Vision Circle

Death and Taxes

This morning on the radio it was announced that one of the local hospitals under the jurisdiction of the County of Los Angeles, is going to have to shut down barring a judges injunction. The County Health Department is going broke.

State Republicans have decided within the week, to begin borrowing money to make up for the state's budget shortfalls. The state will borrow as much as 11 billion dollars just to cover two month's cash flow.

Supporting $10 billion in borrowing represents a major concession by his party, said Assemblyman John Campbell, R-Irvine, who is vice-chairman of the lower house's budget committee. The number is what the deficit is expected to be June 30.

"We don't like to do this. We think this is actually a bad idea ... but it's better than tax increases and so we offer it as a compromise," Campbell said.

We have now reached the point at which the tax rebate in every pot policy, blindly aped by Republicans since the days of Proposition 13, has gone beyond selfish to foolish. Democrats too have been petrified of raising taxes. The California Legislature has resorted to all sorts of strange fees and and as usual, politicians make themselves appear to be respectable by standing opposed to them.

There have already been fourteen cases of SARS reported in California, so I am waiting, with some trepidation, for SARS to make an impact in Los Angeles County. There will be a run on N95 masks as the hospitals are quarantined and run out of beds. Our politicians have a multivolume cookbook filled with recipies for disaster. This one seems poised to move to the front burner.

Mighty cancer-proof mice

US scientists have discovered a cancer-proof mouse, according to this piece in New Scientist, and have successfully created a colony with this inherited trait. One can hope that the immune mechanism used by this mouse could translate into future cancer treatments. If so, how long before some demand that we cancer-proof the human germ line?

Hitchens on Chalabi

Hitchens posts a defense of Chalabi in today's Slate.

In news stories as well as in opinion columns, it is repeatedly stated that Chalabi hasn't been in the country for many years—or since 1958. This contradicts my own memory and that of several other better-qualified witnesses. They recall him in northern Iraq many times and for long periods in the 1990s, helping to organize opposition conferences and to broker an agreement between the opposing Kurdish factions. He frequently risked his life in this enterprise; indeed it was for criticizing the CIA's own ham-fisted efforts in Kurdistan at the time that he incurred the lasting hatred of the agency. And since his activity on Iraqi soil was reported on several occasions in such journals of record as the New York Times, it must be something more than objectivity (or, dare I hint, something less) that informs the current animus.

Yasser Arafat hasn't been in Jerusalem for some considerable time, after all, and before his disastrous return to Gaza, he hadn't been on Palestinian soil for decades. The Dalai Lama hasn't been in Tibet since the 1950s. Perhaps these leaders should be criticized more for being out of touch. But the fact remains that they are not. More important, both Arafat and His Holiness consider themselves to be axiomatic and self-evident leaders while Chalabi does not. But the fact remains that his forces provided invaluable help and intelligence in the recent campaign, and it is to the Iraqi National Congress that several senior Baathists have recently chosen to surrender. If this does not demand praise, surely it merits a little recognition?

Considering this and the previous post, there must be some future in hyphenated Americans who are invited to represent their home countries to the United States, no matter how distant.

Not such a waste?

This UPI report from 2000 quotes conservatives deriding a Clintonian measure. The concept was to train Iraqi opposition in the art of political compromise. Given the current situation in Iraq, where presumably the USA does not want a theocracy to rise from the current flux, perhaps encouraging the deal-making aspect of the process of democratic governance wasn't such waste of money as the critics thought.

The latest example is a workshop proposed by the Conflict Management Group, a nonprofit offshoot of Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School... "To identify, diagnose, and enhance the ability of the Iraqi opposition parties, and the individuals within the parties, to discuss, design, and facilitate intra- and inter-organization dialogue, cooperation, and problem solving."

Translation: Pull Iraqi resistance fighters out of the field, bring them to Harvard, and teach them how to get along.

It's a bit late to pull them out of the field now.

Post-National Religion

The Archbishop of Canterbury gives us a great deal to think about.

The idea that's being increasingly canvassed is that we are witnessing the end of the nation state, and that the nation state is being replaced in the economically developed world by what some call the 'market state'. This new form of political administration has in some ways crept up on us, and we need to do some hard thinking about how it has happened and what changes are involved for the whole idea of being a citizen - not to mention the whole idea of being a politician too. And if the analysis I want to offer is right, and these changes are indeed irreversible, we need to look at what kind of vacuum is left in our social imagination as a result.

I see that Stephenson's meme is finally taking hold in centers of authority. The Archbishop is my kind of clergyman in more than one way and I’m pleased to see that he gets it. He gets it in a rather unique way, but that depends on his reading of this Bobbitt fellow, whom I don't know. In either case I’m with him on the primary merits of his case, which is my reading of the current asymmetric war on terror. The nation state (and for my denser ideological colleagues) the nanny state, is on its way out the door. As market forces take over and they decentralize power and globalize standards via the disintermediary forces of global telecom and pervasive computing. This leaves a significant gap in the social forces and traditions long associated with government as exemplified by the great society. Who fills that gap? Religion. But not the kind of bible-thumping idiocy involved in creating the republican's big tent. I'm talking about smart religion.

So the problem of the market state looks rather like this. By pushing politics towards a consumerist model, with the state as the guarantor of ‘purchasing power’, it raises short-term expectations. By raising short-term expectations, it invites instability, reactive administration, rule by opinion poll and pressure. To facilitate some of its goals and to avoid chaos, government inevitably relies more on centralised managerial authority. So there will be a dangerous tension between excessive government and the paralysis that can result from trying to respond adequately to consumer demand. To put it in another way, government and culture drift apart: government abandons the attempt to give shape to society.

But check this out, and I think this is the key which shows that certain sects of Christianity may be ahead of the curve with respect to dealing with the decentralized world. That is because this market state preserves

..a vision that has nothing to say about shared humanity and the hard labour of creating and keeping going a shared world of values. Being provocative again, I’d want to say that a proper use of tradition makes us more not less critical and independent in society. The great revolt against traditional authority in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a necessary moment, because tradition was understood as the way in which the past dominated the present - or at least how some people’s version of the past seeks to limit what’s possible now.

And finally, without an explicit nod to GWBush’s state legitimation of Christian charity under the guise of 'faith-based initiatives', our archbishop remarks

The market state is much in love with partnership as a model of public action, and the possibilities of partnership with religious communities are many. To point to the importance of religious communities as, for example, partners in statutory education is not to license unbridled superstition and indoctrination but to invite - to challenge – religious communities to find a way of bringing their beliefs into practical contact with public questions, to identify exactly what difference faith commitments make to the educational process.

Lovely.

Sing Ding Dong, Dammit!

When Dorothy's house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East, she inherited the ruby slippers and incurred the wrath of her more evil sister, the Wicked Witch of the West. That didn't stop the Munchkins from celebrating.

The Iraqis and American pacifists have no Lollypop Guild and won't be presenting any awards to GW Bush any time soon. In fact, now is the time that 1000 skeptics are blooming. Jack Balkin correctly notes that in the long view of things, it's far too early to tell. We have a long yellow brick road ahead. But it is not too early to celebrate.

The longer we wait for things to go wrong, the more certain we are to be rewarded. Everything goes wrong given sufficient time. Nevertheless we can do our moral calculus fairly immediately. The objective of any war is to win. We won. Unlike Dorothy, this tornado was of our own creation and we landed our house smack dab on the target. Granted, we took out a fair section of Munchkinland in the process, but we are making good on fixing it. We have rid the world of a tyrant.

The question which concerns me now that we have the ruby slippers of empire on our feet, is whether or not it is reasonable for skeptics to judge our 'success' on whether or not an evil sister materializes. We very may well get punished for crushing the Ba'ath regime, but why should we judge the success or failure of the war based for an ever expanding evaluation period? Is it fair to judge Bush against a failure to find WMD? Yes. Is it fair to judge Bush against a failure to establish a new republic in Iraq? Yes. But it is not fair to judge Bush against a rising tide of terrorism in the region which finds encouragement for its raison d'etre in our wars against Iraq.

I think it is fair to say that there may very well be flying monkeys in our path. But we did not create them nor there agenda and skeptics should not paint our successful defeat of the Ba'ath party by borrowing dark colors from a pessimistic future.

Whose Mecca?

The State of Georgia is heading backwards once again. A cursory reading of the news shows that the state legislature has every intention of bringing back the flag of segregation once more. I could expend a lot of energy denouncing this retarded move in high minded language, and I'm sure plenty of people will. I won't, not because I am particularly shocked or outraged, but because it is so clear that Georgia is wrong that volume isn't necessary.

The question now centers on how the rest of civilization should make the State of Georgia pay for this moral error made legitimate by the government of Sonny Purdue. I hope that it is drastic.

Interesting times continue

According to a piece in the Christian Science Monitor, the trend towards more decentralized terrorism against American multinational targets continues. Small bombings, but there is potential for escalation. The reducttion of state sponsors of terrorism means suviving terror groups must organize locally to get funding and arms.

Admittedly these are petty attacks for now, but how long until one of these independent groups ramps up its expertise and organization? How long until one of these groups manages to get hold of biological weapons left over from South Africa's Project Coast, which have apparently escaped into private hands?

Sex & Cultural Dissonance

About two years ago, I finally got on the air for the first time with Ira Flatow on his Science Friday show. One of the subjects of his show was the bonobo ape and its sexuality. I haven't been thinking about sex so much, but about cultural dissonance. According to Ira, Japanese researchers had less difficulty studying these primates' complex sexual behavior but Westerners found a great number of their acts unconscionable. So when the question came around about which of the apes are most like humans and the most intelligent, the Japanese picked the bonobo. Meanwhile, Europeans and Americans alike settled on the chimpanzee. As time moves forward, it may turn out that the Japanese were right. A cultural interpretation of the meaning of sex acts is inevitable, no matter what our biology. We may never know.

As I reflect on cultural dissonance in the context of empire, we also may never know how our acts may ultimately be interpreted, or whether a question of the value of any particular act can and will be perceived as we expect. I mean how many Americans have ever heard of a bonobo ape much less consider it more intelligent than a dolphin or a chimp? The very idea is foreign.

Nevertheless in considering this matter of ape sexuality I have become moderately curious about how much of our own sexuality derives from observation of animals. Surely we humans have watched dogs, pigs, sheep, horses, cats and cattle copulate since the beginning of civilization. Often our health and wealth has depended on knowing when such activities were going right or going wrong. Surely our concepts of male dominance and female submission in things sexual comes more from horses more than say, black widow spiders or salmon. But what we say, what we think and what we do are surely divergent. After all, horses don't masturbate. Are we indeed like monkeys? Probably more than we'd like to admit.

Another great matter of sexual import which has passed through the old bean this weekend has to do with my anticipation of the great female prophet. My daughter asked about world religions and I pointed to my old, and fun reference on such liberal arts matters, An Incomplete Education. This book reminded me that there were approximately 650 million Roman Catholics. Knowing how much the Virgin Mary means to Catholics, having audited catechism myself, I wondered what a huge impact it would be to the world if some future Council of Nicea decided to make the Holy Spirit female.

A female pope would change the world in ways we cannot imagine. In this way, I tend to believe that all feminism is pre-historic. The day will come.

Tax Time

I'd like to offer a little anecdote. Several years ago there was much complaint about the usefulness of the Million Man March. If, detractors said, one million black men truly wanted to make a difference, then they would take 100 dollars out of their pockets and create a college scholarship fund. This kind of effort would be respectable. In a little known survey, scholars from Howard University found that over 40% of the participants at the march were college graduates. That means, given an average college cost of 20,000, that 8 billion dollars in college money had already been spent successfully. 80 times as much the complainers determined to take seriously. And still the march was derided. Sometimes the noise of new money promised masks the power of old money already spent.

These days, I hear a great deal of flak which annoys me a bit, about Haliburton this and Bechtel that. I thought I'd like to toss in a few comparative numbers in for spite. I realize this isn't particularly visionary, but it's something I haven't heard said much elsewhere.

The estimated cost of rebuilding Iraq will be about 20 billion dollars per year for about 5 years. The cost of warring against Iraq up to this point has been about 63 billion dollars. That 63 billion is mostly supplies, boots, combat pay, fuel and logistics. It's not the basic military stuff. That's already paid for. It is both comforting and disturbing to know that these are not very large dollars where the United States of America is concerned.

The International Red Cross has estimated that 2 billion in humanitarian aid will be sufficient for Iraq acording to a quote I heard last Thursday on NPR. Unfortunately I cannot find an update on that figure anywhere. Estimates vary depending on whom you ask. Still, let us be over the hand wringing over Bechtel's 700 million dollar contract, shall we? This is not an extraordinarily large job.

According to the American Red Cross:

The highest natural disaster death toll in U.S. history was caused by the Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900, which killed an estimated 6,000 people. The most expensive disaster is the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. The destructive events will cost more than $997 million in disaster aid. The largest mobilization of volunteers for a disaster relief operation was also in response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, when a total of 54,577 workers arrived on the scene to provide relief.

The State of California's annual budget is about 100 billion dollars. Iraq has fewer people. So we'll spend about a fifth as much. Granted, we are not going to take them to California standards, but the point is that 20 billion per year is not so much money that it will come anywhere near breaking the American budget. Given that Bush has conceded about 250 billion from his latest tax cut, there seems to be more than enough to go around.

I am looking forward to seeing how much money the United Nations will raise for all efforts at rebuilding Iraq, be they humanitarian or infrastructure. We know how much it costs, we know how much American companies are getting, we know how much America can afford. Let us now see some economic leadership from other coalitions.