Body Parts

Deep Conspiracy in Finance Over Possible Massive Terror Strike?

The notion of a conspiracy involving betting on a collapse of the stock market, of a catastrophic extent that would probably require a massive terror strike to initiate, holds a kind of hypnotic fascination. It is like looking into an old, deep, water well. Light does not reach down to the bottom of the well. You see brief, slight flashes of light and hear certain gurgling sounds. The flashes of light might be your eyes adjusting to the darkness. The sounds might be your own blood rushing through your ears. Are they real, there in the deep? Only time will tell.

National Preparedness Month

September is Homeland Security's National Preparedness Month. DHS helps thousands of organizations and governmental agencies to prepare homes and businesses for natural and security disasters. The effort is to get business to have plans and preparations in place to deal with disasters and to distribute information to homes to deal on how to deal with disasters before governmental assistance can arrive. The preparations call for volunteer participation. Such efforts are useful and a reasonable starting point; but surely they cannot be the extent of preparation. Why should we expect more than 5% of American civilians to participate with regard to their homes? The efforts are akin to President Jimmy Carter's lame suggestion that people turn down their thermostats and wear sweaters to deal with the oil crisis of the late 1970s.

Information about National Preparedness Month is available at www.ready.gov.

Real preparation would give a significant portion of civilian Americans some genuine possibility of surviving a disaster. It would involve mandatory participation and preparation:

• Widespread training of civilians with survival skils, such as first aid
• Organization of neighborhoods
• Putting notification technology in place to notify homes of emergency
• Evacuation plans for different kinds of disasters
• Distribution of personal 3-day survival fanny packs for evacuation
• Setting up reception areas ahead of time
• Setting up family reconstitution areas ahead of time along with technology for family members to locate one another
• Training of ordinary citizens with rehearsals -- national "fire drills" so to speak.

DHS has not, apparently, planned to do anything like such preparation.

Also, proposals surface for a compulsory national service for both women and men (in place of compulsory military service). National service should be folded into a comprehensive civilian defense program.

My proposal that an Americanization program be included in a civil defense program is relevant here.

(Thanks to emergency.com for the reference to DHS's National Preparedness Month.)

Updated. August 31, 2007.

Legalizing Drugs Would Produce A Social Disaster

The Wall Street Journal print edition published letters to the editor today that neatly capsule the libertarian and left support for legalizing drugs, such as meth and narcotics. Legalization would destroy the biased market for drugs that criminalizing their purchase and use creates, driving up their prices and thereby guaranting that growing sources will continue and criminals will be created to supply the trade. Further, as one writer, Raymond Niles, states, "If people want to destroy themselves, that is their right." (Wall Street Journal, Letters to the Editor, Thursday, August 30, 2007, A9).

Certainly, legalization would destroy an illegal market, but it would not eliminate that market. Even legalized, drug use would be regulated, for instance, with a minimum age for use and prohibiting ex-offenders from using. Some kind of truncated illegal market would spring up to meet these and other kinds of demand.

As for Raymond Niles, and many other persons who have voiced this argument, their opinions are wrong. For a simple reason. Drug addiction destroys the users, true; but it also destroys other persons. Addiction destroys social relationships. Addicts are, by and large, incapable of maintaining relationships, because they cannot fulfill their responsibilities to others. They can't hold jobs. They can't support their families. They can't pay back loans and maintain credit. They can't maintain their personal health against the ravages of drug use.  They drive stoned and endanger others on the highway just as much as drunk drivers. Addicts do not have a "right" to this destructive behavior.

It is not the illegality of drugs that produces this social destruction; it is addiction to the drugs. Legalization would greatly increase addiction by making drugs easily available and removing any stigma against their use. As drug addicts destroy themselves, they destroy others. You don't think so; then you are sheltered. To get a more accurate view of the effects of the disease of addiction, go to one of America's many courts, where most of the proceedings are in public view.  Broken businesses, broken homes, bankruptcies, broken families, destroyed children, raging violent custody battles ... all will be displayed for you.   

Name-calling By Conservatives is as Objectionable as Name-calling by Liberals and the Looney Left

Conservatives have blasted candidate John Edwards for hypocrisy. He campaigns on a populist platform, criticizes globalization and inadequate health care and health insurance. His supposed hypocrisy is that he is rich, has expensive haircuts, lives in a large home, and made money as a lawyer. The presumption is that he must be hypocritical because he does not share the economic misery of those on behalf of whose plight he wages his campaign. His politics is not hypocritical, as far as I can tell; he doesn't claim to be poor. He is proud of his wealth and should be; he earned it, rather than inheriting it. Many conservatives don't like Edwards because he is a personal injury lawyer. Perhaps they envy his success. It is not against the law to be a personal injury lawyer, any more than it is against the law to be a corporate attorney, many of whom he opposed. Edwards is in a long American political tradition of rich men who espouse the cause of some lumpen mass of American voters who are vulnerable and need (or would benefit from) governmental protection and support. The tradition has included President Franklin Roosevelt. President Roosevelt was empathetic; perhaps candidate Edwards is, too. For all I know, candidate Edwards goes home after a day of campaigning, falls in to the arms of his ailing wife, and weeps for the less fortunate. But I don't think that his doing so would make his political campaign more authentic or more worthy. It is time for conservatives to engage Edwards' ideas and proposals, which have been successful in setting the Democratic agenda. It is time for conservatives to have some ideas of their own; or they risk chittering away the political future of conservatism like a group of hysterical squirrels fleeing lawn sprinkers.

What If Light Pollution Becomes So Bad We Can't See Stars At All?

Light pollution is so bad in many cities that no more than fifty stars, or even fifteen, depending upon night viewing conditions, are visible to the unaided eye. In many cities, you can't see any stars at all at night (or the evening and morning "stars") without going to a park that gives you some distance from bright city lights.

Suppose that light pollution becomes so obstructive, from both direct and indirect sources, for instance, by light scattering from aerosols and particulates in the atmosphere, that no one on the surface of the earth could see with unaided eyes any stars at all. How would our conception of ourselves change?

Well, for one matter, no one would be able to have experience that connected them to the ancient Greek tradition of astronomy, or to the ancient Greek theology, as both these intellectual traditions derived from experience and knowledge of the night sky.

And no one would be able to have experience that connected them to the Romantic traditions in Western religion.

But loss of these historical traditions would be, I think, of less significance than impact on the human psyche (after all, those traditions could be--and probably would be--reinvented if humankind still had the ancients' night vision of the stars).

Would not the loss of the night sky reduce humankind to the world of animals, who look (or hear or smell or feel) no farther than the forest floor or the prairie horizon?

I read "Who happens to be gay"

You are writing about a person. You are describing his qualities, perhaps his business acumen or homemaking fervor or social charm or brilliance as a surgeon. You add, then, he "happens to be gay". Why did you add that information? If he "happens" to be homosexual, then it is incidental to the description you were making; the information is irrelevant and shouldn't be included. You probably mentioned the fact of his sexual  orientation as a quiet compliment to you, rather than to him, in praise of your own tolerance; but in doing so, you diminish your qualifications of character to praise of him.

How To Increase California's Prison Capacity Quickly

Remove mentally ill persons from the prisons. About one in six prisoners is mentally ill, many with psychotic illness. They are in prison for committing crimes originating out of their illnesses. Prisons do not provide adequate health care for them. But, where would we put them? They are in prison, because they have no where else to go. They should be hospitals. More mentally ill persons are in prisons than in hospitals. They do not receive adequate mental health care, because we decided, as a nation, that we do not want to spend money on them. We abandoned our medieval mental hospital system in the 1970s because we did not want to invest adequate money to make it a place of humane and hopeful treatment. We replaced it with the community-based mental health system, which is a failure, because unsupervised, mentally ill people will not take their medicines. Without families (or willing families) to look after them, chronically, severely mentally ill persons become, basically, indigent. Many turn to alcohol and drugs in self-medication. They turn to crime to support their habits. And end up in prison. A solution to the prison problem cannot be found without solving the mental health of a large segment of America's population.

Why We Should Not Give Arms to Fatah

When Hamas defeats Fatah in the West Bank, as assuredly it will within the next year or so, the arms we gave to Fatah will fall into Hamas' hands. The Jerusalem Post details the advanced arms that fell to Hamas when it conquered Gaza in the Spring. Those weapons will simply be turned against Israel--and us! We really really need to stop being stupid.

San Francisco African Americans self-segregate by class

John Ritter's interesting USA Today article, "San Francisco hopes to reverse black flight" (USA Today, August 28, 2007), touches several themes that this blog has developed, but, alas, without underlining their significance. The first theme is not well understood by either conservatives or liberals. The Supreme Court's prohibition of racial housing covenants and its Brown decision had the unintended effect of separating the black classes, middle class from working class and poor. Freed to seek better housing, in the 1950s, urban, black, middle class families across the nation fled the inner city racial ghettos, leaving the poor blacks behind. Sometimes the middle class flight led only a few blocks away, sometimes it was miles away to suburbs; but however far, the middle class was no longer present in the community. As it was the middle class that provided the moral leadership and social structure for a stable black community, this separation led quickly to the collapse of social order in the inner city ghetto, producing the riots of the 1960s. Taking advantage of the vacuum in social leadership, radical, criminal black groups, such as the Black Panthers moved in, leading to delegitimation of mainstream values*, violence, and structural chaos that continues today.

The second theme is that white liberal welfare-state policies to aid the working class and poor blacks who remained in the cities in the 1960s and later accelerated the disintegration of the black community. This theme is well understood by conservatives, but liberals remain willfully ignorant--as it is in their political interest. The welfare policies reinforced the decline of black church moral authority, the disintegration of the black family, the rapid increase in illegitimacy, and welfare dependency that shackled ghetto blacks onto the lowest rungs of the American ladder of upward mobility. All of the deleterious effects of liberalism's response to the events of the 1960s have been masked by the obstinate, misplaced loyalty of African Americans to the Democratic Party, which has enshrined as indisputable dogma the Party's harmful racial ideology and misguided social policies.

The most important reason for a substantial portion of African Americans to leave the Democratic Party is to make possible, within the black community and with non-black communities, a realistic discussion about African American problems and genuinely innovative solutions to them.

*The Supreme Court initiated the delegitimation of mainstream values in the 1954 Brown decision, when it cited social scientific studies that labelled the black middle class a "pathological" copy of the white middle class. See my discussion of the effect of the Brown decision on school curricula and on the notion of "subjectivity".

(Thanks to Instapundit for the newspaper reference.)

Is it wise to change the electoral college?

The exciting political development of the day is the California Republican effort to break the California state winner-take-all electoral college rule. This move is an appropriate response to the Democrats' state-by-state effort to make states electoral votes go to the national popular vote winner--an obvious effort to avoid another 2000 race result. Whether it is wise to muck around with the electoral college is another matter. I've not read or even seen referenced any political philosophy discussion of the wisdom of getting rid of the electoral college (as the Democrats plan would effectively do). Aren't there sound reasons to continue to let states as states continue to have a central role? But does anyone think that any of the current candidates have the intellectual capability to discuss such a weighty matter?