Arab Spring, Riotous Fall

Recently, a large portion of the Arab world has erupted in protests against America. It seemed to kick off with the bombing and attack of the American Embassy in Libya, where our Ambassador and 3 other Americans were killed.

The protests were supposedly over outrage about a video posted in YouTube by a Christian Coptic Egyptian person living in America. I don't know whether the person was born here of Egyptian parents or moved here, and whether he became naturalized or is not a citizen, so I'm not sure if they are even mad about the actions of a "true American". It doesn't matter, because anyone can post anything they want on YouTube, and if you don't like it, don't watch it.

It seems bizarre that anyone would get mad at a whole country for what one person in that country did or said. What was done may have been in poor taste, but it was not illegal. The protesters seem to be further enraged that the man has not been arrested or put to death by hanging.

I have no sympathy for these enraged protesters. I can appreciate that they have no understanding of our legal system or the rights we enjoy in this country, but even so, I cannot fathom why they want to hold our whole country accountable for an insignificant and poorly produced video. I had to see what it was all about, and couldn't stomach watching it because of the terrible quality of the clip. I can't believe this guy was able to get as many actors as he did to make such a stinking piece of garbage. I can't even get to the content, you have to wade through too much embarrassingly amateur footage to even stick around that long. It's about as painful to watch as a Barney video. Or reality television, for that matter. One report I heard said that most of the people that were protesting had not seen the clip. Perhaps if they had, they would not be so mad at America for harboring someone with such terrible views, but they would be mad at the studio for letting someone waste their money and time producing this crap.

The Muslim world rioted after some Dutch cartoonist wrote a cartoon critical of Islam some years back. I didn't understand that, either. I can't believe anyone can be so thin-skinned about their beliefs. I guarantee that their behavior is not getting them any converts in the world at large for their cause when they can see such lunacy.

When we invaded Afghanistan, I assumed that many people in their country thought that we were overstepping our bounds to invade an entire country for the actions of one man. However, it wasn't that simple, the country had a religious leadership that was harboring and protecting people that wanted to launch attacks on us, so you justify the action with a "rogue nation" argument, that a lot of people can agree with, relate to, and support. It still doesn't stop individuals from getting extremely angry about the occupation when bystanders are also killed in the military strikes against legitimate targets (or when the occasional mistake happens and a wedding party is bombed). I can see why those people would get mad at our actions and think our actions were unjustified. Iraq is just a more egregious example of this kind of thing, a situation where people are legitimately uncomfortable with our presence and incensed when it leads to the killing of innocent lives. In my mind, I was leery of the possibility of our presence being a recruiting tool for the jihadis.

Then these protests and the violence directed at Americans makes me take another look at my views. Any sympathy anyone may have had against an Arab person because we invaded their country has to realize that the fundamentalist Islamic masses have just validated our course of action. If someone saying something they dislike is cause to kill our Ambassador and bomb our Embassies, then they must understand perfectly why we would invade a country because someone killed a bunch of Americans. I should stop feeling guilty that we use a strong arm against anyone in an Arab country, because surely they condone that level of action if mere words justify rioting and attacking a country's embassy.

My emotional reaction to these countries is to want nothing to do with them. I think we should just pull our entire diplomatic missions out and put travel advisories on each of the countries. We should urge Americans to stay out, we're not welcome anyway. I think this should be backed up by cutting off trade. I don't even want to engage with these countries. I realize from a practical standpoint this is not realistic. No one will advocate this kind of reaction, and no trade restrictions will be considered. Many individuals faced with the prospect of travel to any of these cesspools of unrest should think twice about going there. Your life is cheap and you are not welcome. There's plenty of other places in the world that would welcome you and your dollars. Go there instead.

I'm guilty of the same mistake that the Arab protestors are making, which is to generalize from the actions of a few to the motives of the rest. However, they are generalizing from the actions of a single individual who is only exercising his right to free speech. There is no actual harm being done by this speech, and they can simply ignore the film and there will be no effect whatsoever. On the other hand, while the number of protestors compared to the general populace is a small percentage, these are large mobs, and they have killed people for simply being
American. You would not have the option of simply ignoring them, as they have the option of doing with our miserable individual. So while I am extrapolating on the actions of a few and criticizing them for the actions of an individual, my hypocrisy protects individuals from being harmed in a real way, blown up by a mob. We felt the same way about the French Revolution, so it's not even a Muslim or Arab thing, it's a stupid enraged mob thing.

Missouri Amendment 2

I was getting ready to go vote during this summer's second Missouri Primary of 2012 and wanted to know what was going to be on the ballot. This was a really particularly sleepy election. For someone in the political middle, disenchanted by both parties, a primary is a not something that raises much motivation. Even though I complain that most elections give you two bad choices and you have to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, I still don't want to try to influence who is going to be on the ballot.

I looked up the ballot and discovered that there was going to be a state constitutional amendment on the ballot. That's pretty rare. I know that the U.S. Constitution has not added any amendments for a long time and the process to get the constitution amended on the national level is almost impossible when the country is evenly divided on most issues (try to imagine an amendment about guns or gay marriage making it to through congress).

The proposed change was to insure school prayer was a protected right in the state. No one can prosecute anyone that wants to pray in school. It seemed pretty straightforward and completely unnecessary, as this was already guaranteed. No one else in my office knew about the amendment until I told them. My brothers, who I immediately called, both knew about it, but had only just found out about it.

I considered this a really poor choice of elections to put such a supposedly important matter on the ballot. If you are truly up in arms about a subject to the point where you think there needs to be a Constitutional Amendment over it, why do a sneaky stealth move and put it into an almost ignored primary election?

This primary happens to be one that insures that the majority of voters going in would be conservatives and Republicans. Not many Democratic positions were even being contested, but the Republican field was rife with candidates, and many races had far right candidates poised against moderate Republicans. So this field was really heated up.

After the election, the results came in and the amendment passed with about 80% of the vote, an almost unheard of majority. I was disappointed, and still riled about the sneaky way that the measure was put onto the ballot, but I moved on and started to forget about it.

Then I heard one of my science podcasts report that the measure would mean that people that did not want to learn evolution in schools would have the right to refuse to learn it, and that the measure would be challenged.

My first reaction was that this was not what was on the ballot. It said nothing about the conduct of people in classrooms being able to refuse to learn something, it simply said that you couldn't stop someone from praying in school.

I got online to see what the language of the ballot was, and found that it was already taken down from the election board's website. I did find the original Amendment as approved by the General Assembly and read it in full. It did indeed say that anyone that disagreed with any subject in school on religious grounds could not be forced to participate in the curriculum.

That's alarming on two levels. One, the ballot did not even hint about his aspect of the Amendment, and the language of the ballot was both abbreviated and deceptive in that respect. Two, the original article 5 of the state constitution had language in it that already specifically provided for religious freedom, and the ballot language didn't sound that different than the original section. The Amendment was to replace article 5 so most people reading the short ballot description would naturally draw the conclusion that religious freedom in schools was not something that was already a right. The only thing that really changed was the ability to opt out of any education that one deemed against their religion.

It seems to me that there would be no limit to what you could opt out of. The obvious courses would be those including Evolution and Geology, because not only do people not want to be taught something that they feel contradicts Genesis from the Bible, but many people believe the 17th century theologian's accounting of the years in the Bible that puts the age of the earth at about 6,000 years instead of the generally accepted 4.65 billion years. So Geology is, by definition, blasphemy. I can see people opting out of Chemistry because it fails to say that an intelligent creator designed all the elements and molecules. People could probably figure out ways to opt out of English class and Gym class. Once you put a vague exception that allows people to get out of the hard work of learning, they will expend considerable effort in applying that exception to anything and everything they dislike and hope that their feigned religious piety will get them out of it.

We look to the Muslim world and see people in some countries educating their young in Madrases where they read the Koran for 12 hour a day while being beaten and yelled at and we shake our heads at what a shame it is that these people will use their religion to keep their people willfully ignorant. Yet we have plenty of people in this country that will gladly follow that model and hand our youths all the tools they need to avoid opening their minds and learning something true about the world.

Crime Scene Investigation

I "read" a book recently called Crime Scene Investigation, Philosophy, Practice, and Science by Professor Robert C. Shaler of Pennsylvania State University.

This is part of The Modern Scholar series, where exceptional Professors with excellent lectures get a chance to record it and put it in an audiobook. These versions always have the Professor/author read or perform the class themselves. The disadvantage when an author reads his own book is that the typical author does not have a good speaking/reading voice.

In this case, the Professor has a pretty good voice, as he's used to delivering lectures, but he has a definite New York or Philadelphia accent. There is a stereotype of people with this accent to those of us in the Midwest. This stereotype is obviously not fair to everyone, but often people from the thickly populated area near New York City have a belligerent and condescending way of speaking. There is a tough guy kind of bravado and a know-it-all sound to the way some from that region say anything, it seems. This guy had this voice in spades.

What he had to say was also in that vein. I was describing the course to my brother a few days after I started listening to it, and I told him that this guy knows everything and everyone else is completely full of shit. That's the way he came across, and I kept waiting for him to get over it and start describing the science of Crime Scene Investigation. He never really did.

To be fair, he imparted a lot of information, but the attitude that it was delivered with was way too distracting for me. I kept waiting for him to explain why methods that he deemed to be erroneous or misguided had ever been attempted in the first place. My expectation was that people would approach the science of something as complicated as crime with a early theory based on some kind of logic, which would later be superseded by more modern science or more thorough methods. The way Professor Shaler presents it, everyone was stumbling around in the dark, hampered by their own incompetence, until he showed up to shine his brilliance down on the field.

That's a pretty harsh assessment, and I don't mean to take away from the obvious intelligence of the guy and his mastery of the field. I am frustrated by my own inability to ignore the tone of the lectures, and I feel it distracted me from understanding the subject as well as I could. One last criticism, though, is that he would often state what he thought was the correct method, or the clear facts of a subject, but he would rarely explain how they got to the point where they figured that out. I was hoping and expecting to hear a little of the history of the science, like in the Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum.

One of early facts about Professor Shuler that made me think that he was a pretty heavy hitter was that he was head of the Forensics Department in New York City, he pioneered the use of DNA evidence, and was responsible for identifying the victims of 9/11. He also mentioned Kansas City, which lead me to believe he had been here before. I had the impression that he had worked here, but perhaps he had simply advised the unit here. I kept listening for more information on this, but there was none.

That leaves us with actual subject matter. The thing that really stuck with me is how violent people can be. The matter of fact way that he described people that would continue to beat a person long after they were dead sticks in my mind. It also was quite telling when they went over blood splatter pattern analysis. You don't think about a wounded human as some kind of blood geyser. It's impressive, when you think of it, just the fact that people are inflicting damage on their fellow human beings in such an overwhelming way that blood is splattering 15 feet in the air.

In the end, I thought that the techniques are interesting and they do an amazing job of solving crimes. However, I cannot imagine that there are enough scientists, let alone investigators to truly study all crime scenes. On one hand, you get the impression that police forces are stretched thin. On the other hand, you get the idea that there is no such thing as the perfect crime, and no way to commit a crime without the strong possibility that YOU WILL GET CAUGHT.

Divide and Fall of the Empire

I've been listening to The History of Rome Podcast for a few years now. Through 178 episodes, he's gotten to the point where the last few years of the Roman Empire are at hand. I will regret listening to the last episode, as it has been an enjoyable experience.

Learning about the last century of Roman history, I've been impressed by one fact about their decline. They were their own worst enemies. Sure, the Goths and Vandals and Huns put pressure on the Empire, but this pressure could have been brushed aside by the earlier Empire, when they were strong and united. The worst thing that lead to the decline is that every few years, some strong military leader or some conniving palace insider would decide that they should be emperor. Suddenly, it's Roman legions against Roman legions, and the strength of the empire gets continually drained. Near the end, no one wanted to pay their taxes and the Emperor couldn't muster enough funds to field a decent Army, and they spent more time bickering than actually trying to mend and strengthen the empire.

It reminds me of this country today. We seem hell-bent on attacking ourselves and finding trivial and artificial faults toward our fellow countrymen in order to scramble for supremacy in some childish "King of the Hill" style melee. All we're succeeding in doing is tearing down our proverbial hill and making the lofty heights that America used to occupy an ever declining hog waller.

Even near the end, there were people that understood the glory of Rome and longed to restore its place. Rome was an Empire that could be brutal and warlike to its enemies, but within the Empire, there was peace, literacy, and civilization. There was one language, and one law, and being a Roman citizen meant something in the world. They amassed wealth and built magnificent cities and structures that survive to this day. The groups that tore the Empire apart plunged Europe into a dark ages that lasted almost 1000 years and much of the knowledge and history that had been carefully preserved during the Empire was completely lost.

Perhaps it's inevitable, when you build a strong society with wealth, strength, and progress, people within the society become obsessed with rising to power and controlling the society. Many of the people that rise to power are not suited to rule, they only have one talent, fighting for position and destroying those that are in their way.

I see many parallels to our current situation.

College is for Snobs?

Rick Santorum is still running for President at this time, but I'm certain that anyone reading this in the future will find that laughable. He made a stump speech where he said: "President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college, what a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day, and put their skills to test, that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he (Obama) wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image."

Newt Gingrich is also still running for President at this time (again, something that will seem very odd 10 years from now). He gave a speech at a church recently where he attacked colleges as bad places because they try to liberalize and secularize people. Was the message not to go to college?

These people are still in the primaries, which means they are trying to get the conservative Republican Party nomination for President. This always becomes a "how far right can you go?" contest, which ends up hurting any eventual nominee if he goes too far. These guys just went too far.

Conservatism is defined as people that resist change and are usually convinced that some time in the past was a better time. They tend to admire people from the past as having better values and being more respectable because they have not been tainted and corrupted by these modern times.

I would find it very interesting to whisk Newt and Rick back in time to the post WWII era. I would like to see them give their stirring stump speeches to crowds of World War Vets, who they would probably describe in glowing terms as from the Greatest Generation. Can you imagine these people, many of whom eagerly took advantage of the new GI Bill to educate themselves and launch themselves back into the work world with more marketable skills and a chance at prosperity that they couldn't have dreamed of prior to the war? Can you imagine them cheering Newt and Rick telling them that college was bad? Can you imagine these men that faced down fascism and imperialism agreeing that ideas from professors at American colleges were somehow irresistably subversive and should be avoided? Would they consider that the power of these professors to brainwash them would be so strong that they should avoid college completely just in case they might fall victim to it?

I imagine that a WWII vet would probably not have a problem talking back to a college professor if he said something bad about America. I also imagine that a WWII vet would probably tell Newt & Rick to shove it if they went back in time and told them not to go to school.

In what world is it a good idea to discourage people from going to school? Here we have a situation where one of the major fears in retaining a U.S. edge in the world is that we aren't educating ourselves enough, and these people are running for President and attacking the best path to personal prosperity and the best method for maintaining U.S. superiority? How is that leadership?

Fair Tax

I was listening to the Slate Political Gabfest and they were discussing the reaction when Mitt Romney released his tax returns. Romney has been reluctant to do so, and after a lot of pressure from Newt Gingrich during the current Presidential Primaries, he finally opened up the books and revealed that he made $20 million dollars last year and paid around 13% in taxes. The top rate for people in this range is supposed to be 35%, and at the $20 million income level, the tax should be 34.9%. Mitt Romney's special tax break cut his taxes by 62.8% or $4.4 million.

They made the comparison that most people at much lower incomes pay a much higher rate and John Dickerson asked if we are supposed to be enraged because Mitt's taxes were too low or because everyone else's were too high. That was a big government/budget/taxation in general question, but what was of interest to me what what he said next.

He asked if it was ludicrous that we have a tax structure that favors capital gains and investment. I saw a recent piece on the Daily Show by Jon Stewart that showed that the tax shelter for venture capital firms (like Mitt Romney's former firm, Bain Capital) fought for and got a special tax exemption for their people at the 15% rate. If true, that's a example of an interest group lobbying the government and getting a special exemption to help themselves get richer. The average person does not have anyone looking out for them to this degree. Of course, the Daily Show went on to show Mitt Romney giving a campaign speech where he said that everyone should pay some taxes. He's saying that people that are exempt from income taxes because their income is so low (poor people) should have to pay more taxes, when he himself is rich beyond most of these people's wildest dreams and he has worked hard to pay less taxes.

The point I was getting to was that tax codes have been to a certain degree the government's attempt at social engineering. There are some good arguments for social engineering through the tax code. If you believe that home ownership is good because it is a cornerstone of the American Dream or maybe a good economic engine for the country, then you are justified in lobbying for a tax exemption for home ownership. So, let's assume that someone has the argument that people that are "investing" (in other words, buying stock, presumably to invest in corporations and companies) are helping the country. They are saying that this activity is noble, drives the economy, and should be rewarded.

I would probably have agreed with that position many years ago, but let's look at what we get for this "investment". The financial meltdown of 2008 was engineered by "investors" playing with other people's money in speculative complex financial instruments, all the while lobbying to be exempt from government regulation. So you can point to an enormous recent example of how the investment class of people have not helped the economy, in fact they did such enormous harm that they had to be bailed out lest the entire world's economy get sucked into their slip stream as they sank beneath the financial waters. So, in other words, the debt generated from their greedy miscalculations is now on the backs of the rest of us (our taxes, our debt) after they were bailed out by the government. This does not seem to me to be the kind of thing they should be rewarded for. In fact, you could ask why no one is being punished for this. Unless you call record bonuses some perverse kind of punishment.

My concern is that these "investors", even in times when things are working right, are not helping our American Companies to be healthy. Stock investment's influence on corporate decision making is at best a burden and at worst an exercise in short term thinking. Stock holders believe that their imposition of fiduciary responsibility (the obligation of a company to do whatever it takes to make a profit for their shareholders) is not only justified to insure profits, but also that this is a healthy standard for a company to be held to. The problem is that stocks are rated on a quarterly basis, and what is good for a company in the short term is not good for the company in the long term. It's very healthy in the short term to lay everyone off, thus saving on payroll, or to cut R&D, thus cutting expenses. However, a company that whittles its staff down to the point where they cannot deliver when they are asked to produce something will not remain viable in the long term. A company that will not invest in ideas and learning, or bother to test products for the future, will not have a future.

I'm all for rewarding people who save and invest in industry here in the U.S., but the responsibility of a company should be to insure that they will be around for many years, not generate a quick profit today at the expense of burning through a company's assets and capabilities and leaving a worthless hulk behind.

We have a word for this kind of behavior, when one entity sucks the life out of another, killing it in the process: Parasitism. When we allow investors to treat our American companies as carcasses they can bleed dry, and then pay as little taxes as possible to the government that sustains and serves the country, then why are we surprised when the country begins to resemble the companies that these parasites have sucked dry?

Crowdsourcing Legislative Sanity

I've been frustrated lately about how Congress does legislation. Bills are enormous, too big to read prior to our elected officials voting on it. The average citizen has no chance of comprehending what's going on prior to a vote being taken. Too many unrelated amendments are added in, usually because individual members pledge their vote for some pork or pet project, or alternately because someone is playing poison pill politics.

I have often wondered what I would do if I was a Congressman, Senator, or the President, and needed to read all the material you have to make decisions about. It's too much reading for anyone but a speed reader to get through. I figured the way to do it would be for the staff to divide up the work and read the report/bill/law/etc. in sections and do short summaries of each part so that you could get a rapid summary. Then you could browse specific parts in detail if there were the parts you were concerned about.

I've often wondered the same thing about Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. He has lots of guests that he interviews that are out pitching their most recent book and it always seems like he has actually read the book. How does he have the time to read the entire book each time? I have suspected that his reading was outsourced to his staff for some time, and that he got some kind of cliff notes summary version to read. Even if they tagged just a few portions, the best parts of the book, you could get through a book in an hour or so if you only had to read a concise summary and maybe a dozen of the best passages.

There is another concept toward outsourcing and consolidating your work that is done by a website called Galaxy Zoo. This is called crowdsourcing. They take the evaluation of galaxy pictures from Hubble and let subscribers sort through the data with a tutorial and applet to help frame their answers. It takes a group of data that is too big for an individual or small group to process and makes it manageable. While the bulk of the data is still not examined by an expert, it can be accessed quickly and indexed for particular trends or phenomenon. This allows they to sort through some 200 billion photos of galaxies in a couple of years, where this would have taken hundreds of years for all the astrophysicists in the world to examine them.

Why not take legislative review out of the hands of staffers and aids, who are political appointees that probably also have political agendas? Why not crowdsource all pending legislation? Have people read sections and summarize them with an outline or app that standardizes the responses. What does it say? What is it about? What are the problems with it? How do you personally feel about it? This last would be in order to give weighted responses. This would be superior to a posting of the entire bill that had a long stream of random comments by anyone that wants at the bottom. You've all seen these comment threads, they are worthless for helping you understand the content of whatever they comment on. Some of these comments in typical threads are well reasoned and useful, but most of it is emotional or inconsequential.

You have to make a commenting community put their efforts into something more useful and accessible. Summaries could be weighted by reviews from others, or there could be a wiki-like function of editors that could block users that are just trying to obscure the subject, use it as a spam outlet, or derail the conversation because they are politicians or lobbyists themselves.

Ideally, a system like this would enable the public to look at pending legislation and quickly find the objectionable or flawed aspects of it, and put public pressure on their representatives to either amend the legislation or rewrite it completely. Ideally, this system would give power to the public to override lobbyists and special interests.

Unfortunately, it could be subverted really simply if our legislators decided to keep pending legislation secret. This in itself would be something that I would hope the public would protest, if they were aware of it. We've seen committee work taken into secrecy in the past, so you know there is a tendency to hammer out backroom deals outside of the light of public scrutiny.

The legislative review site I'm envisioning could be established as an independent oversight entity controlled by the electorate. It would encourage legislative literacy and participation, particularly if complex legal bullshit currently being put into bills could be made simple, quick, and understandable. I believe it could also bring people together in the center, where most real people reside, not in the extremes that the major parties often use as talking points to rally support and obscure the real issues and real way they run the government. It is possible that we would not need a new or third party if we could take back control of the two major parties. It is possible that many of these legislators would welcome a way to say no to the special interests and actually do what is right for the country. This pressure could be brought to bear if only we had a way of wading through all the verbiage and sorting out what is actually being proposed.

Preserve, Protect, and Defend

I was listening to someone recently saying that he was a strict Constitutionalist. I've heard this phrase spoken in many recent debates and campaign speeches. The implication is that one side is right because they are following the true intent of the constitution, and that everyone should know that anyone that opposes this viewpoint are flagrantly flaunting all constitutional dictates and just making up new rules as they see fit. This is similar to what people say about activist judges. You only gripe when a judge makes a ruling against what they believe.

What I find interesting about the Constitution is that when the President is sworn into office, or if you take a commission as an officer in the military, you are sworn to defend the Constitution. Not your country, not your family, not the leaders, but a piece of paper, an idea. I still find this a little strange. You can simplify it and say that the Constitution defines your country and that's what you are defending. I think maybe the framers of the Constitution meant people to be loyal to the rules, and the rule of law calls for the free election of new leaders. This prevents us from making leaders permanent fixtures.

I was looking at the World Almanac later, thinking about the Constitution and I opened it up and found the text on page 579 of the 2006 edition. I realized that I have never read the whole Constitution. I assume that most strict Constitutionalists have not either. It reminds me of people that say they believe in everything in the Bible, but when asked, they admit they have never actually read the whole Bible. So I read the Constitution.

To be fair, I had already read the Amendments many times, as the exact wording of the Bill of Rights comes up often and is worth re-reading. The original Constitution is the document that was written in 1787 and outlined how we would become the United States we are today. It took the U.S. from the Articles of Confederation, which was the way that the government was set up after declaring independence, to a government with a central, federal core that the states would form around.

People often question how the Constitution could possibly be correct for all times when it was written over 200 years ago and the world has changed considerably since then. One point that strict Constitutionalists will make pertaining to this is that you can always amend the Constitution. This is true, the method for amending the Constitution is written right in it. Article V states that either 2/3 of both houses of Congress, or 2/3 of the States Convening to form amendments must pass, then 3/4 of the states must ratify the amendment for it to become law.

I had a discussion with a gun enthusiast and told him that I had discovered that the term "Militia" was not just in the 2nd Amendment, but was all throughout the main body of the Constitution. There is no exact definition of Militia in the Constitution, and there may not be a modern equivalent. I'm not sure that a Founding Father, if rushed forward in time and asked to comment on what a Militia is, would even be able to find for us a comparable group that exists today. In the time of the Revolution, people at a state and local level may have to defend themselves from Indian attack, or possibly from an external invasion (foreign power) to their homes. Everyone was armed to hunt, and I suppose there were occasional wild animals that would enter areas inhabited by people, forcing them to band together in self-defense. The Militia was just a bunch of average guys that picked up their ever present firearms and came together as a group. We don't allow this. We have Police, but you have to have training and pass a test and get hired to do that. We have National Guard and State Reserve forces, but these are people that were trained by the Federal Government and while they can be called out by state Governors, they more typically belong to the Commander-in-Chief (especially since 9/11, after which the Bush administration called on these reserves to fight to a degree that they were not even called on in the Viet Nam War). So, if aliens from space landed tomorrow and began a War of the Worlds - style invasion, do you really think that anyone that you handed a gun to would not willingly step up and fight? Excluding the cowards that would lose their composure and simply run for the hills, the average pacifist that is against firearms in theory will gladly kill to defend his family. The problem is that we do not ever face this situation (and we do not need to hunt for food), so the ownership of firearms as the Founding Fathers envisioned it is not applicable to today's world.

The gun enthusiast pointed out that the proposal of a Constitutional Amendment on gun rights would fail if written either way, pro- or anti- gun ownership. I think he's right. There is no clear overwhelming majority either way. Given the margin of divide on most political issues right and left, there are not many ways the Constitution could be amended with the current mood of the populous. So gun ownership falls into an ambiguous middle ground. People seeking to make what they feel are reasonable restrictions to gun ownership are not usually thwarted by Constitutional arguments and those wishing to extend gun ownership rights, such as the recent trend to allow concealed carry laws in many states, are also not restricted by the Constitution.

There were other things in the Constitution that surprised me. Just how much of the original Constitution has been superseded is surprising. One real surprise for me what the language for return of the slaves to slave states or rather to their owners if they escaped their masters and ran away to another state. At the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there were no free states. By the time the Constitution was being framed, states in the North were only just started to outlaw slavery. I remember learning in my pre-Civil War history how the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law inflamed Abolitionists in the North. What you don't realize when you read the Constitution in detail is that this provision was already written into the Constitution almost 60 years before the Fugitive Slave Laws were enacted. You see in the Constitution the struggle to bind together the free and separate institutions that were the states into a single federal group, with central governing authorities. As the United States under the Articles of Confederation (and later, the seceded Southern States under their Confederation) proved, if you do not have strong central authority, you will not have the power to act as a group, and you will not have the power to survive.

Their were a number of things that were amended since the original Constitution. There is a very strange clause in there about the way Presidents are to be elected. The expectation was that there would be multiple candidates running for President, and there was a provision for what I will call a run-off election, but in reality, it's a matter of narrowing down the top two candidates. It used to be that you picked who you liked out of a large field, then the top two would not have clear majorities and they would redo the vote with just the top two. In the event of a tie or dispute, the House would decide. This happened between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was one vote away from not being our third President.

There were other odd things. It sounds like there was an expectation that states may want to combine or further subdivide into more or less states. The ability to raise taxes is throughout the text. The problem I have is that I do not understand a portion of the text. What is a Letter of Marque and Reprisal? There are lots of phrases that seem to be preventing states from being able to screw over one another competitively. There is also language that what one state grants its citizens is supposed to be recognized by other states. So what about gay marriage? How is that not a national right as soon as one state extends it as a right for themselves?

One very interesting phrase at the end of the body of the Constitution, before the last Article that tells how the Constitution will be ratified, is that there will be no religious test for qualification for any office in the United States. This certainly flies in the face of people today that like to say that we are a Christian Nation and that our Founding Fathers intended for us to be Christian. If that is so, why are they explicitly saying that there be not test for religion to hold office? If we are a Christian Nation, that clause should say that only Christians can hold office. We are not a Christian Nation, only a nation that is predominantly Christian.

The Bill of Rights comes along and immediately limits the power of the new Government that was established. Everyone knows that the Bill of Rights consists of 10 Amendments. What I did not realize until I re-read this was that there were originally 12 proposed. The first original Amendment was about the apportionment of Representatives which was never passed, and the second was about compensation to members of Congress, which was only passed in 1992.

I only recognized four names on the list of the people that signed the Constitution. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. I was surprised John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were not involved, but I found out that they were in Europe serving as ambassadors at the time. I recognize many more names of people that signed the Declaration of Independence. I would venture to say that most people probably consider the signers of the Declaration of Independence as our Founding Fathers, even though that document only says what we are not, not what we are. The true Founding Fathers that set up the United States and made us what we are today are the writers of the Constitution.

So, after reading the Constitution, I would have to say that I believe we should follow it as we do all laws and regulations, but we also have to revisit it and recraft it from time to time. The original Constitution makes it pretty clear that slavery was not only accepted, but protected by the laws of the land. We had to fight a bloody Civil War to change that. My point is that laws are made by men, and men make mistakes. Times change, and the way we govern ourselves has to change with them. Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of Liberty has to be watered with the blood of patriots from time to time. It's simpler just to amend the Constitution to reflect changing realities. I prefer pruning the branches of the Constitution to descending into chaos.

Culture of Cults

When I was in college, we had a religious group on campus that was recruiting a lot of students and growing very fast. Then the college newspaper, the Collegian, reported that they were a cult. Supposedly, they would take depressed and despondent students on a "retreat" where they would put them in a room with a dozen members and pressure them until they cracked. They wouldn't let them go until they started to agree with them that their views were correct. They would isolate the members from their friends and families over the next few weeks and continue to work on them until they were indoctrinated. I remember the paper reporting that one student's father lost contact with her and became alarmed. He hired someone to kidnap her back and had her deprogrammed. She explained how she had been brainwashed and how glad she was to escape.

We've recently met a couple that are in a local charismatic church that is growing very fast. They have attempted to recruit us several times. We've learned that innocent invitations to parties and get-togethers always include extended sessions of prayers and preaching. I became suspicious of the church and did some research. There were glowing reviews of the church online, as well as scathing commentaries. The detractors were usually members of similar churches that had only small variants to the doctrine. I saw some indications that the church was a cult. I found their site and saw that they had a podcast. When I downloaded and listened to the most recent episode, it was a real treat. They believe that the end of the world is coming. More specifically, they believe that the end times may have already started, and the 1000 years of bad times are here. The sermon discussed how they needed to put laws in place to protect the faithful and needed to take over government functions so that they could be in control. They discussed how the end times would have pockets of good interspersed in areas that had gone bad. They spent a considerable time talking about how this other church was full of nutty people that were seriously deluded because they believed that Christ comes at the end of the 1000 years, while the truth is that Christ comes at the beginning of the 1000 years. Since listening to this incredible sermon, the couple has shared with us their ideas on storing a year's worth of food in their house, and raising chickens as a way to insure they don't go hungry if society collapses.

This is nuts in my opinion. I believe you're free to believe what you want to believe, but I also believe that I can believe that what you believe is crazy, and in this case, that's what I believe. More importantly, when people believe something that is insane, and their ideology is telling them to go out and recruit and spread the word and be ready to take over the government to further these beliefs, that's the point where you've crossed the line into dangerous.

What am I going to do about this? Avoid the crazy people and warn others if the subject comes up.

I started thinking about cults and the characteristics of what makes a cult. Just like the old revelation that sexuality was fluid and that people were not gay or straight, but usually somewhere on the continuum between the extremes, cultish behavior or beliefs are on a continuum. There are many organizations that exhibit cult-like behavior.

So I put together a list of characteristics of cults.
1. Beliefs that cannot be shaken by truth or facts.
2. Recruiting of other members.
3. Intolerance of dissent within the cult group.
4. Policing of beliefs within the group. Training to learn and reinforce group cohesion.
5. Attacking individuals or groups outside of the cult that disagree.
6. Devotion to the cause and willingness to do and say what you are told by the group despite the costs and downside of these actions.
7. Certainty that other forces are arrayed against you. Paranoia. Us versus them mentality that precludes critical thinking or ability to consider circumstances dispassionately.
8. Willingness to protect the group despite the cost or the righteousness of any particular circumstances.

I started thinking about groups that displayed cultish behavior came up with the following list:

Religious Cults
Political Parties
Military Organizations
Police Forces
Intelligence Organizations?
Sports Teams or Fans around Sports Teams
Corporations
Political Movements
Media Organizations

Now obviously, not all members of these groups display cult-like behavior, but there are great examples within each group.

The military, of which I was once a member, is very conscious of their "socialization". They require cohesion to function and succeed, they expect orders to be followed explicitly (and rapidly without question) and they evoke strong loyalty reactions. They don't get pegged to the far end of the cult meter because there are examples of military people that will speak out about a war or report their fellow members for infractions.

Police organizations that become corrupt or overly brutal become cult-like. They talk about the Blue Code of Honor and the Blue Shield of Silence (that's not right, but I can't remember what they call the effect where police are not supposed to ever report each other or bring each other up on charges).

Military organizations that form around brutal dictators are cult-like. Look at North Korea as a prime example. Dissent it not tolerated and belief of anything other than that the Supreme Leader is a godlike figure is not tolerated. Hitler had a cult of personality built up around him and it infected the entire nation to a degree.

Political Parties can be cult-like when they issue "talking points" and try to keep everyone "on message". The problem with this is that if they pick a bad direction, there is no way to correct the problem and steer onto the right course.

The advantage of behavior in the direction of a cult is that people can be unified, they can speak and act with one purpose and they can get things done. They can sweep aside opposition and will not be slowed by internal dissent or hesitancy. The disadvantage is that groups can either be driven far down a bad path, or societies will not find innovations and new ideas if they do not fit in nicely with old beliefs. I can imagine the anti-cult groups having slogans like "Think for yourself" and "Question Authority".

In real practice, I believe that society swings back and forth between this cult discipline (like was seen in the McCarthy era) and dissent and questioning (like what we saw in the 60's). I believe it's good to vacillate back and forth between these extremes. That way you get the advantage of decisive action and the advantage of self correction. History has fluctuated back and forth between these extremes, but what you have to ask yourself is, where am I right now?

Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street

The recent rise of the protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street has caused some mixed feelings. While the movement is disorganized, diffuse, and does not have a central message, it has evoked a strong reaction in the public. People that trend to the left are sympathetic to their opposition to big corporations or ultra-rich. The unemployed, the underemployed, and those who work hard, but see their salaries and benefits slipping every year feel justified in being angry at the 1% of the population that has the bulk of the wealth in this country. The conservative right are scornful on one hand, calling the protesters ignorant or misguided, and fearful on the other hand, saying they feel that these protests will spiral out of control.

Police in riot gear have already broken up protests in Denver, and police in New York City are increasingly trying to control or break up the protests there. Some compare this to the reception the Tea Party movement of two years ago got with the public. Primarily against big government, they were successfully co-opted by Fox News sponsorship and Republican Party courtship. What started out as a revolutionary movement has basically become the far-right wing of the Republican Party, with a seat at the table in Government and a National Organization.

What people fail to understand as they look at these two movements with very different complaints and issues is that the core impulse that spawned the movements are basically the same thing.

Both movements' primary complaint is against the size, power, and corruption of their chosen nemesis. It's Big Government versus Big Corporations. The problem is not how big these institutions are, the problem how some of these institutions have gone rogue. They are unmanaged, selfish, and malevolent to society's health and long term goals. They are short sided and corrupt, seeking to get on top, amass ever greater power and money, then rig the game so that they will always be at an overwhelming advantage.

The actual problem that this country, and to a similar extent, the world is embroiled in, this fear of big governments and big corporations, is not two separate problems. This unacceptable mess large institutions have created is two sides of the same coin. They are inextricably joined at the hip. Big corporations fund and corrupt big government, and big government then provides them legal cover for the nefarious activities of corporations. Who lobbies Washington and funds political campaigns? Special interests intent either in getting a business advantage or in having government either subsidize them or leave them alone with rules and regulations. Who gets elected? Not principled popular people that go to Washington with ideals that cannot be swayed, but fickle politicians that court the biggest supporters, then do nothing to interfere and everything to help the special interests that fund their elections. Once they have tilted the playing field to their corporate partners' advantage, they often leave government and go straight to work for the companies they already served while in office.

The real problem with this setup is not with the size of the institutions or the amount of money, the problem is a lack of control and accountability. The problem is that no moral and ethical institution is powerful enough to challenge and correct these imbalances. The system is rigged against those without wealth, power, or influence. Frankly, those without wealth, power, or influence are disorganized and could not be effective in making any changes to those with power. The supreme court has ruled that corporations have the same rights as people and campaign donations equals free speech. This has given a green light to the people at the top that are exploiting the system to the hilt. It gives society the feeling that things are spiralling out of control and that there is no way to correct this and rein it all back in.

The other underlying problem is that these big entities are doing what is good for themselves, and not what is good for society. They are often doing what is good for themselves at the expense of society. If these massive institutions were looking out for the common good, no one would begrudge them any of their wealth or power. Indeed, there are many organizations that have reached their pinnacle of development and are doing a great deal of good in the world. There are also organizations that have lost their way and come back to their senses. But the incentives in the business world and in politics are all aimed to push the system further in the direction we have been going. The inclination by any power player is to use any dirty trick in the book or their competition will roll right over them.

These giant institutions seem to be short sighted and unaware of the effect that they are having on society. Dan Carlin, in his Common Sense podcast, made the comparison of recent protests all across the Western World to the protests in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring. It is surprising how little is known (or I should say how little is reported and emphasized in the media) about these movements that are cropping up everywhere. Most people probably could not answer a Jeopardy game style questioning of why there were recent protests in the following countries: Greece, Spain, England, Italy, Israel, or India. If you can find information about these protests online, it will surprise you that something this big is not already in the news every night.

My fear, when I think about this rising unease and this escalating willingness to take to the streets to protest is that the problems being pointed out in these protests are real and they are not being addressed. The lack of government and corporate responsibility is going to push people towards socialism and away from capitalism. The masses need to be heeded if for no other reason than to let the powerful stay in power. If the large institutions that are in power today would only be responsible and share power and wealth with the people, and if they would concentrate on doing what is best for the entire society in the long run, there would be a chance that the people will not rise up against the powerful. If they crack down on protesters and double down on their policies, they could very well push the people to take more drastic action and disrupt society. While it feels good to get out in the street and shake your fist when you are mad about an injustice, it is not good to tear down these large institutions. In the end, stable, peaceful, non-violent society comes from big strong governments and jobs, wealth, prosperity, and technological advances and innovations come from big strong corporations, and these are what makes life a continuous series of improvements. These benefits must be channelled wide throughout society and shared in order to be preserved.

Super Organism

I just saw another example of life on the planet acting like life in a body.

Bodies have a genetic code they follow that is influenced by signals. Hunger makes a trigger go off that makes you want to eat. Injuries send signals that direct the body where to respond with an immune response or where to perform repairs.

I was listening to a podcast about microorganisms that cause a behavioral change in their hosts. There were several examples, starting with mice that get a parasite that causes them to stop fearing, and in fact start to love the smell of cats. Their behavior gets them eaten, so the parasite can propagate in the cat. There is a catapillar that gets a virus that prevents him from molting. They climb to the top of the tree and eat until they die. Then they explode open and rain virus particles down on the other caterpillars in the tree. They were also talking about viruses that pass on traits from one host to another, possibly speeding up evolutionary adaptations in a population.

There is a lot of talk lately about the function of the bacterial population that we carry around with us. Besides the beneficial work that some strains do for us, aiding in digestion and preventing harmful strains from infecting us, there is a great deal of interest in the possible ways that these cultures of bacteria are affecting our behavior. Evolution dictates that strains that change behavior in a way that threatens their hosts will soon die out, so it stands to reason that we will find many beneficial relationships between our internal bacterial passengers and ourselves.

This reminds me so much of how a well functioning cell behaves. Stimulus, response, but not necessarily the same response, given the atmosphere the stimulus is given in.

Many people have speculated on a phenomenon called Gaia, or the Earth as a superorganism. The sum total of all of the species, working together, each effecting the others. Many people have a hard time believing this could be true when you look at the imbalances, such as human population running away, or species being hunted to extinction. The people that theorize about Gaia always seem to come up with this Disney-like interpretation with all the animals in the forest talking to each other and living in harmony. What if it's not that simple or pure? What if brutality and consumption are part of the plan, and we do work together on a higher level? Would we even know what that looks like? Would we even know how to prove it, much less see it? I'm not saying this potential superorganism is in perfect harmony, or has some kind of purpose or way of exerting self-determination. I'm just saying that there are influences and relationships that are not at all obvious. We should be open to the things we see in the future that may prove that there are more connections than we ever suspected.

Weeds

There was a podcast on Science Friday that originally aired on July 15th of 2011. It was about Weeds and Invasive Species. I listened to it again around the end of December 2011 and put an outline here on my blog, and now am sitting down to complete the entry in May of 2012.

The subject was weeds. This is usually a plant, and sometimes an invasive species. Simply put, it is a species that is in a place you don't want it. By this definition, you might include some animals, although you wouldn't call them weeds. Many people would treat them the same, though. If it's something you don't want, many people try to eradicate them.

The discussion between the two guests, one a Professor of Biology, and the other an author, was interesting and struck a chord with me. I've often been a fan of plants that other people are always trying to kill (animals, too, for that matter). I've had a hard time whenever I tried to explain the virtues of a species to someone who had a deep hatred for whatever it was. I often wondered where they got their idea and how you could ever change their minds.

At the core of my belief is the thought that biodiversity is important. Not just the liberal activist, knee jerk recitation of "biodiversity" as a way of sounding hip and trendy without really thinking about it. I've always thought that life on Earth forms a web, a rich tapestry made of many ingredients. When you start knocking out certain strands of the web or certain patterns or colors of the tapestry, you run the risk of making the structure fall apart and causing it to stop functioning. You never know what other species might be depending on that particular plant or animal, so it's best not to make an arbitrary decision that it's "undesirable" and try to wipe it out. If you find out later that you needed it, it could be too late. Nature evolved in equilibrium with each species as part of the mix, it's insane to think that removing some of them at random won't have an effect on the rest.

Another thing I've always suspected is that there will be value in most species, if studied close enough. This is beyond the way that this species impacts others, or the exact role it plays in nature. I believe that most species have one or two molecular tricks that their DNA perform that we can learn from. It seems that each time we really study a life form in detail, we find something biochemically about it that is unique. We will need all these tricks if we are to survive in a resource starved and overpopulated world. The obvious example of this is the search for medicines and other pharmaceuticals in plants, but what if the thing you find is an adhesive or a natural plastic? It's still valuable.

One of the interesting points the podcast guests made was that many species tend to rapidly colonize and thrive in environments where we have disturbed the soil. There are natural disturbances, volcanic eruptions, landslides, erosion or deposition of soils, and these events all are followed with a series of plant species that come in to perform specific tasks. The first colonizers anchor the soil and provide ground cover and deposit nutrients when they die and decay. Eventually, a series of species take their place in the recovery of a disturbed area, sometimes crowding out the early weedlike species, sometimes living side by side. Ultimately, a dominant species like trees come to take over the area, forming a mature and stable landscape rich with niches for other species to inhabit.

The other interesting aspect of many plants that are considered weeds is that they could have a beneficial function that is not obvious. Some "weeds" condition the soil. I recently discussed this with a friend. He will have to regrade and reseed a recently completed yard because of buried septic and ground source heating systems. I suggested clover to nitrogenate the soil, but he was concerned that he would not be able to wipe it out once it was established. I suggested he let it stay to feed the honeybees, which are having a hard enough time struggling for survival.

We often become dismayed when a nonnative species takes over an ecosystem. I'm not sure we can be certain that this is a bad thing. The Great Lakes were so polluted that they were a tragedy just a few years back. With the invasion and profusion of the tiny zebra muscle, the lakes are now so clear that you can see down for 30 to 40 feet in some places. It just sits there with it's little shell open filtering the water. They determined that cattails remove heavy metals from marshlands. Some people have considered actively using them for remediation of polluted waterways. I saw a road crew spraying some kind of herbicide on roadside cattails just yesterday.

Another point that the guests made is that you might as well find a way to live with unwanted species, as it is virtually impossible to eradicate some. I know most people have heard that dandelions can be used to be in salads, so that is a direct use (which I have often thought would be to my benefit if civilization fell, I'd be able to eat the greens out of my yard). But there are other issues, such as the Asian Carp, an highly invasive species that it spreading in the rivers outside of Chicago. Apparently, these fish could be harvested without limits and would still thrive, and there is supposed to be a huge market for their meat in China. I heard that the Kudzu grass that is taking over in Australia is causing some to consider importing elephants from Africa to come and graze it back down to manageable proportions.

I liked the way the podcast guests described weeds. One quoted Ralph Waldo Emmerson, who said a weed is simply a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. Another noted that a common definition of a weed is a plant in the wrong place. He then asked, "What is the right place? Who makes the decision?" He noted that these answers are entirely subjective. A weed is a plant that gets in the way of your plans. Why not change your plans?

Their discussion of Invasive Species was interesting. They noted that the northern parts of our continent were scoured clear of all life during the ice ages. That means that everything we see is new as of 25,000 years ago. So invasive and non-native classifications beg the question of how do you declare the cutoff date for when such a distinction began. Most people do not know that many state flowers and insects are not native. Vermont has the Purple Clover and the Honeybee as the state flower and insect, when neither were here when the state was colonized by Europeans. For many people non-native species have always been there and are not considered an invader.

One of the guests remarked that all weeds are trying to do is green over empty ground, and for that, we should give them a second chance. A caller in to the program tried to counter that many native species are dangerous, poison ivy, trumpet vine, and the plant responsible for milk sickness. The author remarked that the berries of poison ivy are the most important food of Chickadees. He proposed that we need to take a planet centric view of all species and try to answer how they fit into the whole environment.

There was an interesting discussion of perception. The guest said that we should not embrace the native versus non-native difference, which is exceedingly emotional for some people. People like to dislike certain species. When altruism evolved, along with that was a distrust of people outside your own group. Maybe people were predisposed to have an us versus them viewpoint on the world. We just fall into this trap when it comes to species, we embrace the natives and we love to hate the non-native. It's a natural instinct of humanity, but not necessarily a useful one.

Another more recent podcast that I listened to says that we absorb and hold all kinds of micro RNAs from plants. They speculate that this enables us to make proteins with bigger building blocks and makes for an efficient metabolism, but also that we may have co-evolved with certain plant species whose chemical contribution gave us an edge. It's not just raw building blocks or minerals or other simple chemicals that are part of a good diet, it's part of the unique substance of a particular plant that can be quickly used by our bodies. Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out what there is out there before we arbitrarily wipe it out?

[NOTE: the field of yellow flowers that was thick with bees and butterflies was sprayed with a herbicide shortly after the pictures were taken.]

Stupid Voters

I was listening to Dan Carlin's latest Common Sense episode 203 about "Upgrading the Electorate". He talked about the way most people are ignorant of public affairs and current events and how this makes us very poor voters. We do not feel in the least bit hesitant in voting on subjects that we know absolutely nothing about.

He sited an author in the podcast, Rick Shenkman, who wrote the book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter. He summarized the types of ignorance as follows:

1. Sheer Ignorance - no knowledge of the facts
2. Negligence - disinclination to seek facts
3. Wooden Headedness - people that want to believe only what they already believe
4. Short Sightedness - inability to see long term consequences of current events
5. Bone Headedness - simplicity and gullibility, biases

It's interesting because it runs the gambit from inattention, through people being manipulated or pre-disposed in certain ways, to people actively selecting their own viewpoints despite any outside influence or information. Dan Carlin says he thinks that it's not a matter of people being stupid, as in incapable of learning, as it is that they are not interested. My thought is that there is a portion of those not interested because it's too much work to figure things out. This is the appeal of Talk Radio. People figure things out for you.

I was also watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and he showed a summary of Republican speakers who felt quite comfortable vilifying liberals in one voice and playing themselves off as the victims in the next. It seemed odd to have someone simultaneously bullying and browbeating their enemy while claiming they were being taken advantage of or being treated unfairly. This kind of speech strikes me as strange because is it self apparent that it is inconsistent and cannot be correct, yet this does not stop people from spewing nonsense and expecting everyone to lap it up as the gospel.

Our Founding Fathers believed that the average person should not be allowed to vote, only the educated elite (this was a phrase that was so much more applicable in that era than today, yet you hear it so much today). Back around the time of the American Revolution, being well read was much more common in the upper classes. People of means took great pains to educated their children, most particularly their eldest sons, in order to prepare them to manage estates or take their place in the leadership of society. While the printing press was spreading literacy and information at a much greater rate than in times past throughout history, there were still practical bars to acquiring the reasoning and analytical skills to discern the facts from the sea of raw information. Books were expensive, and newspapers were prone to opinion and exaggeration. Many of the laboring class were illiterate and uninterested in changing that status. Women were considered beneath consideration, too, and not expected to be interested in reading and literature. The Founding Fathers were well-steeped in a Classical Education that included Latin and Greek and the history of the great Roman and Greek civilizations that spawned all higher theories on science and society. The Founding Fathers were concerned, too, that the passions of the crowd could sway the people and move them to enact laws that were not well reasoned for the long term, or select leaders that were not deliberate thinkers, but passionate and poorly directed hot-heads.

The Republican primaries are in full swing now, so the brand of idealism that we see being shared most extensively right now is Conservatism. I am biased on that score, because I am prone to paint conservatives as Religious people that see the science of evolution and geology as an enemy, or greedy people that see the science of climate change as a barrier to making money the old fashion way and not worrying about what the impact on the planet is. Michelle Bachman in particular strikes me as a candidate that is willfully ignorant of a great deal of reality, yet strikes a chord in some people that gives gravitas to her ridiculous statements like the idea that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation because some voter in a meet and greet line told her this (and because she already believed that nasty things happen to people that get vaccines).

It is easy to start thinking that we almost need people to take a test that proves that they are at least paying attention to current events before they vote, and better yet to take a test on basic government functions and U.S. history before they are eligible to vote. I've often wondered how many U.S. citizens would be unable to pass a U.S. citizenship/naturalization test (see http://www.sporcle.com/games/lilchocdonut/uscitz to see if you could pass the test). The reason we don't do this is because our countries laws reflect the belief that everyone is entitled to a vote. Never mind that this was never true in history, all the way back to Greek and Roman times, the Democracies that we were supposed to be emulating. Originally, military service or property ownership was the minimum requirement for voter eligibility. We've been expanding those rights for some time, until now we have universal suffrage and an 18 year old voting age. Tests to qualify voters have a bad history, from post Civil War times when they were used to exclude black voters, so there is justified resistance to such a system. There is also a sense that rich or influential people might mass power in our system, but if we are to be truly democratic, a majority of the voters can assert their rights or displace a powerful usurper.

In any case, it feels as if this inattention of voters is not a good thing. It corrodes democracy by making it easier for elected officials to take over power and make changes to society against the popular will simply because people are not paying attention or not understanding what happens. While I myself have been guilty from time to time of thinking, "people that don't know what is going on should not be allowed to vote!" I think it is more fair to say that I wish more people understood what is going on.

Igneous Rocks

We were in Colorado on vacation, enjoying the mountains and it got me wondering about geology and wishing I knew more. While we were in a small hotel, we were watching Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader. There was a question about rocks formed by extreme heat. The contestant answered that this rock was called lava, which made us laugh, and then admit that we did not know what it should have been, which was igneous.

As soon as I got home, I listened to more of a podcast of a Geology class from the School of Mines in Golden. He explained how these rocks form from flowing lava.

Then him mentioned Ship Rock, which we saw at the tail end of the vacation. It is the remaining core of an old volcano, which when you know that this is how it is formed only enhances the way it looks. The same can be said of Devil's Tower, which we saw on vacation about 4 or 5 years ago. That flow was slower and more laminar, and all the outside of the core is all eroded around. Ships Rock has lots of lateral flows, so it is very spiky and interestingly shaped.

I'm now totally into igneous rocks, particularly the cores of old volcanoes.

Ghost Town Construction

I went to Colorado recently and visited the Animas Forks region to see some ghost towns. Thoughts of how these communities were built and lived in inspired me to consider more deeply if it would be possible to learn how the buildings were actually built.

It's something that I do already, looking at buildings and trying to guess their age based on construction techniques. This is usually buildings or factories in cities, and since they are usually large with complex construction, there are a lot of clues. Large buildings had more of a chance of following standardized building procedures, sometimes building codes.

Buildings and houses in the mountains would be another thing entirely. Throughout most of the mining era, these communities were thrown together in some very harsh environments, far away from normal supply lines, and probably without any kind of code or building inspector. I noticed that some houses and buildings were sound, but others were not so sound. These communities were filled with buildings that are no longer standing. In one place, Capital City just west of Lake City, only one building survives. It was easy for me to visualize that as the mine played out and people started leaving the area, the last ones to stay were probably tearing the other houses down to use as firewood.

One thing I know about building in places other than the mountain is that you normally position the building on a foundation that goes below the freeze line so that it will not be subject to freeze thaw cycles and the instability and thrusting that comes with freezing soil.

The houses in Animas Forks were all built on grade without any basement. The ground they were built on was mostly rocky, either large rocks or solid shelves. This would have been an extreme challenge to anchor a building to. The other thing that I kept thinking about was how deep the snow would get in the winter. One storyboard mentioned that many of the homes were destroyed by avalanches, so how do you protect against that?

The whole line of thought made me think that it would be a great book idea - mining town building construction. You could have a fantastic time searching out the structures: locate them, analyze them, and map them. While it would be fantastic to have access to building records and find actual Bills of Materials, I believe that research would indicate that there are no records left of how things were constructed. It would have to be done by first hand inspection.

I was daydreaming while I was in Animas Forks about what I would do if I could go back in time. I figured their life in a mining camp was pretty harsh, so it would be good to make a bath house and water works. You could probably use solar energy to heat the water. It would not be hard to improve on the available construction materials. So much could be done with just the mining tailings to make sturdy foundations. I looked at the insides of the remaining houses in Animas Forks and saw what I thought at first was wallpaper, but later determined was material covering the walls to keep the cold out. It would not be that hard to construct avalanche splitters uphill from a house, and it would be very useful to use the stone to put the house into the side of a hill so that you would have some protection and heat from the ground. You'd have to lay in an enormous amount of food to stay there year-round. I imagine there comes a time in November or December where the roads close and do not re-open until spring.

I don't think I'm built of the sterner stuff it would take to stay over the winter up in the mountains. I do like the idea of poking around in those old mountain towns throughout a pleasant summer. Now all I need is an advance by a publisher and a winning lottery ticket and I'm there.