Category: Political

On the dividends of a late read

I read a lot, eagerly, omnivorously, and in doing so sometimes overreach, ordering books I can’t possibly get to in the short term; hence they accumulate in heaps on my office floor, as my shelves are already squeezed. I confess my gluttony, yet without repentance. Liking books isn’t a bad vice, I think, and I’ll hardly bankrupt our family budget in doing so.

Sometimes, however, I’ll guiltily raid one of my piles, snatching a book that’s lain there goodness knows how long, with the end result that it’s somewhat dated in what it has to say. Take, for instance, my latest snatch, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away. Well, here’s a book that came out in 1999, or 12-years ago, and I’m reading it just now. I deserve what I get.

But sometimes there are dividends in doing a late read, as time’s passage can afford a new perspective. For example, Bryson, in a chapter called, “The Numbers Game,” has this paragraph, mind you, written pre-1999:

No matter where you turn with regard to America and its economy you are going to bump into figures that are so large as to be beyond meaningful comprehension. Consider just a few figures culled at random from this week’s papers. California has an economy worth $850 billion. The annual gross domestic product of the United States is $6.8 trillion. The federal budget is $12.6 trillion, the federal deficit near $200 billion (p. 51).

Well, let’s see what time’s warp has done to those stats.

Today, the worth of California’s economy has swelled to $2 trillion.

The USA annual gross domestic product (GDP) is now over $15 trillion.

The approved federal budget for 2011 is currently at $3,360 trillion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_States_federal_budget#Total_spending
Wikipedia

As I write, the federal deficit exceeds $15 trillion. http://www.federalbudget.com/FederalBudget. The figures increase every second. Remember, it was just $200 billion when Bryson wrote his book 12-years earlier!

I don’t know about you, but I find this sobering, if not downright scary. We’ve gone from a budget mess to the very precipice. Ironically, the bailouts and stimuli to the economy, rather than helping us, are contributing to our economic malaise, turning the United States into a full scale deficit crisis. Somewhere, we’ve got to stop the fiscal hemorrhaging. Ok, my figures update Bryson’s 12-years ago. What’s going to happen over the next ten years? I don’t think any of us want to go there!

For a sense of just how much money is dripping away into interest payments on accumulated debt exceeding $15 trillion we can’t do better than Bryson’s fantasy analogy of earning one buck for each dollar you could initial to determine how long it would take you to earn just a trillion dollars:

If you initialed one dollar per second, you would make $1000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days–something over three years–to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years, you would be as wealthy as Bill Gates. But not until after 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar (and even then you would be less than one-fourth of the way through the pile of money representing America’s national debt). That is what $1 trillion is (p. 52).

As I’ve said, sometimes it’s serendipity to read a book later rather than sooner. Unfortunately, not many in the right places seem to be reading–or listening–at all. I think of other problems experiencing the “kick-the-can-down the road” syndrome,” for example, accelerating climate change, a nuclear Iran, a world with insufficient water, population overload.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Evolution’s triumph: the Sandhill Crane

You can’t mistake Sandhill cranes, resplendent with red crowns, wide wing spans, and long legs.

Every fall, they come to Kentucky by the thousands, transients pursuing a rest stop as they wing their way to winter feeding grounds in the Mississippi delta, Florida, Mexico and Cuba. They draw their name from their principal migratory feeding ground along the Platte in Nebraska, with its 75-mile stretch of grass secured sand dunes.

They’re enchanting birds to watch and listen to. You can hear them coming a long ways off in what sounds like a thunderous French r made deep within the throat. These are creatures who sing and dance. Couples, who mate for life and live up to 20 years, actually sing in mutual cadence, sometimes leaping up and down.

They’re among our most ancient birds, stretching back several million years and preceding humans. By the early part of the Twentieth Century they had been hunted virtually to extinction. Through careful conservation, they’ve rebounded, though still threatened principally by habitat loss in Mississippi and Cuba.

Lately, they’ve been in my thoughts. Last spring I had been reading Carl Safina’s impassioned lament for nature’s vanishing wildlife, The View from Lazy Point, and several times he alluded to and quoted Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, a collection of Thoreau-like observations on nature and man’s troubling despoilment of it. I was not disappointed.

In the course of this beautifully written book, Leopold comes upon the Sandhill crane:

A glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spiral to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.

When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the chorus of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.

The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their once having harbored cranes. Now they stand humbled, adrift in history.

—

Upshot:

This week here in Kentucky, the Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources announced it will take applications for permits from Nov. 15 through Nov. 30 and hold a drawing Dec. 5 to select up to 400 hunters, the first state to do so East of the Mississippi. Hunters may take up to two sandhill crane then, or until hunters take 400 birds. The season will begin December 17.

Can it happen again?

 
We’re now coming up on the 10th anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11.  Yet in that interval, very little has changed.  We’ve little control of our borders and we remain lethargic in implementing monitoring of overstays.  Given our recent history of home-grown terrorists, we’re likewise negligent in screening applicants for immigration.
For example, just recently we’ve learned that the immigrant hotel maid accusing International Monetary Fund president Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape may be implicated in a web of lies.  She’s now admitted to lying on her application for refugee status, claiming she was ganged raped.  In a recorded conversation with her boyfriend in an Arizona jail two days after her accusations, she commented, “This person is rich and there’s money to be made.”  It’s also reported she’s stashed money in several banks, some of it drug dealer money and given false information to the government on her taxes. http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/07/02/new.york.dsk/
Hey, how does someone like this, a rogue liar, not get checked out before being granted asylum?  Strauss-Kahn, however, was compelled to resign as head of the International Monetary Fund and has possibly lost a chance to become France’s next President.
Two weeks ago here in KY, the FBI took into custody two Iraqis who had also been granted refugee status.  They had been caught in a sting, trying to provide material support to al Qaeda in Iraq.  One of them bragged that he had employed IEDs against Americans in Iraq.
While we hear much about illegals flooding across the Mexican border, the truth is their numbers are dwarfed by those who simply overstay their visas.  Of the estimated 12 million illegals in the U. S., half of them have done so.  Fact is, it’s now the favored method of sneaking-in.  It sure beats swimming a river, squeezing through a tunnel, or paying a ”coyote,” only to be abandoned in the Arizona desert with the border patrol at your heels.
Unfortunately, the Congress and the Naturalization and Immigration Service have made jumping the queue enticingly easy.  Once foreigners are in our country the INS lacks any mechanism to check on where they are or if they’ve left.  As Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington has put it, “We certainly don’t know who they are or where they are.”   http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0205/p01s03-usju.html
The danger this leads to in staging an attack on the homeland is obvious.  The events of 9/11 were perpetrated by 19 terrorists, all of them granted visas.  Four of them took flight lessons in the U. S., three of them lacking proper visas for doing so.  Two of them had overstayed their visas.
According to the 9/11 Commission, all 19 used driver’s licenses for ID purposes to avoid showing their passports and possibly raising suspicion.  Licenses were procured from VA (7), FL (13), CA (2).  And yet we have advocates of granting driver’s licenses to illegals like 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, arguing we need to ”bring these people out of the shadows.”  Sounds like political pandering to me.
As early as 1996, Congress actually passed a law requiring the INS employ a “rigorous” system to track foreigners entering and leaving the U. S.  Congress, however, delayed its implementation due to protests from border towns, complaining it would interfere with commerce.  Under its provisions, it would call for a swipeable ID card to record entering and leaving the U. S.
Again, the situation isn’t as simple as it sounds.  In any given year, some 30 million visas are issued.  Just recently, the Government  Accounting Office indicated a backlog of 1.6 million overstayed visas, leading Sen. Joe Lieberman, Chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, to comment,  “It is simply unacceptable that we are still systematically unable to identify people who overstay—some of whom may be terrorists . . . .”

The resources, however, needed to capture a relative few are enormously cost prohibitive and unlikely to secure approval in a down economy and a Congress embroiled in a heated budget debate.  At best, the Homeland Security Department has settled to prioritize the more egregious cases.  http://www.globalvisas.com/news/us_struggles_with_backlog_of_overstayers3067.html

If we’re derelict in monitoring overstays, we’re far too lenient in screening would-be immigrants. Consider a few instances supplementing those I mentioned at the outset with regard to the Strauss-Kahn accuser and the two Iraqis picked-up in KY:

Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized citizen, who attempted a car bombing in Times Square in May 2010.
The Lackawanna Six involving six Yemeni-Americans in 2001, who confessed to providing support to al Qaeda interests in Afghanistan.  Some had participated in al Qaeda training camps.
The Fort Dix Plot, involving six foreign born Muslims, four of whom were illegal immigrants.  In 2007 they had plotted to kill soldiers at the army base.
Mohammed Osmud Mohamud, who in November 2010 attempted to ignite a car bomb during a Christmas tree lighting tree ceremony.
I’m aware we have our own American terrorists who represent the extremes of the ideological perspective, Left and Right, but I’m dealing here with lapses in security in the context of immigration and visa monitoring. 

In my view, it’s more productive to pursue intelligence gathering as a preventive to domestic terrorism, whether by foreigners or Americans.  Under the Patriot Act, provision has been made to allow greater surveillance.  Unfortunately, the Patriot Act has been increasingly under attack by liberals who see it as an infringement on civil liberties, or invasion of privacy rights.  The ACLU is adamantly opposed to some of its provisions, recently renewed for the next four years, and they have a point in that one of its provisions allows for the government to seize the personal records of any American without concrete evidence of conspiracy.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-berlin/patriot-act-government-secrecy_b_888185.html

Still, since 2001 no attack on our homeland has occurred, and thus the threat has receded for many, a telling irony to the Patriot Act’s success in preempting another attack on the homeland.

Again, we need to beef up our borders as well, since they provide a funnel into the   U. S. for terrorists.  Proposals such as Amnesty and the Dream Act are misguided, since they serve as incentives when there should be deterrents.

Unless we’re more scrupulous in handling visas, controlling our borders and screening immigrants, we will surely increase the likelihood of another 9/11, though the targets may change:  perhaps a train, a shopping mall, a crowded stadium of unsuspecting fans watching a World Series or Super Bowl.

As Thomas Jefferson, one of my heroes, famously said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Sociopaths among us

All murders are awful acts, but the multiple murders that took place in a Medford, NY pharmacy on Father’s Day are especially gruesome. As Suffolk police commissioner Richard Dormer put it, “This is one of the most heinous, brutal crimes we have ever encountered.” As I write, the alleged perpetrator is in police custody.

In reading about the case, I find myself rummaging into memory of my reading and actual experiences in dealing with the sociopath personality. Is David Laffer a sociopath?

In psychology, sociopaths are said to suffer from an anti-social personality disorder. In layman’s terms, we think of them as devoid of conscience. What’s scary is how many of them there are, roughly 4% of the population, or 1 of every 25 people. Making matters worse, they’re very difficult to identify.

They’re difficult to detect because they can be so charming. Laffer’s neighbors are simply dumbfounded. He seemed so friendly and kind. I was a social worker for three years, working with troubled youth. To this day, I remember two of my boys, Billy and Glenn, especially well. Billy, age 12, had this really cute mug I don’t think any mother could resist. You just had to like him, though you couldn’t ever turn your back without his getting into new mischief. He could lie like water from an open hydrant.

Glenn, age 17, was this tall, lean kid, strikingly handsome with his blue eyes and blond hair sloping down to his shoulders. Again, what a charmer! He just happened to set a school on fire back in Minneapolis.
 
Since they’re so numerous, chances are you’ve met some along the way. I suspect they gravitate to certain professions like sales, politics,and investments. History is replete with sociopaths at the top of the power pyramid, exploiting and killing, such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

You hear a lot about schizophrenia and yet there are four times the number of sociopaths as there are schizophrenics, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

You’ve heard more than once about anorexia, but again there are more sociopaths than anorexics.

Did you know that there are 100 times more sociopaths than people diagnosed with colon cancer?

It’s a mistake to think these people don’t know the difference between right and wrong. They do, but it doesn’t motivate them.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, those characterized by three of the following should be considered as manifesting an anti-social personality disorder:
 
1.  failure to conform to social norms 
2.  deceitfulness, manipulativeness
3.  impulsivity
4.  failure to plan ahead 
5.  irritability
6.  aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of self or others
7.  consistent irresponsibility
8.  lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated or stolen from another.

I think it’s still hard, even for professionals, to decipher the true sociopath, but I’m betting Laffer fits the mold. As Dr. Martha Stout tells us in her excellent The Sociopath Next Door, “Whether the victim be a frog or a person, sociopaths can kill without experiencing anguish.”
 
I think of last Sunday morning, Father’s Day, four lives snuffed out, wantonly, brutally.

Coming Ice Age?

 

You may have seen talk in the media of what’s happening these days with our sun, that solar orb we take for granted, thanks to its regularity. And yet even the sun can prove volatile and like all suns, will ultimately flame out long after you and I  have passed into molecules. 

Things are happening these days with our sun.  Solar wind is the slowest in 50 years and sunspot activity is very passive.  Magnetic fields that cause sunspots have been weakening for some time, while winds that are usually found beneath the sun’s visible surface are currently eluding our detection.  Climate scientists say the sun is going into mini-hibernation. 

All of this ignites speculation and fuels the debate between those who argue global warming and those who dismiss it as simply just another cycle.  The opponents of global warming argue that the sun’s present passivity means that instead of earth heating-up, it will be cooling down, a convenient fix to say the least. 

Scientists at the National Space Observatory (NSO) tell us that these changes in the sun could impact the earth, perhaps ushering in a “Grand Minimum,” or more conversationally, a Little Ice Age”: a “70-year period with virtually no sunspots [which occurred] during 1645-1715”  ( http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/06/a_mini-ice_age_on_the_way.html). 

According to NASA, that period featured frozen rivers normally ice free and snow fields year-round at lower attitudes (American Thinker). Is another Little Ice Age our looming destiny?

Not so!  Climate scientists, not astronomers and NASA, are the experts we should rely upon for our conclusions, and many of them believe that a mini-hibernation of the sun, while it may produce a “grand minimum,” cannot appreciably cool the earth to offset the present global warming.  In fact, they’ve conducted simulations to project what would happen if  a “grand minimum” started now and lasted until 2100, or thirty years longer than the Little Ice Age of 1645-1715.  At most, the earth would cool only by 0.3 celsius. 

To offset  global warming trends,  the effects of “grand minimum” would need to be at least 10 times greater than what the simulations suggest as the possible maximum consequence to overcome the effects of climate change.  Present projections have it that emission of greenhouse gases will ultimately cause global temperatures to increase anywhere from 2 to 4.5 degrees (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/solar-minimum-climate/).  

Alas, despite some who make sport of global warming as a cantankerous “sky is falling” syndrome, arguing for a cooling earth as our ultimate scenario, if any at all, global warming is a sobering fact; more specifically, our exponential increase in greenhouse gases poses a lethal risk to our survival and that of our fellow creatures.  We ignore this truth at our peril. (See my earlier post,  February 3, 2011, on global warming’s insidious threat.)

Truth, Beauty, Goodness

 

It’s been said more than once that human beings are governed by three key motivators:  money, power, and sex.   Certainly we don’t have far to look for confirmation, the media chock full of daily tidbits and then there is our own recall of people who have failed us and, more humbly, the strength of these tempters in our own lives.  I am reminded of the biblical injunction, “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.”

But fortunately, this isn’t the whole story.  The vast majority of us have a capacity for thinking and doing the right things.  The other day, I read of a man finding $40,000 and turning it in;  a few months earlier, of a man who donated his kidney to a complete stranger.  I’m sure you have your own stories to tell.  One thing I always marvel at is the abundance of altruism unveiling itself in every disaster such as the recent tornado in Joplin, with stories of individual heroism, sacrifice, and mutual caring.  When we listen to the news, we rarely glimpse this positive dimension, the news feeding on the aberration, ultimately distorting our perspective as to the norm.

If there does exist a diabolic trinity for wrongdoing and, yes, downright evil, I would counter there also exists a trinity of salient potential in human beings for truth, beauty, and goodness, those classical verities of what make for an ordered civilization and happy living.

By truth, I mean our quest for the meaningful life, or as Tolstoy would have it, “For what should I live?”  I write in Aristotelian mode, holding that truth is learned rather than innate, the aggregate of empirical witness via observation and correlated experiences.  Truth, however, is more elusive than ever in our contemporary era, given the shrinking of temporal and spatial boundaries in the Information Age,  digital driven, with a resulting conundrum of universals washed away by a tsunami of alternatives.  Abetting ambiguity, is the rise of Post Modernism with its relegation of certainty to the landfill of relativism, truth simply personal perspective.  Me, I think what matters is that we are engaged in trying to find truth, at least for ourselves, truth not subject to our personal whims, truth validated by thorough, unbiased research, truth ready to be shed should we find tomorrow we believed yesterday’s falsehood. As the poet Browning put it,  “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.”

By beauty, I mean not simply what excites because it’s “pretty” or makes me happy.  That’s  Hollywood stuff.  I mean something in the classical sense possessing wholeness, proportion, and the insightful.  Beauty is related to truth.  A sad story, a tragedy if you will, can still transcend pathos when it depicts life wholly, or with verisimilitude, free of sentiment and need for closure.  If I leave off a book somehow made wiser, then I have found beauty.  Keats had it right when he wrote at the end of his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty–that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” 

By goodness,  I mean something akin to what the Greeks called ethos, which I equate with integrity–the giving of one’s highest measure, a workman never ashamed.  Of the trio of classical virtues, this is the most neighborly, the one  most consequential  for the social, or interpersonal, since it implies our responsibility to be mindful of others.  It’s the glue holding society together.  As the term suggests,  it’s the virtue embracing the ethical.  Whatever I do when no one’s looking, or in anonymity, I test my ethos, or caring and social responsibility.  I still stop at the stop sign, even though no one’s there.  I still pay my taxes and do so honestly. I do not cheat in the class or on the time clock at work.  I do not forego fidelity to my spouse or betray a friend.  I think of the chaos of a world where each of us played by our own rules.

The Greeks had a marvelous word for the coalescence of these virtues:  arete, or wholeness.  Together they provide balance, the secret to the elusive happy life.

Against all odds

Despite the disasters that happen so frequently these days, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes, there often exist those aspects of courage, kindness, and the miraculous where, even against all odds, perseverance wins out and the heart is warmed and inspired.  We sometimes forget, however, that animals also suffer in these calamities, made worse by their dependency.  Surviving, they oten find themselves without their human families, with slow starvation or death by exposure their ultimate prospect. A lucky few, all too few, find rescue through dedicated teams of animal relief organizations.  And a very few make it on their own.  Let me share with you by way of You Tube the story of a little terrier in Alabama who did just that, becoming a symbol of hope for human sufferers as well. 

Do they not also bleed?

 

The news media has widely reported the capture yesterday of the notorious Bosnian Serb war criminal, Ratko Mladic, wanted for his leadership role in the massacre of 7,500 men and boys from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995.  He will now be handed-over to the International Criminal Tribunal to face trial.  It’s justice long overdue.

Concurrently, yesterday saw the capture of one of history’s worst mass killers since Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and yet it’s a story you have to search for diligently, since it’s been so grievously under reported by Western newspapers in their callous, ethnocentric dismissal of third world people. Do they not value their own lives, too?

In any event, the UN announced yesterday the arrest of 52 year old Bernard Munyagishari in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  He was wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda in 1994.  Bad as Mladic’s crimes are, they pale in the context of Munyagishari’s chilling machete bloodbaths, resulting in the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in 1994, while the Western world and Africa itself looked the other way.  Obviously, white, European Yugoslavia and African politics were in play, not the black members of a minority tribe in a distant country once colonized by the Belgians.  Former President Clinton, however, did recently express regret for his administration having looked the other way and the American government has been offering a 5 million dollar reward for information leading to his capture.

A former teacher and soccer coach, Munyagishari  became the major leader of the Hutu militias that carried out the genocide taking place in just 100 days between April and June 1994. He also co-founded the Interahamwe, a militia whom he stocked with weapons.  Their specific mission was to capture, rape, then murder Tutsi women.

Munyagishari will be extradited to Tanzania, where he will stand trial before the Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).  Since 1994, it has rendered 46 judgments, with 8 acquitted and 9 under appeal.  Recently it sentenced army general Augustin Bizimungu to a 30-year term for preparing lists of Tutsis to be executed.  Unfortunately, there are still nine other major players being sought, among them Felicien Kabuga, a financier at the time.  A number of Hutu militia may have emigrated to Canada.

It’s been 17-years, confirming that often the wheels of justice grind slowly and, alas, sometimes not at all.  What sticks in my throat, however, is our frequent Western indifference and ignorance, for  cruelty has no border.  I remember the poet Yeats’ trenchant observation of volatile contemporary life:  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  We are all brothers and sisters, whatever our color, ethnicity, religion, or politics.  The horrors of Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo retain their indelible wounds and cry out for justice, but do those of the third world bleed any less?