indeed revolutionize, Egyptian culture. He was Egypt's--perhaps the world's--first monotheist. (This observation was expanded into a whole thesis by Freud who argued in Moses and Monotheism that Moses was an Egyptian and had learned monotheism from the Aten cult). The current god was Amen. He gradually began to dismantle the pantheon of myriad gods and goddesses ruled over by Amen and substituted the single god Aten--really a re emphasis of the old sun god Ra-- in their place. He also established himself as the intermediary between Aten and the world, thus bypassing the priest caste. This may have been a difficult process against the priests and tradition but perhaps it was a cult of the upper class with the lower classes clinging to the old gods and ways; none the less the images and charms of the older gods seem to have continued unchanged. Amenhotep IV eventually changed his name to Akhenaten, moved the capital to a new site, Amarna, dedicated to the new god, and destroyed and desecrated the old Amen statues and religious sites.

There are so many interesting and unique aspects of this man. He changed art; representations of the pharaoh became softer and more personal. His family became prominent (his first wife was the elegant Nefertiti) and for the first time statues became less rigid, more life-like . Temples were bright, airy and filled with representations of family and community scenes.

Things ended badly. He died--or was overthrown--and his family began rule.But soon Horemheb took the throne and all evidence of Akhenaten, his family and his new god was erased from monuments and records. Indeed Horemheb is recorded as directly following Amenhotep III. Amarna was abandoned; Akhenaten was anathma. Amen and his priests were back.

Bathetic and Bathoic

A question has been raised about my use of the word "bathoic" in reference to Blagojevich rather than "bathetic." Bathos comes from the Greek word for depth (e.g. bathysphere) and has been used in that context as the depth or bottom: Samuel Johnson called a poem "the very bathos of insipidity." Pope redefined it in his poem Peri Bathous, a satire on contemporary poetry that he felt trivialized important subjects accidentally,thus debasing the very things they attempted to elevate. (One of his examples was presenting God as a baker.) More than presenting this art as low in the artistic hierarchy, he meant to show a decline, a distance between the high quality of artistic ancestors and the low quality of the descendants and hence a loss. Hogarth followed with his final etching, The Bathos, which shows more than just failure, it shows failure set in the relief of expectation. http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/18c/hogarth/30.html

The phrase "sublime to the ridiculous" first appears in Thomas Paine's Age of Man as "one step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again." This implies a continuity, a rising progression from one to the other. Bathos, on the other hand does not; it implies a discontinuous fall closer to "the decline of the sublime to the ridiculous." It is used most often satirically, as anticlimax. And "bathetic" has become "syrupy, sentimental."

This fall, this decline, is lost in Samuel Johnson's--and the more humorous modern--meaning and I wanted to preserve it. My particular interest is the change of American leaders and culture over the years, the change from Washington to Nixon, from the world of ideas to conjecture. So I looked at "bathoic"--and coined it. I also decided to coin "Bathoe" and "Bathoes", to signify the principles in this decline.

The Cafeteria of Vulgarity

Vulgarity is the offending of good taste, a subjective notion, at best. But its antonyms are instructive: "Cultivation", "refinement", and "tastefulness"--concepts that are harder to quarrel with. It is from the Latin meaning "mean folk". The Latin Vulgate Bible translated by St. Jerome is so called because it was to be "commonly used", not because it was demeaned.

Schopenhauer called vulgarity "will over intellect", maybe a bit harsh if one thinks of vulgarity as just careless. But if one looks at the music awards last night much was carefully planned and none was careless. Vulgarity has become a credo among some, a marketing tool by others. Not that it can not be entertaining or even profound. Shakespeare's lower classes usually had a very good understanding of entertainment and of life, but they were never the center of the play, they were the relief. And Eminem can be very powerful. But that is not the norm. Inexperienced poets start with free verse because it is less restraining; it is easier. And "refined" is harder than "unrefined".

Democracy is always suspicious of the charge of vulgarity. It smacks of elitism (although Baudelaire said that what was enjoyable about bad taste was "the aristocratic pleasure in giving offense.") Chesterton implies it is democracy's greatest risk: "To put it shortly, the evil I am trying to warn you of is not excessive democracy, it is not excessive ugliness, it is not excessive anarchy. It might be stated thus: It is standardization by a low standard." It is this "low standard"--and the eagerness to free it from judgment-- that is the point. It democratizes value. It makes all things of equal value and, if true, nothing is valued. Everything and nothing can be picked and chosen; decisions are nothing more than what please. That is more significant than lazy. That is a loss of aspirations and is no way for a society or an individual to live or to think.

Department of Extortion

If you don't give me a swimming pool in my home legislative district, I'll vote against your health bill.
If you don't soften your stance towards American casino ownership, we'll boycott your sugar production.
If you don't change your currency value, we'll impose tariffs on your products.
And the indirect approach: if you don't let us raise your taxes the economy will collapse, the social security system will collapse, the housing market will collapse.....on and on and..
And now..If you don't give up on your mosque, we'll burn your sacred books.

It seems the public has taken a new step in its effort to manage its problems: They have turned to their political experts for example. After years of observing governmental function--the horse-trading, threats and compromises--the people have taken extortion into their own hands.

So far it has been a messy experiment. A man with a religious community of fifty people has dominated the news and thinking, or as much thinking as extortion will allow. It seems that he--and the news observers--actually believe that this is a legitimate negotiating technique. And why not? We see it in other fields all the time. The union extorts the bosses with the threat of a strike. The bosses extort the union with the threat of bankruptcy or outsourcing. The politician extort the voter with the threat of more or less programs. Only the politician is relatively safe from extortion because, even if voted out, he has a plush retirement package to fall back on. And there is always "consulting".

One can worry, though, about the use of these new tools among the simple voting folk. Extortion, like a fast car or a weapon, should be kept out of the hands of children. Politicians have a lot of experience and can be relied upon to do this type of thing well. Perhaps the politicians should take control of this outbreak right away and regulate it, perhaps through a new Extortion Czar or cabinet position. Like the warnings on auto ads, these things should be left to experts; do not try this at home.

Note to wife: If I can't have spaghetti for dinner tonight, I'll kill the dog.

Too Much Ado

When I was in college, a freshman seeking some attention invited the American Nazi, George Lincoln Rockwell, to speak at a small campus group created specifically for the event. In a day the campus went mad. Classes were cancelled, meetings held, some administrators tried to figure out how the school could abort the invitation. Eventually an entire week of the school calendar was changed to accommodate a week of impromptu seminars and lectures on Nazism. Table pounding, heartfelt angst was experienced by all. It was great fun. I am reminded of that time:
--A New York judge recently struck down a lawsuit by a guy contending that ladies' night at bars violated the equal protection clause---against men; it is the talk of the blogs.
--A self-proclaimed southern minister has made international headlines by announcing his plans to burn copies of the Koran this month; his congregation is around fifty souls. Mayor Bloomberg of New York and Angelina Jolie had an opinion on the proposed book burning.
--A small group wants to build a mosque near the site of the 9/11 attack in New York; it is an international story with angry debates.

It is easy to look at the above and blame a surfeit of lawyers or a shortage of creches. After all, August is a notoriously slow news month and Christmas will be coming. Yet there seems to be more--or maybe less--at work here. We simply have a lot of information available and little self-control. And we are easily driven to indignation. Everyone wants to be righteous. And everyone wants heard.

At one time in this country it was big enough and communications were limited enough that silly ideas and suggestions remained a local event--if a problem at all. Even after communications improved a wacko was seen as little more. Interesting moments in the country--the Symbionese Liberation Army, Timothy Leary, much of the activity of the ACLU--were all seen in context by an indulgent but confident culture. Even in my college Nazi experience, the tempest was quite content to be limited to the campus teapot. Now every crazy numerator stimulates its equally crazy denominator to cancel it out. Every opinion deserves a sound truck. Every notion, every behavior, every occurrence is seen as more than itself; it is seen as a validation of principles, either personal or national, when it may be nothing more than a quirk or a tick or simple exhibitionism.

Stupidity and bad taste are hard to legislate against but they can be combated. They are best scorned. But it requires some shared cultural beliefs, some respected social spokesmen and some equipoise, some assurance that the social footing is firm. And it requires a press that recognizes these needs.

Most important, it requires adults of good will. This is a culture desperate for grownups.

Prostate Cancer and The New York Times

An article in the New York Times of August 30, 2010 discusses the diagnosis of prostate cancer through the lens of a new book entitled "Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers" by Ralph Blum (a cultural anthropologist) and Dr. Mark Sholtz (an oncologist). http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/a-rush-to-operating-rooms-that-alters-mens-lives/?emc=eta1

The scene depicted is not pretty. The gist is that the vast majority of patients with prostate cancer are over treated, that 80% of the surgery done for the disease is unnecessary and that a large motive for treatment is financial remuneration. Radical prostatectomy, the commonest surgical treatment is said to lengthen the life expectancy of one in forty-eight patients.

As a disclaimer, I have not read this book but the picture presented here deserves analysis. Some background studies--
Random autopsies show a rate of unexpected cancer of the prostate in about 30% of men in the groups around 45, 55 and 65 years of age. It trends higher in the age of 75 and higher in the 80's.
PSA, a protein made in the prostate at a predictable rate, rises in situations where blood vessels are increased in number, fragility and porousness and, for one or more of these reasons, shows up elevated in some prostate cancers.
The diagnosis of prostate cancer has historically been made on physical examination where the disease is found as a hard lump on the prostate. The prostate, when the exam is normal but the PSA is elevated between 4 and 10, has a positive biopsy in about 30% of cases.
PSA elevation generally precedes clinically detectable prostate cancer by 5 to 7 years. In clinically detectable disease, life expectancy without treatment in men under about 70 is less than those with treatment over ten years; in men over 70 the life expectancy is about the same.

Clearly, 30% of men under the age of 70 are not dying of prostate cancer but if the disease that progresses to clinical findings can be identified in these men, that should help. A big problem is this group cannot be identified. PSA is generally seen as evidence of tumor activity but that may not be so. Biopsy of men with elevated PSA may find a disease that was sleeping and will sleep on. Some evidence of aggressiveness is often assumed from the Gleason Number, a rather subjective grading of the tumor tissue's histological deviation from the norm, and further hints of presumed behavior can be gleaned from volume of disease in the biopsy and multiplicity of sites of involvement, again generalities. Youth with the diagnosis is a negative.

There is nothing written in stone here: This is a disease of context, indeed many diseases are. Chicken pox is annoying in children, fatal in the elderly. A heart attack might pass unnoticed in an older man where the younger man is struck dead. Who survived the Black Death and why? Current medical thought sees prostate cancer as a mosaic, a collection of tendencies, clinical leanings and statistics from which decisions have to be made.

And it is hard. But articles like this make it harder. And presumed scientists often do not help. Last year a study showed up from Europe that looked at two groups of men, those in whom PSA studies were done and those who did not have the studies. Using this information as a proxy for prostate cancer and the value of finding it early with PSA testing, the scientists followed the two groups for up to seven years and found no significant difference in survival rate. Their conclusion: PSA testing--early detection of prostate cancer--was of no value. But PSA elevation precedes clinical disease by 5 to 7 years and clinical disease takes a while to kill. How was this study meaningful over such a short time frame? It wasn't. And the scientists knew it. Why, then, did they publish it? Why, indeed.

How the authors of this book determined that 80% of surgery was unnecessary is not clear from the article but it will be wonderful to learn. This difficult mosaic, which so many struggle with, will finally be made clear. At least I hope it will be--although I am not sure where these insights have been hiding. I hope this is not just another financial enterprise created to take advantage of the classical American under education in science, preoccupation with conspiracies, slavish devotion to sensationalism and confusion of disrespect with independence.

Pirate Logic

Over the last three years the Pittsburgh Pirates earned about 11 million dollars in profit annually, profit from a franchise recently valued a bit less than 300 million dollars. That return is about what the owners would get in a bond fund if they had sold the franchise and invested the money. A conservative return, certainly not a great return. Now with that knowledge, with 300 million dollars as the denominator, imagine how things would change if the owners changed the numerator, the earnings, by investing in players. How could the owners invest that profit, that numerator, so that the earnings would add more to the numerator than was spent? In other words, how could money from profit best be spent that guarenteed a net larger numerator?

This is a tricky question because the Pirates are paid to lose and such disincentives are extremely complex. The Pirates receive revenue sharing money from more profitable teams based on the money the Pirates do not make; if they start making more money, they receive less in revenue sharing. Moreover Bradbury's new book shows, according to him, that a team spending money to move from 60 wins to 70 wins actually loses money and the positive return doesn't appear until the team reaches the middle 80's in wins.

The problem, then, is more than improving the quality of the team, it must be improved in a quantum manner. Not only does money invested have to result in an improvement, that improvement must allow an improvement to at least 85 game wins. Under these conditions, a team owner must be very careful. Improving his roster may not help and may hurt his bottom line. Put another way, the team's success and the owner's success may not coincide. Indeed, they may be in opposition.

Consequently, the team cannot simply get better, it must get significantly better. Say, for example, Pujols decides to do missionary work in Pittsburgh and agrees to work for them for 5 million dollars a year. I doubt his addition, while interesting and entertaining, would make much difference; the opposition would pitch around him and offence is only part of the game anyway. The Pirates can't pitch either. But with Pujols' 5 million dollars--as much as a bargain as he would be--the ownership has already spent half--half--of the money they have to spend. Pujols is still batting fourth on a team with a lineup of seven other number six hitters and no, zero, pitching. And, if Bradbury is correct, with some luck and a few career years in the lineup the team could win 75 games, qualify for much less revenue sharing as a result and not even afford to pay the charitable Pujols the following year.

Building with free agents requires tremendous insight from scouts and the general manager. It also requires tremendous luck because the free agents would have to agree to a contract of more than a year or two. The available money would thus be tied up for years in free agents who would have to be had at a bargain, be willing to sign a long term contract and all of those investments would have to be successful. The team would be betting its solvency on several turnaround situations.

The other way is the draft, a longer but cheaper route although fraught with the uncertainties of untried youth. But the losses are limited, the players are locked up for 6 years and the luck is homogenized among the teams. And a team with good judgment of talent can succeed. The Marlins do it every cycle.

So the owners are making a reasonable return, they probably should not gamble in the free agent market and it seems likely their only option is the draft done with a good eye. They should hire a good eye. The city of Pittsburgh should be happy they can see major league baseball visit 82 times a year. And until the team management shows they can draft well the city will have to settle for pirogi races, nostalgia, mascots, fireworks, aging rock band performances and, generally, going to a county fair with a baseball team attached.

Tiglons and Ligers, Oh My!

"The evidence is overwhelming that manufacturers are creating excess HFC-23 simply to destroy it and earn carbon credits," said Mark Roberts of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a research and advocacy group. "This is the biggest environmental scandal in history and makes an absolute mockery of international efforts to combat climate change."

This appeared as part of an article in the Huffington Post. HFC-23 is a particularly dirty carbon producer and the implication is that the production of carbon--even if that production is peripheral or has no relation to the industry in question at all--has become a separate pursuit of companies so they can be paid not to produce it.

The question is why is anyone surprised? A distortion in the market, a tilt of the playing field, has been created to reward some and not others, to benefit specific behavior that has only an accounting advantage, like depreciating steel plants but not investing to produce steel. People will rush in to take advantage of the bias. These Rube Goldberg economics probably work sometimes but rarely. Raise the minimum wage to benefit minimum wage workers: Decrease the number of minimum wage jobs. Subsidize ethanol to decrease the use of petroleum: Petroleum use increases to produce the ethanol. Balance the earnings between big earners like the Yankees and lesser teams: Pittsburgh Pirates. Decrease the spreads in the stock market trades to stabilize the market: Flash crash. In this instance, businesses will be paid not to produce something, ergo, they will produce as much of it as they can first. This will produce more of the offending substance and eventually leech more money out of the payback system and make it less effective.

Notice that a system, once interfered with--even with the best of intentions-- changes into something else. A minimum wage job changes a valuable employee into an economic burden on his employer. An energy producer produces fertilizer and proportionally less petroleum for energy. The efficient farmer becomes a part-time food producer and a grossly inefficient energy producer. Several good baseball teams create and underwrite a new strange game the Pittsburgh Pirates play. Decreasing the profit in stock trades by market maker intermediaries creates a market where only high volume computer trading is profitable. It is reminiscent of hybridization. A mule is neither a horse nor a donkey. It is new.

But it is close. Close. And that is the point. No chef would substitute salt for sugar because it was close in appearence; he knows there is more to it than that. But somehow intellegent people feel thay can mix-and-match economic and political components without fear. Administrators and legislators create programs in reaction to problems and it is like adding a unique, foreign piece to a puzzle. Everything changes. Now, with the new piece, nothing fits and the puzzle becomes something else, neither the problem nor the solution but something else. A mule that can not run like a horse, a tiglon very distinct from its parents and from a liger.

It's not "close enough for government work"; it's a new explanation, a new excuse. It's the excuse Heisenberg has cursed us with that justifies our compromises: The imprecision of our times.

But we have to do something, don't we?

Blagojevich and Libby

So the bathoic Blagojevich is convicted on one of twenty-four counts, lying to the FBI during the investigation. I don't know if this is an indictment of the jury, the electorate (sort of the same), how inept a crook Blagojevich is or Fitzgerald. There is a recurring pattern here, though. Some guy is rousted, investigated to death and the only thing they get him on is lying during the questioning. The same thing happened with Libby. Fitzgerald--again--knew who the leak source was but pushed on and trapped Libby in some inconsistency and sent him to jail. I have absolutely no sympathy for politicians of any stripe and believe they are all probable felons and traitors. But this catching an innocent man for what he does in the course of an investigation that exonerates him is creepy. Sort of like kicking in the door of the wrong house and then arresting the owner for resisting arrest.

Hold Your Peace

America needs a debate over its very nature, that is--does it have characteristics distinctive from the animal qualities of other countries? Does it have a unique direction or is this just another nation trying to find its economic footing within a workable political framework? The New York mosque flap provides just such an opportunity.

Hurt feelings, bigotry, xenophobia and religious enthusiasm aside, this mosque debate should stimulate reasonable discussion about the boundaries of personal freedom policed by individual responsibility. The question is not whether it is legal to build it--it is--but rather whether such a building is appropriate, whether well meaning citizens should enforce their personal rights in the teeth of the overwhelming condemnation and discomfort of virtually everyone else simply because it is legal to do so. Some see this question as akin to desegregating a grade school, an African American personal right in the face of white condemnation and discomfort; this is more akin to the behavior of the "flying imams", gratuitous and malicious--albeit allowed by existing laws--done solely for the purpose of tormenting a social opponent. It is an area where good will is required, a willingness to put aside your personal right for the greater good. It is that crucial element in society that recognizes the individual's importance to the whole--and the whole's vulnerability to the individual: Self restraint. It is that quality in an individual that recognizes that on some level in this country he is participating in something large and important, something he shares in common with all others as opposed to the smaller and individual family, racial, blood type, skin color, cultural and religious variables that distinguish him from that large group.

Every marriage has that moment where the minister turns to the congregation and intones, "If any here gathered has reason why these two should not be joined together in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace." It is sometimes a signal in fiction for the picaresque hero to leap to the fore and abscond with an unwilling bride. In truth, it is a brilliant moment evolved from the Book of Common Prayer: The modern minister is not serious. The announcement is designed to give the individuals in the congregation the opportunity to put their objections aside, to allow the couple to proceed with their ritual and move on with their lives. To start anew. The people are being asked to withhold their right--even their presumed responsibility--to be destructive. It is saying to the congregation, "You are given the freedom and the opportunity to speak, to damage these people and this event; don't take it."


Yet someone will sometimes take it. The society is always plagued by the self-righteous, the bluenose, the puritan and the literal, often someone with a vindictive streak. Someone willing to destroy the whole to make a point. This mosque controversy is an opportunity to confront that person, to smoke him out and reveal him, to raise the important argument of social unity--the argument that must be resolved if this country is to solve the economic and security threats it will soon face.




All that being said, this is funny:

A grass-roots movement among construction workers and unions asks Cordoba mosque supporters: Who do you expect to build it? The same people who built the World Trade Center perhaps? (IBD)

Results as the Opposite of Intentions

So the recent studies show that an increase in the minimum wage results in the rise in unemployment of minimum wage workers. Subsidizing the mortgages of homeowners results in the rise of bankruptcies and loss of homes. Attempts to pacify countries result in an increase in armed resistance. Programs that underwrite food expenses for hungry children results in an increase in the number of hungry children. The federal support of ethanol as a petroleum fuel substitute results in an increase in petroleum use. Taxes to stimulate jobs growth cause a decrease in gross domestic product. And how's the war on drugs going? Is it doing as well as the war on poverty?

Anybody see a pattern here? Is it true that our interference stimulates the problem we are trying to fix? Or are we seeing the bad administration of a good plan? Either way, it's a heck of a lot worse than Heisenberg interference which, at least, is neutral.

The debate over the proper role of government will never end. A new approach might be: What can government do right? One of the axioms of government seems to be that a program will never go away once started regardless of its effectiveness or success. How about the creation of a bureau that does nothing but analyze the effectiveness of governmental programs. Then we can analyse the role of government in the framework of its capabilities.

Probably wouldn't work.

The Black Hole of Bad Manners

This New York mosque controversy is not a circus, it is just another distracting and misleading tempest looking for an accommodating teapot. Anyone can build a building anywhere as long as it conforms to local regulations, is not in an area of eminent domain and conforms with the financial interests of politicians of import. If the mosque doesn't violate any of these restrictions, no one will have a logical objection.

And that is the point: The objections are not logical--but they are heartfelt and, somewhat, understandable. The Islamic movement in the U.S. has willingly joined what has up until now been the underclass' monopoly: Taking advantage of America's strange eagerness to reward bad social behavior. In 1999 two Muslim students on an American West flight were thrown off after wandering the plane cabin, refusing to respond to flight attendants, talking to passengers in ominous ways and trying twice to get into the cockpit. On Nov. 20, 2006 the six "flying imams" on a US Air flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix terrorized a passenger cabin by wandering the cabin, refusing to sit in assigned seats, speaking loudly in Arabic and voicing loud support for bin Laden and hatred for President Bush. They, too, were sent off the plane. Both these groups sued in court and got money.

I doubt any of these acts qualify as felonies or even misdemeanors but they are certainly obnoxious, antisocial and malevolent. Mutual concessions are mandatory in the civilized social world and pointed disdain for the comfort of others living responsibly under the social contract is a bit hard to take sometimes. While these people are only annoying and the problems minor, there is a larger point at stake. Societies--especially democracies--need a feeling of commonality of purpose. Diversity brings spice to the table but substance is always individual. People and groups with their black hole self importance will always ignore the common good. This mosque mosquito is just another such square religious/ethnic peg in the social round hole. And the opposition to it is little more than incoherent anger at sadistic jerks.

This mosque foolishness is a real opportunity. The social contract demands a concern for the common good. Purposeful defiance of the common good must be publicly discouraged, even when that defiance is legal. This country has a long history of confusing narrow personal political goals with how the country should be. Malicious social disruption might be legal but it does not have to be tolerated. This discussion should move away from debate over political and legislative tolerance to the social responsibility debate. It is time to draw some lines.

"Irony is Overrated" (Claudia Black, Speaking for all Women)

Illness in the United States is showing a pattern: Chronic illnesses are rising. Diabetes, cancer, coronary artery disease, hospital acquired infections, mental illness, childhood obesity and autism--all are increasing in the population. These changes are occurring in a culture that seems to be genuinely concerned about its health, a culture that diets, works out and whose insurance industry and government actively promotes healthy lifestyles. What possible explanation is there for this increase in disease despite sincere and advanced efforts to prevent it? Perhaps it is those very advances themselves. Parallel to this rise in disease is the rise in construction and technology, a growth in our industrial and living complexes unparalleled in history. More, these chronic illnesses seem to be exclusive to these growth areas throughout the world. The social and economic burdens of these illness trends may soon overwhelm the society's ability to respond. Clearly something must be done.

Civilization has been know to be a detriment to man in the West ever since Rousseau. The relationship we have with our environment, how our new world relates to our old world, can no longer be ignored. The interactions within these worlds would be denied only by the most uneducated. From psychology to entangled particles we have demonstrated our integration. Yet some of the more established Eastern societies have recognized this interdependence for centuries and we should call on their wisdom. I am speaking, of course, of the ancient Chinese Feng Shei.

Feng Shei (literally wind-water) is a Chinese belief founded in Taoist thinking and refined for 3000 years. It recognizes the interactivity of creation seen in the relationships among the five elements of fire, water, earth, metal and wood. The various combinations and mingling of these elements also interact with the surroundings and contribute to the health and well being of communities and individuals. Who hasn't walked into a room and felt welcomed by its structure --or not? Why are some towns charming and some not? Feng Shei takes these subjective feelings further so that structure, color, architecture and placement of all man's interventions work with, not against, the energy of nature. Man's energy and work would thus conform to the harmony of nature, not oppose it. Feng Shei is time honored and proven effective in countless experiences over eons.

This country has been built and developed without respect to nature for too long. Clearly our inharmonious relationship with the world is beginning to bear poisonous fruit in our health, our happiness, our lives and our international relations. And certainly things are getting worse. A serious crisis demands a serious response. My solution is Feng Shei credits. This would apply from suburbs to operating rooms. Communities developing without respect to Feng Shei would pay a tariff that would be redistributed to communities that observe Feng Shei techniques. Corporations and companies would do the same. Such an approach would favor developing nations which do not have existing inharmonious infrastructures and penalize those richer countries with existing offending infrastructures who can better afford the penalties for past failures and the overhead to update them. Feng Shei experts could act as administrators and, in the capitalistic tradition, a public market for Feng Shei credits could emerge.


The discomfort of the nation is palpable. We are at the tipping point. Undoubtedly there will be skeptics, conservatives content with what we have called "progress", fearful of change. And there will be many who will oppose these changes because they have something to lose, something personal to put before the whole. But we are in grave danger. Who can deny a malaise is abroad in the land? A renowned and revered culture offers us the solution, a culture so large it is, in itself, a consensus. Only reactionaries and xenophobes can disagree. We must act, and now.

Shards

Today is the anniversary of the murder of Sharon Tate by what the press called, strangely, "The Manson Family". I knew of the actress only through my passing interest in terrible movies, specifically "The Fearless Vampire Killers", but the story was riveting. The circumstances of her murder were particularly gruesome but the arresting aspect of the event was the nature of the attackers: They seemed on the surface to be totally mad yet they were organized and moved like a pack. Manson himself was less interesting than the others; he was never physically involved in the killings and his influence in the events only highlighted the main problem. By themselves the murderers were inexplicable but, as agents, the pitiless blood drinking lunatics were impossible.

Madness is a terrible curse only exaggerated by our misapprehensions of it. We sniff around its edges, sometimes come to ridiculous cultural conclusions and submit the victims to more of the same. We have tried to frighten madness out, boil it, burn it, exorcise it, reason with it and more recently stun it with pharmaceuticals. Yet of all its diverse appearances, one thing is constant: The madman never organizes, never joins. His illness separates him spiritually from others, isolates him not because he is shunned but because he is unable to form bonds. He is alone with his illness, castaway and marooned. Contrary to fanciful social allegories, there is never a revolution in a madhouse.

Yet here we have a group of total crazies planning and executing an attack on several families over several weeks. Many had previous psychiatric diagnoses and one later made a motiveless attempt on Gerald Ford's life. How could these people organize? How did they group and integrate towards an end? Is there some new pathology afoot? Or has the culture become so large and so forgiving that, at its edge, otherwise inexplicable social behavior--like snake handling--can find a home.

Why Dr. Karen Woo Died

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/08/british-surgeon-karen-woo-afghanistan

From the days of The Waters of Mullalla through the Heroes of Beslan to the Glorious Defeat of Dr. Karen Woo there is nothing more characteristic of the desperate, homicidal and primitive nature of the peripheral, armed ideologue than the precise, savage attack on the helpless. A hospital target is preferable and if a nunnery is attached, all the better. Rarely a school is available but that, of course, is usually too much to hope (or pray) for. That is the nature of certainty--or sometime the desperate, homicidal and primitive all by itself: The right --or need--to exploit the greatest leverage possible. Who can forget the wild-eyed terror in the eyes of the children in the Beslan school as hard, experienced guerrillas cut them to pieces. And one can easily imagine the similar fear mixed with an adult incomprehension as Dr. Woo and her companions died because they did not know the protective magic phrases from the Koran that their fellow knew.

Total war is easy for the winners to defend. But the losers did not go to war because they were mad in spite of their enemies' slander. The losers had their reasons, formulated in their minds and conferences. And at the core of every homicidal conflict is inevitability, the belief that the combatants have no other option. War is the option to their annihilation.

Years ago the Iroquois, pressed on all sides by the relentless European immigrant, decided to go to war. But trapped as they were against the Great Lakes in the northwest by the bulk of white settlers they needed a second front, preferably in the southwest. They turned to the Creek, a large and well ordered tribe they respected and sent their famous war chief, Tecumseh, to convince them to join their war. Tecumseh stood at the council for three days, silent until the white government observers left. Then he gave a speech that ended thus: "Make war on their men! Make war on their women! Make war on their children! Make war on their dead!" The Creek rose in a rage, joined the Iroquois and fought to the death. Many of the battles had 98% mortality rates with only the leaders escaping to raise another force. One of the white leaders, Andrew Jackson, cemented his reputation in these horrific wars.

"Make war on their dead"? Tecumseh was not mad either. His war was not with these settlers and he knew it. His war was with history. His war was with a culture and its progress; no less a victory over the entire movement of history would protect the Iroquois and the Creek. They were doomed and total war was their only answer. They were in the endgame. They killed everyone they could find, farmers, traders' wives, settlers' children. And the settlers responded in kind. Every battle was to the death; there was no quarter and no surrender. When the military position was overrun, the camps and villages were next and all the women and children were killed. And then they were gone.

A society, a culture, a people backed into a corner will fight like a trapped beast to the death. So will an outlaw. It is very important that a society be able to distinguish between the two. No society wants to be in an endgame with an enemy and not know it.

Giving War a Bad Name

On August 6, 1945, the Americans attacked the city of Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, the first such attack ever. Interestingly, its anniversary is not well remembered. At least 140,000 people were killed in the initial attack; the lingering effects are myriad.

There are countless topics that can be derived from this event but there is a specific modern American peculiarity whose origins I have always pondered: The reluctance to fight wars seriously. Since the Second World War the United States has gone out of its way to sanitize combat. It fights wars as a community effort--as part of coalitions or the United Nations--as if there is "nothing personal". They place limits on objectives, they never participate in the time honored purposes of war--slaves and booty--and often will compensate or rebuild the enemy after the fact. Most significantly, they try to distance their own citizenry from the combat. From a volunteer military to the creepy draft lottery the average citizen is moved as far as possible from the war. Indeed this compartmentalizing of combat seems to dictate policy as the government limits action and objectives to limit domestic impact.

The attempt to isolate foreign war as a domestic policy is, of course, impossible. The American inflation chart follows the war chart point by point. Worse, the people become inured to the violence and destruction, like the gradual therapeutic desensitizing to an allergy. But the worst point is the nation's military purpose and its domestic purpose are allowed to diverge. In the Vietnam War American troops were under a greater threat because several sites of enemy troop operations could not be violated for diplomatic reasons, because the war might expand and become a risk to the citizens at home. No nation should allow its sons to be under fire without being willing to commit completely to their defense and well being. That is, no nation should allow its sons to be under fire without risk to itself.

War is too terrible to be dabbled in. The soldier is immersed in total war; his society should be too. That the soldier is a volunteer is no excuse. If every action was supported with a war tax, if gasoline was diverted or food sold for the expressed purpose of troop support, if the citizen were made to suffer, to participate in the actions of their military children in some--even symbolic--way there would only be serious efforts undertaken.

War is an active, inevitable evil. Yet it cannot be softened or cleaned up. No politician can tweak it to make it more gentle. It is vicious and lethal. Even in the strange Aztec "Flower Wars" everyone died in the end. The citizens of Hiroshima knew this. They lived and died it. It may be that their lesson is too hard for us to face.

Blind Bathoes and Elephants

A number a years ago a woman held up my neighborhood bank with a handgun. She was quickly arrested, tried and convicted. The judge--a bathoes character if there ever was one--sentenced her to nursing school.

I have never forgotten this story because it so typifies modern thinking. The judge felt that nurses were as a group upstanding, responsible, hardworking citizens. The distinguishing characteristic that separated nurses from others was their nursing degree. Therefore, he reasoned, this criminal would be improved by a nursing degree. You can catch almost anything in a hospital, why not responsibility and integrity. Indeed perhaps the entire community would be improved if everyone was conferred a nursing degree at birth.

Observations lead to generalizations. Sometimes these are brilliant, like Darwin. Sometimes they are only bigotry, like blacks are lazy or Asian girls can't drive. No observation is worth anything unless it is confirmed, critically. Science is not consensus, it is contentious. It is the battlefield of argument over inference. Information never, ever, implies; we infer. It is only after brutal analysis that information becomes meaningful.

Our current culture does not understand this and we will suffer for its ignorance. We look at home ownership and see that people who are homeowners seem to be better invested in their communities. We ask no further questions; we assume --infer--that home ownership is beneficial in itself. We ignore all the other possibilities--the buyer saved for his down payment so he was disciplined, the buyer did not buy until he had a good and stable job, the buyer had a stable family--all perfectly reasonable circumstances that might contribute to the successful homeowner demographic success. No, the house is the thing. People with college degrees earn more than their fellows without a degree, thus a degree is good for you. (Not a nursing degree this time around.) Do we have any idea if a 120 IQ woman with a degree out earns a 120 IQ woman without a degree? No, that study has never been done. So we slog on and encourage home ownership and college degrees with only the most superficial evidence.

Poor scientific thinking is more than erroneous, it distracts us from the truth. It misleads us as surely as an intentional, malicious lie. Years ago a seminal study was done on the mortality rates in cities versus farm communities in Great Britain. It showed a significantly higher mortality rate in urban communities. The conclusion was that pollution was very bad for you and plans were initiated to curb smog. Now it might well be that smog is terrible for one's health but the study omitted one point: It did not correct for smoking. When the statistics were later reviewed to eliminate the factor of smoking among the subjects, the difference went away; the survival rate among the two communities was identical. Smog might be bad for you but there was no evidence in this study for that; but there was real evidence that cigarettes were killing people.

We are less insightful than we think. And we are less kind. Basing plans and programs on shoddy thinking traps everyone in the shoddy results. More, it distracts us from the true answers to our questions. One can hope that with time we, as a community, will get better at this thinking but one worries. Shoddy thinking, like bigotry, is easier.

The Slide from Fixing to Complaining

Lawrenceville, Pa. residents had a meeting chaired by a Pittsburgh city councilman last night. The topic was the Marcellus Shale Formation. A member of the Marcellus Shale Council, which is a body of oil and gas drillers, was present as well. There were a number of concerns voiced, the prominent one the potential poisoning of water by the drilling. The consensus was that the community was opposed to drilling even though the drilling representative stated there were no plans for any driller to drill in the Lawrenceville area and it was unlikely anyone would.

The process of drilling in shale formations includes "fracing" where a liquid, usually water, is fired into the shale area after the area has been approached with conventional drilling. The theoretical problem is contamination of water sources by the fracing liquid. The depth of the drilling is usually away from groundwater sources; drilling usually is at several thousand feet at least. While this possible contamination is a real concern, the examples of contamination are usually not active drilling or fracing but rather abandoned and collapsed wells. Indeed a recent report from the EPA paraphrased in a journal stated: "Although thousands of wells are fractured annually, the EPA did not find a single incident of the contamination of drinking water wells by hydraulic fracturing fluid injection. Effective state regulation has made hydraulic fracturing a safe and environmentally-sound way to maximize and conserve our nation's natural resources." (See http://www.iogcc.state.ok.us/hydraulic-fracturing).

Southwestern Pennsylvania has been a hotbed of shale drilling recently. The Marcellus Shale has promise of being a huge, productive natural gas source for many years. In a nation with acute energy concerns one would think such a find would be applauded, its aspects analyzed and plans for maximum benefit for all made. In an area with a devastated economic base one would think that dancing in the streets might be the order of the day. (It has been said the natural gas industry in western Pennsylvania has potential to be larger than steel at its zenith.) Yet what do we see? We see a community organizing to stop an economic venture that has no intention of going there. It reminds one of the old vaudeville joke of the man who is found in Central Park cutting newspaper into small pieces and scattering them around. When asked the reason for this behavior he says: "To keep away the elephants." When he is told incredulously that there are no elephants in New York he replies, "See, it's really working."

There is a need for us to intervene in our history, to be an active participant in what is happening to us. Action, like responsibility, can be taught. It can be made part of the community ethos. Necessity might hurry it. The first step might be to attempt not to look ridiculous.

Athletes and their Crowd

When Steinbrenner was buried, not a Yankee player was in attendance. When LeBron James weighed his choices he thought not once of the Cleveland fan or his community. Yet somehow the fan feels the athlete has an investment in him and his world, has some concern about him, responds to his cheers and exhortations. He feels they are joined by their common interest in his team, that the fan is the famous "twelfth man."

This identification is a true public relations miracle. How the coddled, babied, egocentric, self-absorbed and money addled athlete could possibly be seen by the public as representative, heroic, outgoing and responsible in his community staggers the imagination. How many local citizens have to be shot, throttled, beaten, thrown up on, wrecked, groped, raped and terrorized before the community figures it out? The athlete is not one of them. He is not a community member, not a local citizen. He is an obnoxious visitor at best, an alien mercenary at worst. And he cynically exploits the community's best unifying hope: To create a common bond and direction among its people.

This world needs achievers and we need to note them. Heroes would be great, too, but we need achievers. We need them to prove the value of distinction, to show the rewards of effort and sacrifice. We need them to emulate. And we need communities; we need the feeling of some occasional unifying point where we can gather, like around a campfire, and share in our commonality and recognize our filial bond.

We ask too much of these athletes. Let them play. It's the game and the audience we are there for.

American Gigolo

There is a recent article in Slate by Anne Applebaum whose title tells all: American Hypocrites. http://www.slate.com/id/2260968/ The thrust is that Americans demand much more from their government than they admit and that the talk of downsizing it is little more. Her focus is on the absurd preoccupation we have with safety. We seem to hold the government responsible for everything from the actions of madmen to natural disasters. Following every such event the actions and reactions of the government are carefully analyzed as programs, people and policies are reviewed, removed, replaced and repositioned.

What is not included in this insight is the government as a willing participant, more, a volunteer. The prevailing thought seems to see the government as quite capable of meeting such goofy demands. We watch as they pursue down narrowing alleys of diminishing returns. We applaud as they start to wonder aloud about the health habits of its citizens. There is a national crisis of shower heads!

We are less hypocrites than gigolos. We have given up whatever talents we possess and, having reviewed the nasty combat in life, have cynically surrendered to premature fatigue, sidled up to the gaudy aging woman at the party and sold ourselves to her.

The problem is the old gal is living beyond her means.

Entropy and the Order of Things

We are homo sapiens, from the Latin "wise man" or "knowing man". This term is neither accurate nor defining. In our early agricultural days we must have been splendid, planning and creating and changing our environment for all the world to see. Now our knowledge has fallen on hard times. Information trumps wisdom; things seem beyond our reach--even those things we have created. We have gone from the sorcerer to his apprentice, lost in a complex world of a master's making. Both art and science now declare that accuracy and understanding are impossible as a maxim. Despite our massive influence, something has been lost.

Nor is the phrase defining. Our brain is startling and vastly different from our competitors but we are not thinking beings with emotional baggage, we are emotional beings with thinking added. We are an elaboration of those very competitors we have outrun. We are a palimpsest with the look of thinking but emotions-- deep, ancient and mysterious-- bleeding through.

This incredible mixture of emotional hardware and thinking software do not exist on a border of antagonism and conflict, they complement each other. They are intertwined. They allow for texture, scent and hue--the complexity of life. But this wondrous gift comes with a price: There must be order. There must be structure. We each must impose ourselves upon the potential chaos of these independent elements. Just as God has devised his innumerable macrocosms, so we must our microcosm.

All systems deteriorate, wind down. Even a solar system, or a galaxy of solar systems, built and fired from some primal furnace will eventually cool and lose its integration. Entropy is the order of things. And each of us must create his world--and maintain his fragile order against the decay--with his "knowing" will.

We Are All Atomic Soldiers Now

A summary of the recent Romer study on the relationship between taxes and gross domestic product: "They find that an announced tax change equivalent to one percent of GDP causes a three percent reduction in GDP over the next two and half years, which would indicate that we are approximately at the Laffer maximum - that increases and decreases in taxes do not have a long term effect on revenue, that increasing taxes merely increases the relative status of people in the state sector by reducing the absolute wealth of people outside the state sector, without increasing the absolute wealth of people in the state sector."

What does any of this mean? This study implies that taxation has a direct effect on the productivity of a nation, that taxation reduces national wealth. It doesn't just shift wealth; it reduces wealth across the board! This implies there is no ability of the state to redistribute wealth, the state can only redistribute poverty. The recipients of the tax largess are net losers as are the taxed.

The nation is at the mercy of the good intentions of the Bathos, regardless of the risks involved. Surely one would look at a study like this and be cautious. One would think of ways to create these circumstances in a smaller area with less potential fallout, to test these ideas further. But no, this plan marches on. And Christina Romer is in the Obama administration!

Years ago the government, eager to see how fighting men responded emotionally to atomic explosions, put a number of soldiers close to an atomic ground zero site. (http://nsdl.org/resource/2200/20061003172814974T) Those men were exposed to tremendous radiation. There are debates over the cause and effect of the illnesses those men subsequently suffered but there should be no debate over the nature of the experiment itself. It was stupid, shortsighted, ill conceived, careless and cruel. It was a bunch of sorcerer's apprentices playing at science. A bunch of curious, well meaning men behind desks making suggestions and plans, everyone with a "good idea", none of them realizing they were over their collective heads.

We are all atomic soldiers now.