Looking behind the curtain

Feel like you're all recovered from the media firestorm last week? Good, you're sitting down, you're chill, time to read this brilliant piece. I'm sorry I missed it last week, but maybe it's easier to digest now, from Whowhatwhere.com April 19:

The Marathon Bombing: What The Media Didn’t Warn You About

Muggs: Post Office Needs New Routes

With the volume of snailmail plummeting against the expanding electronic choices for communication, sophisticates and boneheads alike are wondering what's the big deal if the US Postal Service eliminates Saturday deliveries. It's a question worth pondering in a little more depth than whether you'll get your next Netflix disc in time for your Saturday-night popcorn binge.
     When Congress and the Bush administration decided in '07 that the USPS would have to pre-fund its employee pensions for 75 years out, something that no other business or governmental authority has ever even thought might be useful or sensible, it put an impassable pinch in the postal balance sheet, turning modest profitability into billions in deficits. Faced with the stark choice of raising prices beyond the possibility of remaining competitive (which was the idea for the pols and their pals at UPS and Fedex) or cutting back payrolls and services, the USPS execs are doing what they can to remain afloat, making Saturday deliveries and the thousands of jobs behind them just the start of what will likely be a long spiral into oblivion in a few decades without major relief from a hypothetical smarter Congress in the near future.
     As you read this, maybe while sipping a latte at your favorite bistro, with your smartphone near at hand ready to alert you to your next vacuous update from Facebook and having just used it to deposit your paycheck and pay your electric bill, you may reasonably be thinking that you don't need the Postal Service anyway, so why not just let it go? It's so 19th-century, isn't it?
     In a lot of ways, you're quite right. The USPS has not kept up with changing technology or culture. Information has higher value when it moves faster, so moving it on trucks and planes is ultimately doomed. The USPS is locked into that 19th-century model, both by law and by habit. But it doesn't have to be, and I submit that with the application of some imagination and vision, it could again be one of the most important services in our society.
     Take a look at Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. (You've got a copy handy in your smartphone right?) It's there, right between coinage and patents, as one of the few services that the founders thought important enough to assign to Congress forever: "The Congress shall have Power ... To establish Post Offices and Post Roads."
     I'd like to parse this quaint image for what it meant in the 18th century. In the days when words on paper were the only way of communicating anything other than by direct word of mouth, the post offices were facilities for distributing communications to everyone, and the post roads were the designated routes for those communications. Under this mandate the federal government not only created the postal service, but the interstate highways as well to carry the mail. The reasoning underlying this was that efficient, low-cost communication was necessary to holding the nation together and informing the voters. Obviously It's no less necessary today, but now we seem to accept it can be better done by private enterprise.
     That's how it is, as far as it goes, because the USPS dropped the technological ball with the advent of telegraphy. Focused entirely on the movement of things, it failed to keep its eye on its mission of communication. It could have absorbed and owned the railroad-based telegraph services that became Western Union. Out of that, based on the same infrastructure, we could have had a national telephone service, as many nations do today. From that the service would have naturally flowed with new technology into telex, facsimile, email and Internet delivery of all sorts of communications. The offices and roads of the 18^th century are the servers, wires and airwaves of the 21^st.
     Just as the package-delivery services found a niche in competition with USPS for higher-end services, there would still have been plenty of space for electronic competitors. But the basic services would be secure, and that's the point.
     Today we hear the President talking about the need to extend broadband and high-speed services to rural and lower-income Americans, to provide them equal access and opportunity to prosper. Private enterprise is not getting the job done because it would have to accept low or negative margins in some markets, as the Postal Service must now with the mail. I don't hear him talking about having them pre-fund their pensions, of course.
     Public support for communication and access for everyone are principles clearly set out in the Constitution, and for good reason. The founders knew nothing about electricity, but they clearly understood that if we want a functioning democracy, we can't just leave some of the people out of the conversation because they can't produce enough profit.
     Making change on this scale at this late date would be very difficult, mostly in terms of untying a mountain of legal knots, but if given priority, it could happen. Sixty years ago, to address the breakdown of Japan's banking system with the end of the war, the postal system there began securing and transferring cash for its customers. Today it's one of the largest nonbank financial systems in the world, and its customers love it and use it as an adjunct to the regular banking system.
     I see us approaching a similar crisis moment in our domestic communications. We're already paying a lot more for much slower service than people are anywhere in the developed and much of the developing world, not just an annoyance for users, but a drag on commerce and competitiveness as well. For today's businesses and connected individuals, the wired and wireless communications infrastructure is as important as the rail and road networks, if not more so.
     Rather than let the USPS fade into history, I think it could be very smart and profitable for all of us to expand on its 18th-century mission and pull it into the 21st with a national broadband infrastructure based on the existing publicly owned backbone network to provide baseline access and services, as well as the necessary physical infrastructure appropriate to the local conditions and population, for everyone in this country.
     This goes far beyond your convenience in picking up personal email or streaming Stephen Colbert. Online business activity brings money into local communities, where it's more likely to stay and circulate. Giving middle-class entrepreneurs the realistic option of living and working in high life-quality areas like ours is a far surer bet for the future than trying to attract manufacturing businesses or tourists, with far lower impact. Connected schools better prepare young people for the careers of the future, and better access gives them better prospects for staying in the community.
    We used to be able to think big in this country. I have to think it still might be possible.

Guest spot: The Sacred Bond

The first political blog I read regularly was thismodernworld.com by Tom Tomorrow, starting because I love his cartoons, but continuing for his delicious sensitivity to political irony. This just came in on his weekly mailout to subscribers, and I think it really deserves a (slightly) wider audience. It references his cartoon coming out on Monday, but you don't need to see it to get the point.

by Dan Perkins (aka Tom Tomorrow), author of This Modern World

I grew up in the midwest and the south, and often traveled between those regions as we'd go to visit relatives here and there. I have a very clear memory of stopping at a gas station in rural Alabama, which had three restrooms: MEN, WOMEN and LADIES. I was maybe 11 or 12, and found this both indecipherable and hilarious: what was the difference between WOMEN and LADIES, I asked loudly. I remember my dad looking around uncomfortably, and only after we were back in the car explaining that the redundant restroom was a leftover from the days of segregation, at which point it would have been labeled COLOREDS.

When I lived in Iowa City, in the early 1980s, I had a friend who had to hide from his landlord the fact that he lived with his same-sex partner. They kept an extra bedroom made up to look as if someone were living in it, so they could maintain the pretense that they were just roommates. He had stories of narrow escapes on weekend mornings when the landlord would drop by unexpectedly, that sort of thing.

My friend's Potemkin spare bedroom seems like an artifact of a distant age now, as much as the extra restroom in that Alabama gas station. For several years now, when someone has asked me, more or less -- what's the point? what can we change? -- I've been using the turnaround on gay marriage as Example A for the argument that people's minds CAN be changed, and politicians can be pushed to do the right thing. It's also evidence that Obama, specifically, should not be given the blank check his more ardent supporters would prefer. He "evolved" on gay marriage because he was criticized and pushed and prodded. That's how change happens, not through blind faith that a politician will choose to do the right thing without external pressure.

When you boil it down, the main argument against gay marriage is essentially that "gays are icky," which is basically more about people's own discomfort with sex in general than anything else. The thing is, "gays are icky" just isn't a very compelling legal argument. And so gay marriage opponents have reverted to the fallback argument, that the purpose of marriage is for child-raising. This, however, puts them in the same bind that abortion opponents have with rape, i.e. that the exceptions undermine your entire argument. If you concede that abortion is necessary in the case of rape, then you have lost the moral high ground that all abortions are murder -- which is why there's this odd strain of thought on the anti-abortion extreme, that women who are raped don't get pregnant. It's the deus ex machina, the magic plot device that resolves your narrative dilemma.

Opponents of marriage equality have a similar problem: if straight marriage is superior due to the inherent possibility of procreation, what about the infertile? or the aged? or those who remain childless by choice? A Princeton professor named Robert George rides to the rescue with the theory of "dynamism toward reproduction" -- that penis-in-vagina sex is necessary to "real" marriage because at the very least it simulates the act which COULD result in pregnancy, even when it does not.

I am not making this up.

So, as Proposition 8 and DOMA wound their way through the courts, gay marriage opponents lit upon a more durable argument, seemingly grounded in science rather than animus or religion. Their case, presented most comprehensively by Princeton professor Robert P. George, is that only sex acts with a “dynamism toward reproduction”—that is, penile to vaginal intercourse—create true marriages and lead to legitimate child-rearing. Same-sex marriages, by this theory, are not “real” marriages, because they do not involve “organic bodily union.”

This argument puts gay marriage opponents in an awkward position. For years, they said gays were too libidinous and licentious to create stable marriages. Now, as proponents of gay marriage emphasize love, fidelity, and commitment, the right is fetishizing coitus.

The debate between marriage-as-love and marriage-as-coital-vehicle permeates the amici briefs that have flooded the court. George’s amicus — an abridged version of his book — pits the hallowed “conjugal” view of marriage against the destructive “revisionist” view. According to George, the revisionist view sees marriage as “essentially an emotional union, accompanied by consensual sexual activity.” The conjugal view, on the other hand, sees marriage as “begun by commitment and sealed by sexual intercourse" ....

Ostensibly, copulation is crucial because it leads to procreation. But that pretense collapses when George gets to the problem of straight couples who can’t procreate. He writes that “an infertile man and woman can together still form a true marriage” because “an act of sexual intercourse is organic bodily union whether or not it causes conception.” The couple’s “bodies are still united in coitus,” he reasons, and “the behavioral part” of their coupling “remains ordered to reproduction even when nonbehavioral factors ... prevent conception.” In other words, you should copulate with your opposite-sex spouse not to make a baby, but to behave in a way that would make a baby if you were fertile. Coitus is sacred not as a means, but as a performance.

As the article notes, the irony of it all is that the allegedly sex-obsessed gay community is now the standard-bearer of love and commitment, while traditionalists argue that marriage is primarily about the fucking.

Muggs: Tarbabies

Pop Rocket, March 2013


Benghazi. Illegal immigrants. Obama's birth certificate. Saddam Hussein. Sharia law. Gun confiscation. Agenda 21. Nullification. The New World Order. Blah, blah,blah.
     What these and so many others all have in common is that they are or were, in objective reality, non-issues, topics that look like important public problems but have no rational basis as such. People get hung up on them and can't let go. That's why I call them tarbabies.
     Tarbaby issues litter our history, and widespread online access has made them even stickier. It's a lot easier now to live inside an information bubble that reflects and reinforces a point of view, making it harder to let conflicting information in. People are easily fascinated, and once in that state are lulled into "knowing" comfort even as the assertions grow steadily more outrageous to counter impinging reality.
     In the version of the tarbaby story current in our culture, Br'er Fox used the tarbaby to trap Br'er Rabbit, a situation clearly evoking the life lessons of Aesop. Traditional cultures tell similar versions of this story worldwide. There's a lesson for us here, and it's about propaganda, a subject I know a little about, since I've been doing it as a living for decades. Goering called this tactic the Big Lie.
     We can build our own tarbabies, as any addict will testify, but the kind I'm thinking of are more often built as traps. When an unscrupulous operator wants to distract you from something, relieve you of your money or keep you from getting in his way, setting up a tarbaby is a standard ploy. And we fall for it in droves.
     Say you want to impede international cooperation on a social-justice issue, like land mines. Spreading shrill and unfounded rumors that the United Nations is out to take over your military is bound to peel off a large number people who might be otherwise inclined toward progress. Worried that your industry might have to change because it's killing the planet? Spend heavily to plant fake science stories that make it easier for people to ignore the huge, flashing warning signs and sink back into their Barcaloungers. Afraid that voters will do something sensible that will cost you money or power? Focus on governmental inefficiences or political venality (there are always a few), and tell people that the pols are all crooks and voting is for suckers. To some degree it always works.
     The bigger the lie, the more effective and long-lasting it can be. The idea that the founders of our nation designed the Second Amendment to support uprisings against the government -- otherwise known as treason -- a patently ridiculous concept, is left over from the secessionist rhetoric of the Civil War, and circulating more widely today than ever. The idea that contrails, the wispy clouds of condensation that high-flying planes stir up, are laden with mind-control chemicals, or that a secret government cabal conspired to blow up the World Trade Center, just will not die the ignominious death they deserve under the "um, that doesn't make sense" test. As a species we've proved endlessly that any investment in a tarbaby can pay off.
     Tobacco lobbyists and racists got together in the 1920s to create the "marihuana" tarbaby. Self-serving political sharps and oil interests used doctored "intelligence" to build the Saddam tarbaby. Flim-flam artists in the insurance industry counter sensible progress on national health care with the 'Socialism!' tarbaby. Get a mind stuck to one of these little beasties, and useful thinking processes cease, zip-zop.
     But you may notice that there's an easy defense against the tarbaby, one that works every time and takes practically no effort. Just don't touch it.
     Br'er Rabbit's mistake was that he got emotional, tearing into the tarbaby for a supposed slight before looking closely at what he faced. He managed to maneuver the fox into giving him the tools he needed to escape, but the people using this tactic now are a lot smarter than that. Better to simply take a good look before we invest anything in an idea, and keep looking as it evolves. The briar patch that will free you is more and better information.
     So when you hear over and over that "Social Security is insolvent" or "Obama wants to take your guns away" or "Donald Trump is a credible presidential contender," you have choices: you can take a little time to look, investigate and learn, or you can walk away. Just be warned that if you bite without thinking, you're likely to be hooked.
     Above all we must not let sticky tarbabies distract us from watching and working on the problems that really matter.

You heard it here first

Today we read that the City Council is calling single-stream recycling, including glass, a "no-brainer." Apparently this eureka moment comes at the urging of angry Prescottonians. Good going, we-the-people. Just let me remind you that this fruit has been hanging low the whole time, as I noted over two years ago:

Rethinking the Glass Problem
Pop Rocket, February 2011
An awful lot of Prescottonians, including yours truly, were dismayed when the City "suspended" its glass recycling program in September. Some were outraged. Of the myriad materials we send to the landfill, glass is arguably the most durable and among the simplest to recycle. It simply should not be in the waste stream.
     When The Daily Courier quoted City staff saying that there was "no market" for recycled glass and that "manufacturers found it cheaper to start from scratch to make new glass products," my internal BS alarm went off.
     Among the outraged is my partner Lesley, recently moved to Prescott from Sedona, a much smaller municipality that manages to maintain regular glass recycling through a private-sector arrangement. She dug into the issue and turned up some illuminating facts.
     It turns out that yes, prices for used glass are down, but it's not quite true that there is no market. A look at how the big kids do it shows that a lot depends on how you design your program.
     Prescott contracts with Norton Environmental in Flagstaff to pick up our recyclables at the Sundog transfer station, and we pay $10 per ton for the privilege, a savings compared to paying Waste Management to entomb the stuff out at the Grey Wolf landfill.
      But Norton has never been able to handle our glass. The City's glass effort has been a separate stream involving local crushing and direct marketing. In the mid-aughts, prices for glass fell below the costs (including transport, a big piece) of this relatively small operation, creating the sort of fluctuation squeeze any commodity manager can see coming when margins and efficiency are low. 
     Efficiency comes with scale. Phoenix, Mesa, Scottsdale, several smaller Valley cities and a bunch of large corporations like Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola and the US Postal Service concentrate their recyclables on the huge Hudson Baylor facility in West Phoenix. This New York-based company does single-stream recycling, meaning all recyclables, including glass, go into the same bin and large machinery does most of the sorting. HB pays the cities for their materials, and it sells the sorted products to reprocessors. A YouTube search for "Hudson Baylor Avondale" will get you a look at how it works.
     Currently the most valuable materials in the recycle stream are aluminum and cardboard. (A large proportion of the cardboard winds up sold to Chinese concerns, an interesting foreign-trade angle. We may not be leading the world in manufacturing anymore, but our consumer culture does pump out a lot of salable waste.) With a diversified income stream, the more profitable materials compensate for lower-yielding materials, like glass is right now. The simplicity of single-streamingencourages people to recycle more, bringing in more profitable materials, and its processing efficiency reduces cost.
     Asked whether HB would be interested in taking on Prescott's recycle stream, Marketing Director Will Herzog is quite positive: "I would be more than happy to come up and meet with your City Council to discuss possible solutions." Herzog tells us that HB has never received an inquiry from Prescott. 
     So where's the catch? A couple of factors stand out.
     One is practical. Prescott would have to truck its recyclables to Phoenix, adding some cost. But rather than pay Norton $30,000 a year, HB would be paying us, and we'd be saving some tonnage cost on additional recyclables not sent to Grey Wolf. We'd have to work the numbers there, but the problem doesn't look insurmountable.
     The other catch is more about vision. We would have to think a little bigger to build an integrated system more in line with the economics of the industry. Recycling isn't just a feel-good perk, it is already a major money-saver for many cities and industries, growing more economically essential every day. It's unwise to hold off acting until the need becomes acute and obvious.
     A partnership with HB is a strong possibility, but clearly it will take a lot more research to determine what would be the best fit for Prescott or perhaps the region more generally. Many cities apply federal and state grants for this purpose, and the opportunities there require careful, expert scrutiny. Here I just hope to restart the conversation.
     The central question is not whether we can find a way to recycle our glass or anything else, it's clear that we can, but rather whether we care enough to deal responsibly and conservatively with our ever-growing piles of waste.

Williams: Reinstate the Draft

This week Buz argues for the institution of a regular two-year stretch of military service for every young American, and while I disagree entirely about the form, on substance I think he has a point.

Why this would come up now I have no idea. Perhaps it's been stuck in his craw for a decade or so, shown in his gratuitous use of Rep Charle Rangel as a punching bag for a couple of grafs. (Why  regressive writers are so uniformly compelled to waste ink on irrelevant references to their favorite bugbears I'll never understand.)

But to get to the substance, I agree that as a people we could greatly benefit from a custom of participation in civic duty. A large part of why our political discourse is so enfogged with simpletonian nonsense is that so few people involve themselves with government and public service, leaving them ignorant of its value to us all. Requiring people to participate won't solve that problem entirely, but it could help a great deal if handled in the right way.

It's amusing that Buz, a Tea-Party-styled tax-hating libertarian who sees government as the enemy, is advocating an across-the-board military obligation, but the idea is well grounded in the Constitution and our legal history. At the founding of the nation every (white, male) citizen was drafted as a militiaman, and further required to arm himself to a basic standard of gun and ammo at his own expense and give of his time to training. (I know, the NRA utopia.)

My ancestors accepted that obligation because the most important public good at the time was facing down an oppressive occupier with no compunction about killing rebels. Need I point out that those days are long past?

The military draft ended because as our military missions shifted after 1946 from defending our homes, allies and values to securing resources and enriching corporations, it just stopped working. Better educated draftees could see what was happening and refused to buy in, feeding into the debacle that was Vietnam.

Further, a military investment to the degree Buz is advocating — can you imagine how much it would cost to pay, feed, clothe, equip for war and maintain the health of every 18-year-old in the country for two years on an ongoing basis? — would be a pretty near dead loss for the country. Military operations, whether active or in reserve, produce nothing beyond the profits of the suppliers. When they're active, military operations destroy, adding long-term cost burdens both here and around the world, and making enemies to boot. No, Buz, our military is not a character-building school, though that may be a side-benefit for some, it's a machine for killing people and breaking things. War does not make a better world.

But strip the idea down to its essential element of a public-service obligation and look at what we have in place as resources to support it. Already we have an across-the-board obligation to stay in some sort of school  up to the age of 16. Could we extend that with two years of public service, usually starting from high-school graduation and maybe taken early by those for whom high-school isn't working? Might it be broadly beneficial to push the usual entrance to higher education back for a couple of years, maybe providing the new student college credit or cash for their service? Could our nation benefit from the infusion of young people learning about and helping with water delivery systems, public administration and accounting, bridge and highway construction, design and improvement of parks and public lands, museums and educational systems, election systems, public safety, and on and on according to their interests? And wouldn't those benefits be at least as large for the young people involved?

It would still cost, but that would come back as real benefit to us all, and we could see that benefit both in the practical improvements in public infrastructure and in young people better equipped to be adults.

So yeah, Buz has hold on a piece of a Big Idea, one that's worked very well for us in the past: New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration provided exactly the sort of disciplined experience with public service that Buz says he likes. It hasn't yet occurred to him just how socialist it is, of course, even in its military form. I won't tell him if you won't.

It's Not the Guns, It's the Fear

Pop Rocket, February 2013









Our media consumed the entire month of January with talk about guns, gun violence and what we might do to stop it. Most of it has been regurgitation of the same old time-wasting arguments, and I am absolutely resolved to avoid falling in that trap and wasting yet more of your time and head space. So like the country as a whole, I'm challenged to come at this problem from a different and maybe useful angle.
     Sincerely, it surprised me that Americans near and far took so to heart the killings of the little kids at Newtown. Over the decades we've generally become so inured to this sort of violence that I expected this mass shooting of innocents would quickly sink beneath the waves of popular distraction like the many gone before. That it's spurred a sustained public conversation about gun violence, of such power that every legislator and enforcement officer down to the local level seems compelled to weigh in, is amazing and encouraging. It's about time we got this issue out of the national sock drawer and had it out.
     As I've said in this space before, it's obvious to any thinking being that our national problem with guns is out of control, but there seems to be no practical way out of it. Towering reams of opinion good and bad, usually putting the onus on someone else, are being hacked out daily on this subject, so for both our sakes I'm going to have to assume that you're sufficiently plugged in and I can skip the basics.
     When a problem seems intractable, it's a signal to me that I'm not seeing the whole picture. So let's back up a step to: Why does an ordinary person want a gun?     I see two answers to that, two sides of the same coin: power, and fear. We feel powerless, we need to defend ourselves against something we fear. Drone on all day about the cold reality that holding a gun is vastly more likely to hurt the holder than any bad guy, you won't get through to someone who's afraid. Cite all the statistics in the world about how rare crime really has always been in daily life and how it's diminishing, the fearful seem to fear it all the more.
     Most of us have grown up with the teevee myth that a good guy with a gun always wins and every week he's beset by another bad guy, and while we know intellectually that it's all fiction and mostly nonsense, it still shapes our self-images, emotional landscapes, and ability to competently assess risk.
     Most of the time the bad guys turn out to be people who believed they were good guys, or at least doing the right thing within the mythology they'd created for themselves. We all go through changes and problems, and there's no clear way to be sure any of us won't wind up doing the wrong thing with that weapon. So the problem isn't guns, really; broadly, it's unreasonable fear, coupled with unrealistic myths about our ability to defend against those mentally inflated monsters. It's our national neurosis.
     On left and right we love to posit "mental health" deficiencies as an important cause of mass shootings, and there's no doubt that the murderers of random innocents and their own families are by definition mentally unfit. What we've yet to address is whether our society as a whole is unhinged, become a garden bed full of low-grade poison sprouting the odd murderous weed.
     From outside our borders, our collective neurosis is as obvious as that of a bum shouting at traffic. Citizens of civilized countries around the world, contemplating daily delusionary behavior that Americans take for granted as normal, go all wide-eyed and blanch at the thought that the lords of the world's largest nuclear arsenal could really be this nutz. But here inside the wire we're insulated from ourselves the same way a lunatic's skull contains and protects his delusion.
     At this point the religionists reliably pipe up, fingers wagging, and say, "That's what you get when you abandon Gad!" Man, it would be nice if it were that simple and most mass shooters and gun-huggers were non-believers. Exactly the opposite seems to be true. Magical thinking is much more the problem than the solution.
     But what if we could leave out the magical parts and apply the good and useful parts of religion? Trusting our neighbors, taking care of one another, dealing with one another morally and free of judgment, accepting responsibility, seeing something higher and better in ourselves and striving to live up to it -- the religious reflex, one face of our evolutionary heritage as social animals, is itself a method for assuaging fear and building a secure community.
     If a member of a religious community hurts his family, the group routinely looks to what it might have done differently. Now we have the opportunity for that sort of soul-searching as a nation, to see the shooters as our own family and our own failures, to squarely face the mirror they hold up and gauge what part we played in the tragedy.     Can we be adult enough to look at our national obsession and ask ourselves, how many deaths of innocents are we willing to accept as the price of our freedom to hold a deadly weapon? How can we allow so many of us to indulge in unreasoning fear? Is the illusory sense of comfort and power that gun gives us worth the lives of thousands of innocents every year? Could we maybe find more effective and less costly ways to feel secure?     Like a chain-smoker facing his addiction, we're at some point going to have to stub out our fear and let go of what's killing us.
     Maybe you think the essence of freedom is that the community has to leave you alone with your toys and personal myths. Sorry, it doesn't work like that, and never has. If you accept the benefits of community, you're obliged to follow its rules and care for it. Seriously, would you rather be in, or out?

Editorial: Church-state debate remains insoluble

The unnamed editor writes, "Almost daily an issue arises that continues to put the question of separation of church and state to the test. We can't seem to leave this alone and go our separate ways, choosing to believe what we prefer." This is the same voice that only a couple of weeks ago fired its own defensive salvo in the imaginary War on Xmas. Like parody, irony is dead, or at least on life support.

In writing his attempt at a Rodney King moment, the editor entirely misses two key points that are so obvious it feels that just naming them is belaboring them.

 First, there is no legal "debate." The enforced separation of church and state, meaning the prohibition of any legal requirement of religious observance or the use of public resources to promote or facilitate religion, is long-settled law that not even the most right-wing Supreme Court since the Civil War can bring itself to breach.

Second, the only people making an issue of this are the religionists, under the direction of those who would move us toward theocracy. There are enough of those in government to force those of us who simply want our Constitution defended to stand up and point out cases where government allows behavior that crosses the legal line. But there's no question about where that line is. This is not about competing interpretations of the law. This is about people who want to reinterpret the law to favor themselves.

Maybe what the editor really wanted to say is that the religionists just don't seem to ever be willing to give up on their dead hobbyhorse. But his framing in this editorial allows the reader to continue to believe the ridiculous canard that there's some sort of liberal conspiracy to destroy religion. No, editor: liberals in this country are the strongest advocates for protecting religious liberty, and we do that by preventing the ascendence of any cult to official primacy.

Christians have played the victim card for two thousand years, it's built into the culture across the religion's many sects and cults. But believing you're the victim doesn't make it so.

If I squint and read charitably between the lines in the editorial, I might have hope that a good editor could have reduced the entire piece to one line: "Religionists should just stand down and shut the fuck up." Knowing where the editor and publisher are coming from in terms of faith, however, I just see confusion and internal conflict. This is a shame, because the editorial was an opportunity for the paper to act as a force for common sense.

The Ongoing Medical Buzzkill

Pop Rocket, January 2013









Readers who vaguely recall that two years ago Arizonans voted to legalize medical cannabis (for the third time) may be wondering why so little has so far come of it. It's true that foot-dragging by obstructionists in our state government is partly to blame (again), but you may be surprised to learn that a lot of it is more structural.
     Credit where credit is due must first go to Governor Jan Brewer, Attorney General Tom Horne and Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, who have nearly exhausted their legal avenues for digging up excuses to avoid doing their duty and ushering in positive change. The courts have ruled pretty uniformly that no, state employees will not be subject to federal prosecution for issuing patient ID cards and fulfilling other related licensing functions, demolishing the state's argument time and time again.
     It's kind of touching to watch the contortions that these proud defenders of "state's rights" have to put themselves through to argue that we really should be obediently following federal law in this one area. That it also puts the lie to their "we the people" posturings is just cake.
     We should also note that it appears most county health departments have turned in their homework and set up the local infrastructure for regulating patients, dispensaries and suppliers. Kudos to them for doing their jobs.
     Cards are being issued, but only one dispensary is officially operating as of this writing, in Glendale, with another in Tucson about ready to go. Most entrepreneurs are waiting for what will likely have to be an Arizona Supreme Court decision finally declaring that the people have spoken (doh!) before they will even slightly expose themselves to the tender mercies of the likes of Maricopa Sheriff Joe Arpaio. At the federal level, answering the question of when Congress will finally get off the dime and move cannabis from Schedule 1 (Evil Things) to Schedule 2 (Very Profitable Things) under the Controlled Substances Act is anyone's guess, making truly secure business planning essentially impossible for the foreseeable future. But as we've seen in California and Colorado, a lot of people will be willing to accept that risk. The "user base," as we say in the biz-journo trade, is huge.
     The legal obstructions will eventually pass, at least at the state level, and in not too long. For people who are serious about this as a business, however, there are other, even more daunting obstacles.
     The official delays on the dispensary network are pushing suppliers through a loophole in the law for any patient who doesn't live within 25 miles of a dispensary. They are legally allowed to grow their own, and many are forming wildcat co-ops for that purpose, operations that they may not want to give up once the dispensaries start opening. You may have noticed a few shops around town last year supplying equipment for home growing. All in our area have closed again or gone back underground for the time being. (Update: I've since discovered that there's at least one smokeshop recently opened.)
     It seems that all the legal posturing in Arizona and the official ambiguity of the President and his Justice Department is turning off most landlords from leasing space for dispensaries and supply-chain businesses. And who can blame them? When the people who know most about this business have been operating as criminals for in some cases generations, they've already got big hurdles to clear to prove they'll be acceptable tenants. And they'd better not have a dog, either.
     Further, once past the warm glow of clearing the many legal hurdles and getting a business open, every entrepreneur discovers the need for a solid credit line, for capital improvements, payrolls, insurance, supplies, equipment, even startup advertising. But Arizona banks and credit unions are uniformly refusing to bank these businesses, blocking even just regular business checking accounts, fearing that if the Justice Department happens to feel like blowing hot one day, they'll be left holding stacks of unrecoverable loans, making their shareholders very unhappy. This is forcing these first dispensaries to operate on a cash-only basis, inevitably causing daily liquidity concerns and exposing the entire class of businesses to all sorts of financial abuse.
     So where does that leave the industry for 2013? We've had popular votes in 20 states and DC saying that cannabis can be good for you, including two that want to make it as legal as alcohol. More will surely come to that conclusion, and expectations are expanding that the weed will be imminently decriminalized and available, creating new unfulfilled demand right now. We have established a legal structure for distributing cannabis as medicine in our state, but structural discrimination against the industry is preventing all but the very well-heeled from getting involved legally.
     I'm thinking that if we can't get it together soon, our effort to end this campaign of the War On (Some) Drugs could ironically lead to unilateral disarmament and an unhappy scenario in which well funded, experienced and highly motivated criminal organizations could launder themselves into nonprofit respectability and take over the ground floor of what will eventually become a fully open and legal profitmaking industry. This is essentially what happened in the wheezing demise of Prohibition (without the nonprofit whistle stop), leading to the hegemony of Seagram's et al., and would prove to pot-haters that the whole idea was bad from the start. Then you're in backlash territory. Anybody remember 1980?     Would we be happy to see our seniors forced to buy medical cannabis from some infernal partnership between the Zetas and Philip Morris? Or would we prefer a more grass-roots (ahem) industry open to local entrepreneurs and employing Arizonans in what will surely become a significant labor force?
     To readers identifying themselves as conservatives especially, I'd like you to try to get beyond your entrenched feelings about cannabis and focus on the practical aspects of dealing with it as it comes out of the shadows and into common social acceptance. This is happening. Right now we have the opportunity to make positive choices about the future of this new industry, and I hope we won't blow it.

Update, Friday: Today I'm hearing that legislative Republicans will try to refer the law back to the ballot for a third do-over in November, hoping we voters will finally change our mind and repeal the entire system. This is of course why they've been doing all they could to stall implementation. Again, they only respect the will of the people when it agrees with them.

Courier's top news story buried on Page 6

The AP story on A6 should really be the front-page headline today, but you can't even see it online: Weather Disasters: 2012 another record-setter in the US. Mark me, folks, this is really what will define the 21st century and most affect all of us in the long run, for generations at least.

I guess we might be thankful that it's in the paper at all, but that sets the bar awfully low.

Editorial: Hobby (Lobby)'s stand on par with civil-rights fight

This is just so wrong on so many levels, it's hard to know where to begin.

What's sort of scary is that I'm confident the unnamed editor really believes what he's written, opening a window on the abyss of victim-thinking that our dominant white-male-religionist culture has wrapped itself in to justify its continuing efforts to turn back the clock and recover the days when women and nonwhites were kept firmly in their places, by force when necessary.

Wallace stands up for his rights in 1963. 

Yes, editor, it is a lot like the civil-rights movement, but not at all the part you're evoking. A much more apt analogy is George Wallace making a show of blocking federal troops from enforcing civil rights for blacks at the University of Alabama fifty years ago. Wallace firmly believed that his state had a right that superceded the rights of its citizens to access state education resources. It didn't work out.

We have a well respected principle in this society holding that an individual right ends where it infringes the right of another. You may not impose your beliefs on anyone, especially those over whom you wield power. The owners of a corporation may not treat its employees like children or religious congregants. They may own the enterprise, but not the people working for it.

The company argues that it should not have to provide resources for an action that it deems immoral. Company-funded health insurance is a form of employment compensation, so it may as well argue that it won't pay an employee who might use the money to buy contraceptives over the counter, either. It's a ridiculous argument on its face. Add in that the firm is under no compulsion to provide the insurance package at all, and we can see clearly that the issue is not about refraining from immoral action, but rather abusing its power as an employer to force others to do so.

In the long run we'll all come to see the Hobby Lobby show as just another ignorant and futile attempt to control women and impose religion on the rest of us, with the same sort of grandstanding that won George Wallace his place in the Hall of Fame for Stupid Cranks. It will fail, and in short order, that's obvious. The editor's defense of this idiocy as somehow heroic won't cause a ripple as it slips down the drain of antiquated babble, but it's still a shame for our community that our local paper is so backward and in thrall to magical thinking.

It's neither a good way to inform readers nor a good way to attract and hold advertisers. Make your case in your church pulpit if you must, editor, but please, keep it out of the paper, it's embarrassing and counterproductive for your business.

Talking past one another on gun violence

When I was in college many years ago, as both an art technique exercise and a meditation, I hand-drew a large copy of the ancient illustration at left. You may not be able to see the details well here, but what's most striking about it for me is how happy and industrious the monks are in contrast to the stolid world-weariness of the elephant.

The Courier's letters section has been awash in chatter about guns and gun violence since the Newtown massacre. The current round is larger in scale than usual, but not much different in quality than the reactions to any previous mention of guns on the op-ed page. I'd like to be optimistic that people are waking up to the seriousness of our national problem with guns, but, well, you know.

It would just be nice if for once we could hold back on the rush to frame the issue, which is really all that's going on.

The gun lovers want to put the frame on the individual who did the deed, and in this case they're focusing on his developmental disability, blithely unconcerned about tarring everyone who's mentally challenged with the broad brush of scary difference.

The gun despisers want to put the frame on the weapons and the truly insane ease of access to them in this society, unconcerned about the many owners of firearms who keep them safe and under control.

Both these perspectives include essential truths. Both insist that there's nothing more to the picture, and as long as we refuse to put our arms completely around the problem, we can never come close to a solution or even useful alleviation of the incessant damage.

When will we accept the wisdom that we're unwilling and perhaps unable to see the whole picture? Could we at least reject the relentless framing, which amounts to putting out our own eyes, and open ourselves to seeing and hearing something new here?

The letters and comments are a complete waste of time, so I'm not linking to any of them.

It's a day for resolutions, and I'd like to hope that as a nation we can resolve to be better people, take better care of one another, pay better attention, and fear one another less.

Editorial: North Korea threat is no joking matter

Once again the unnamed Courier editor takes on an international news story and steps immediately out of his depth based on his armchair research before his mighty bigscreen boobtube.

Regular readers know that I lived for some years within missile range of North Korea. I know firsthand that Japan relied then for its security against the weird and sociopathic state not on its own military or the massive US forces occupying it, but rather on an extensive chain of shady gambling operations, to which Japanese authorities turned a blind eye, run by North Koreans who supplied most of the nation's hard currency by remitting the profits homeward. It was a not heroic, it wasn't something to brag about, but it worked and as far as I know continues to work.

It's correct to think that North Korea could do a lot of damage in a short time. It couldn't sustain a war or any more than a single hostile move, but it would hurt people all the same, by far the most likely in Seoul. It would then bring sure annihilation for the North Korean regime, and it's ridiculous to presume that just because they act crazy sometimes, they're really that crazy. To even begin to understand this regime you have to see it from the inside, a place so foreign that even most pro Asia-watchers stumble continually over its contradictions and absurdities.

The bottom line is that North Korea is building missiles not to hit the US, but to pretend to itself and its people that it maybe could. This it uses as what amounts to extortion leverage against China, which trades food and technology for maintaining a more or less secure border against the horde of North Korean refugees bursting to escape.

This graf caught my eye:

"North Korean officials insist that the purpose of the launch was peaceful - to put a satellite in orbit. Yet missile experts correctly point out that the technology for that task matches the technology for launching long-range armed missiles."

For "North Korean" the reader could substitute "The USSR" or "The USA" and create a direct quote from thousands of worried papers during the Space Race, and it's absolutely true. The American military made it eminently clear that the space program was entirely about ICBMs the day it ordered Chuck Yeager to abort taking the X-15 out of atmosphere and kiboshed the whole piloted space program. It's utterly naive to think that any missile-based space effort is not about the missiles, and that includes India, China, Japan, Iran, France and everyone else spending a dime on it. We've only got a lot of good science out of it by taking advantage of the military need for expensive fig leaves.

What makes North Korea special is that it won't make a deal and join the club. I have to think that if its military and political leaders (not Kim the third, who like his father is obviously just a pampered figurehead) really are as lame as our media and government would have us believe, it would be the easiest thing in the world to flatter and bribe them into complacency and exploitability. They're clearly not. They've long since decided that leaning into the crazy image will get them all they want and maintain their (imagined) independence and very real local power.

It keeps going this way because our own military-industrialists can use North Korean crazy to justify themselves and their high salaries. Since the War to End All War there has always been an irrational, implacable enemy tailor-made for building war machines. If the enemy's irrational, we don't have to explain why they hate us, we can just take it for granted (and not think about it). We used to go and actually fight them, now for the most part we just "prepare" for their eventual aggression, spending endless billions without ever having to prove there's a threat. It's a close to perfect con.

North Korea will continue to play this game as long as China goes along, and that's where the calculus ends. It's not about us, it's not even about South Korea, really. It's not inconceivable that if we were to drop our sanctions and pump enough aid into North Korea to get its people off the starvation bus, we'd see Chinese military hit teams cleaning out the alpha dogs posthaste. But the card-house of rhetoric we've built around this issue will never allow that.

North Korea is a complex diplomatic problem involving freakish internal politics and interlinked international interests in the status quo, which makes it frustrating. But "alarming"? No, Tim, not really.

Wiederaenders: World keeps turning despite predictions

Duh.

In the graf after his requisite lame attempt at a gentle-humor column (consider trying this on the Angus page, Tim, he's no funnier than you are), Tim plays a little catch-up on what he should have written for Monday, stating that the City money going into the courthouse lights is unrelated to the lighting ceremony and therefore there's no constitutional violation of church and state. (His first point, that no one is forced to attend, is completely irrelevant to the question of whether public resources are being spent on religion, showing just how unfamiliar he is with the legal questions.)

Doing this right would have meant acting like a journalist, getting the complete facts and citing sources. Making  a bald assertion on the opinion page does nothing to inform anyone but those who are already sold, so it really only throws fuel on the fire. (Fer gadaskes, act like  pro and try to see it from someone else's POV for a second, wouldya?)

Later he does a little more sucking up to Carol Springer, following up on a gushy editorial and a long political obit nervily slugged "THE PEOPLE'S POLITICIAN." It would be a major challenge to back that one up, I'm afraid, unless "the people" can be defined as rape-and-pillage developers.

Editorial: Objection to ceremony is wrong

Wow, the group that wrote letters objecting to the religious content of the courthouse lighting ceremony really got the unnamed editor's goat! I haven't before seen a Courier editorial written with such anger, seen not just in the word choices but in the hasty, sloppy thinking.

First to the facts: It's not the "Freedom of Religion Foundation," as seen in the news piece, but rather the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and it's not an "atheist group," as seen in the headline and body copy of same, but rather atheist, agnostic and nontheist. I'm sure that's a little nuanced for the mouth-breathers around here, but an editor ought to have the circumspection to get it right. Clearly "atheist" is meant as an offensive epithet.

When civil libertarians object and sue to halt religious use of public resources, the adherents to the affected cult (pretty much always white Protestants) go to the mattresses as if the next step is to raze the churches and put them all in reeducation camps. They invariably forget that the strongest protection for their religious practices is keeping all such practices out of government.

Had the editor been able to take a breath and think for a second, his defense could have been a lot more sober and effective. As far as I know the courthouse lighting is supported entirely by private funds and groups, primarily the Chamber of Commerce. If that's true as I suspect, the ceremony does not infringe on constitutional protections and there's no legal case to be made against it. The Wisconsin-based national watchdog group responded to a local complainant, probably without access to the accounting or other pertinent facts. Given the penchant among small red-state towns across the country to play fast and loose around religion, the objection isn't surprising, but it's likely an overreaction.

That said, it would be a good idea for local leaders to take this as a cue to check themselves on where the legal lines are. Prescott's state recognition as "Arizona's Christmas City" is likely over that line, for instance, both when the Legislature placed it on the statute books and whenever the City puts money into promoting it. To be within the law, we have to ensure that only private funds and resources go into this sort of nonsense, and the City stays officially clear of it.

Staying within the law (which despite all the religious wannabe legal eagles is clear and well established: church and state must remain strictly separate in this country) isn't any more difficult than adhering to the speed limit on 69, and most importantly, it protects all the silly celebrations and freedoms of religion. People of faith should be the first to support and maintain that separation.

Editorial: Foreign aid: Small dent, big impact

Once again we find the editor aiming for the right target, but his technique isn't quite up to hitting it.

For starters, he undermines his own point by parroting the talking point, "Congress has been spending too much money for decades." Every time researchers ask Americans about specifics, they find that we generally support the spending. What Congress has failed to do is maintain the revenue streams to pay for it.

At the end of the same graf he yarbles, "foreign governments such as China hold the notes on our debts." It's true that China holds American debt, but it's a minor piece. Over half of total US debt is held by the Federal Reserve and the US government itself. Americans hold over half the remainder (right, three quarters of the debt that everyone's screaming about we owe to ourselves), and China holds about a quarter of the foreign component. Here's a primer on our public debt worth studying.
Every American should know this stuff, especially a newspaper editor.

"We deem [foreign aid] an investment of monumental proportions," writes the editor. What he pretty clearly means to write is that it's a small investment with monumental returns. Would it be so hard to run this stuff past a copy editor?

The embarrassingly tiny amounts of money relative to GDP that we reluctantly leak out to assist foreign governments and NGOs for humanitarian aid are indeed invaluable investments in the people they reach and our own image and security. The editor's entrapment in teevee thinking and slapdash writing unfortunately cripple him in his otherwise noble attempt to defend common sense.

Editorial: What will it take to enact gun control?

In the context of the mass shooting events that come  around regularly every year, the Newtown event isn't objectively remarkable by itself, but something about the average age of the victims combined with the temporal proximity to a certain pseudo-religious holiday has got the attention of the unnamed Courier editor, who writes, "In this country, there has never been a serious or credible push to ever ban all guns. That is patently insane." The "ever" is obviously out of place and I'm not quite sure whether he means that never having pushed is insane or the idea of banning all guns is insane, so I can't offer any cookies for clarity, but it's clear in the body of the piece and the headline that he's had about enough of the killing and is encouraging readers to think in terms of stopping it. This is healthy.

Of course this brings out the anti-gun hardliners to joust with the firearm devotees, horsed on swaybacked old nags of argument and carrying blunted lances that never engage the opponent, because most everyone is talking past one another. An exception, from a commenter signing herself Kat Camacho:

"In July of 2011 I buried my child because it's okay for anyone to have a gun, get mad, go into a home a shoot and kill another human, MY SON. Until any one of you folks above have to bury your child because there is no control or justice, I urge you to shut the heck up! Guns don't belong in all of society because sick, evil, spineless creatures live and creep around in this society and Kill with these weapons. Shame on you people."

Hear, hear. She's exactly the sort of person to which I referred in my comment earlier, viz:

On the very same day as the Newtown mass murder, another madman attacked a school in the Henan Province village of Chengping, in China. He knifed 22 children between the ages of six and eleven. Local health-care workers say none was seriously hurt. If the madman had had a gun, of course, that story would have ended quite differently. 

My position on the American cult of the gun is well known, and I'm not the guy who's going to convince any gun lover that it's finally time to start talking seriously about the elephant in the room. It's not the editor either, though it's encouraging to see these words on this page after so many years of this paper going along with the gag*. No, the people who will matter in this debate are the parents in our community who heard the news yesterday and shuddered and cried to think that it really could be their kids, at any time. It's long past time for them to clear their heads and get serious about protecting their children and our society as a whole from this deadly and eminently preventable disease.

Since then I've seen more details come out. The presumed shooter,  Adam Lanza, was a 20-year-old with a disorder on the autism spectrum. The three guns, including an AR-15, belonged to his mother, a kindergarten teacher at the school, with whom Adam lived. She was the first to die. Others are missing who may be victims as well. You're probably ahead of me on this, since this is probably running nonstop from the cable news monsters.

Aside: What kind of society are we living in where a kindergarten teacher with a mentally disabled adult son feels the need to keep two handguns and an assault-style semiautomatic weapon?

Back to the editorial and the subject du jour, the editor's heart is in the right place, but like pretty much all the commenters he's trapped in the world of simple answers to complex problems. Leaping to the idea of "gun control" only raises the defenses of the fearful and locks up the brakes on progress. We have to recognize that to some extent, everyone in this argument has a piece of the truth and no one has all of it.

Gun lovers have it right when they say that the mentally deranged and the criminals (often the same thing) will always be among us,  and that there's no way we can hope to disappear guns from our society.

Gun despisers like me have it right that more guns lead to more violence, that far and away the likeliest person to be hurt by a given gun is its owner or a loved one, and the idea of citizens using their trusty pistolas to face down determined criminals or a tyrannical government is juvenile fantasy.

Even if we could legislate away the weapons, we can't legislate away the sense of entitlement to personal deadly violence that many people read into the Second Amendment. And we can't censor away the fascination with deadly violence in our media and culture without becoming something we all agree would be bad.

Like other forms of crime, gun violence on the whole has been diminishing with our aging population. Mass shootings/suicides have not, and stress-related emotional and domestic violence is as bad or worse than ever. This implies that what so many of us see as individual criminality or derangement is the extreme expression of a much broader-based pathology. Our society is sick.

You've likely heard that one before, but if we take it to heart it means that the practical solution to the problem of endemic gun violence is much more complex, involving the entire society in multi-front treatment that under the best of circumstances will take generations to show positive effect.

But it may not be all that difficult in day-to-day terms. Consider the example from Chengping. Another mentally diminished individual lashes out emotionally, chooses children as his victims and wields his weapon with impunity. The differences: his access to a firearm of any kind was much more restricted than it is here, and his society is much less tolerant of social violence. China is near the other end of the spectrum from us in both these factors, with the rest of the civilized world falling in between somewhere and producing far less gun violence as well. You need both parts, less access and less tolerance.

It's a canard to say that a given deranged person bent on violence who doesn't have a gun will either find a way to get one or kill as effectively with some other weapon. The crimes we're talking about here are emotional paroxysms, not calculated mayhem, and the aggressors use whatever they have at hand. Access to firearms makes death and maiming more likely in the encounter. That's why gun lovers love guns, after all — they're more effective.

We can't start to have a useful dialogue about this very real and deadly problem until we can move out of our accustomed entrenched positions. If you keep a gun because you feel the need to protect yourself, you should be amenable to the idea of reducing access to guns in sensible ways for the people you fear. If you want to see fewer guns in our society because it will reduce violence for all, you're smart enough to  recognize that we can't wish half a billion guns away.

The ultimate solution is bottom-up: we'll have less gun violence when we reduce our tolerance for violence, in daily life, in conversation, in media, in our children, in how we talk about solving problems. If we can make progress on our twisted, adolescent thinking and grow up a bit, then all that's left to do is clear away the mess.

The path to that kind of maturity is to keep the innocent victims in mind and see that it's only luck that you or I isn't in today's body bag. Tomorrow brings another roll of the dice. Wouldn't you like to increase your odds?

*: As recently as nine days ago, btw.

Must read: Worrying about the wrong kind of debt

Robert Wright, writing in The Atlantic, considers what may be a key metric of danger to the economy in What if the Fiscal Cliff Is the Wrong Cliff?, making a strong argument for restructuring of private debt not just to improve the economy, but to avert the continuing threat of economic depression. Key concept: we're still in deep enough to crash the bus.

Where's winter?: November was hot and dry here; heat and emissions on the rise globally

I was briefly flabbergasted to read this piece — a straight news story in the Courier calmly relating facts about climate change. Who screwed up and let this through?

Even that gratuitous final reference to trumped-up controversy, "In conservative states, the term 'climate change' is often associated with left-leaning politics," points up the isolation of the critics from reality. I notice no one took a byline on this one, no surprise in a town where such behavior might get you disinvited from the parties, but even so, just having it appear in the paper is a breakthrough. Could the tide be turning at last?

Related: End of the Arctic Era