Al Rodbell's Blog

Introduction

2012-02-12T13:10:00.000-08:00

February 9, 2012

My Email is: Alvrdb-brt@yahoo.com

This is a discussion of the 2012 Successful Aging Expo, and two speakers, James Brewer and Mike Slater. It contains a proposal for a seniors organization that does not accept dependency as a natural consequence of aging.

Here is annotated "Coast News" article on Darrell Issa, with links to sources

Issues come and go, so this personal web site is a sampling of what is currently on my plate, along with some observations that are now out of date. I often write essays, called diaries, (list of recent ones here) on Dailykos.com, under the user name ARODB.

I recently had published in OpEdNews.Com, a short article on Chelsea's Law For those who read that essay, it is repeated at this link with several references referred to in the article. The law seems to be based on the very human desire for revenge, to protect the most vulnerable among us, along with the belief that greater punishment results in fewer such atrocities. I am continuing to follow this issue, having made contact with the lawyer for the first defendant under this new law, a brain damaged man whose crime was "lewd and lascivious" conduct, the lowest level of sexual offense. For those who have the time and interest to really dig into this subject, there is this long essay, Chealsea's Law, an Opportunity Lost.

Although a staunch secularist, I recently attended an open house at the museum of Creationism in Santee CA, and wrote to two of the lecturers, both Ph.D scientists who espouse the belief that the earth is 7000 years old. Here's the letters I wrote to them. I also had the opportunity to get to know the sponsor of this museum, who also is the founder of an international biotech company. I wrote this article about my visit to his facility in Tecate Mexico.

I opposed the comprehensive health care reform referred to as Obamacare, as described in this comprehensive essay, complete with multiple references. While this is no longer relevant as an argument to reject the bill, it could still be useful as a guide to improving it, and thinking about the current cases. Now some of the provisions have been in effect for a while, there are more insights to be had on the directions the law is taking us, that are worth exploring.

Also the list to the right is a random selection of some recent essays.

Thanks for dropping in. And be sure to leave a comment after reading.

Al Rodbell

Successful Aging Expo 2012- Handout to visitors

2012-02-10T18:49:00.000-08:00

Living through Amazing Times

Al Rodbell

I'm one of you- we who are attending the Successful Aging Expo who are looking for answers as we face what is called our Golden Years. We, most born between 1920 and 1950 have seen social changes unprecedented in any country in the absence of a violent revolution. Computers, hardly existing when we were children, are now squeezed into something the size of a pack of cigarettes (remember those) with more capacities than we ever dreamed of. Since time seems to go faster for us, just as soon as we've learned how to use one type of computer a whole new set of devices comes along, apps replace programs, and we have to adjust or fall further behind.

So, we feel our brain is starting to go, since we can't keep up with the hundreds of new apps for our new smart phones, and can't make the damn thing work as easily as they show on the television ads. And we fear that this is the first stage of something that is worse than death itself, Alzheimer's disease. We become confused by the daily barrage of articles of new research that promises to cure this disease, since it worked so well in mice (who don't have to learn new apps for their iphones) We wait for more news about this latest magic bullet, but it never comes; and we don't hear how it didn't have any effect on humans except making them sick. But not to worry, there are five more articles this week about new ways shown to ward off this disease.

As Bette Davis famously said, "Getting old is not for sissies" and she is right. It's not for chumps either. We have a right to be suspicious of all of those nice young people here who want to help us, to provide us with supplements to keep our joints and brains young, to help us navigate the legal complexities of transfer of assets, to turn our small retirement fund into a flow of income that we can live well on, to make our lives better in every way.

And then there's Politics.

I'm distributing this at the presentation by Mike Slater on his subject, "Obamacare Liberty and Healthcare." He is a self described "Extremist for Liberty" which has a specific meaning in his world, and those of his associates Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. "Liberty" among this group means freedom from programs such as Medicare and Social Security that make you slaves to "Government" which also has a special meaning, which is all things bad. On his program Friday, he talked about this problem, and Joked, "Maybe I'll tell them (us, the older people) that they are stealing from their grandchildren with their Medicare and Social Security." He laughed and said, "I can't say that or Ill never make it back to my car." The problem is that this is what he believes, this is what his admired Republicans in the House of Representatives believe, who voted to end Medicare as we know it almost unanimously. (Don't worry, it was only one house of Congress and it was never even taken up by the Senate)

Note After watching his speech.

Mike did address the need to deal with Medicare, and put in the context of caring for the audience's grand children's well being. He avoided evaluating specific partisan positions during the entire speech, mostly criticizing lack of portability, excessive mandates of coverage, and the inherent increase in costs when the individual does not pay for services. These deficiencies are well known, and "Obamacare" is an attempt to deal with them within our political constraints. His lack of specificity makes it difficult to evaluate his own answers to the problems he raised.

Back to Alzheimer's, the fear and the prognosis.

I will also be giving this out at Dr. James Brewer's presentation of his research on advanced MRI scans to evaluate possible dementia. First of all, he's a great guy, who possesses the rare combination of smarts and personality that allows him to reach we who are so fearful of this dreaded disease. His research is only one part of a network of federally funded facilities (Government = Bad ?, remember) that is trying to find a way to prevent this disease, actually an array of different conditions that can cause pathological memory loss. Here's my concern, that while medical treatment of this complex chain of cellular dysfunction may be long in coming, dealing with the universal fear of this condition must be addressed now. I have suggested to him that in his enthusiasm to find a cure, he may inadvertently be contributing to this exaggerated fear among we older folks. I even took his program's memory assessment to better understand their process, which I write about on my blog.

The highly respected Alzheimer's Association illustrates this subtle distortion. In the section "Myths" on their website they assert that the reality of normal decline of memory with aging is an "open question," meaning that it could be that if dementia, the disease, is cured, we would retain our youthful memories until we die of old age. This is false, as shown in hundreds of studies of populations and examination of healthy older brains upon autopsy. It's different than that of younger people, just as every other part of our bodies, inside and out, is different. Some may call it better, with a deeper richness like fine wine, but different nevertheless. We have to ask why this respected organization maintains this fiction, and what function other than creating both fear and desperation does this promote. Who will work towards achieving a way to age, including all that this means, in the most satisfying way without distortion of the reality of the process? While Government can be "bad" as Slater espouses, he is wrong that it is always such, as there are positive changes that can only be achieved by concerted national policy, otherwise known as Government.

Let's see if there's something we can do together, not as clients who need help, but as people who have accumulated a richness of experiences and insights that deserve to be a major part of our national conversation. I'll start by coordinating this at my website, ALRODBELL.BLOGSPOT.COM.

Capital Punishment-Speaking the Unspeakable

2011-08-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

The following essay was drafted for Dailykos, on September 21, three days before this columnJustice After Troy Davis, written by Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist in the New York Times.

I decided not to post it, that the emotions were too strong, and my message would not be received so close to the tragedy of a probably innocent man being executed under the banner of due process. I did discuss my thoughts with a friend, who told me about Douthat's article that was an almost exact expression of what I said. I'm leaving my draft as it was then, with just the addition of one bold facing, on the point that if the focus on injustice that occurs because of capital punishment prevent future relying of eye witness identifications for convictions, the overall deaths will be decreased. That among those wrongly convicted, the decrease of deaths by suicide for those living their lives out in prison will be greater than those lost to executions,

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How Capital Punishment lessens Injustice

Personally, I find contemplation of executing an innocent man abhorrent. A sentiment shared by the thousands of individuals and organizations that have expressed their outrage.

What is missing in this story, are the numbers of people who have been convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole by the very same defective system of investigation and prosecution. This vastly larger group, an unseen anonymous mass of humanity receive little press, few editorials of outrage, and are quietly consigned to an existence that for some is worse than death.

One answer to this argument is that where there is life there is hope. While true, only during these last years when DNA testing has been made more practical has there been an increase in exonerations. In most case DNA is not in evidence, so eye witness identification, faulty even under the best procedures, are still used.

The martyrdom of Mr. Davis is being wasted if it is directed at abolition of this punishment, rather than demanding procedures that will curtail conviction of this not proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The interaction at the last Republican Presidential Debate is illustrative.

As Brian Williams tried to continue asking his question, the crowd broke into applause, prompting Williams to pause.

The moderator then continued: “Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?”

Here's where Perry deflected the question, begged the question of innocence by making the assumption of unquestioned guilt in his answer.

Perry responded, “no, sir.”

“I’ve never struggled with that at all,” he said. “The state of Texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place of which — when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens,

People are tried when they are accused of committing such crimes, being innocent until proven guilty.

they get a fair hearing, they go through an appellate process, they go up to the Supreme Court of the United States, if that’s required.”

It is often pointed out that the U.S. is one of the few advanced countries that still have the death penalty. We are also one of the few that still have life without parole. We have such inhumane conditions in our largest state, California, that suicides, higher for all people who are incarcerated, are twice as high in this state.

I don't have the statistics, but I would suspect that the suicides of those who are incarcerated for life represent more deaths than those who are executed. These people, many innocent based on the vagaries of eye witness identification, get virtually no press, no outrage, and no demands for remediation.

This is the ongoing challenge that must not fade after the tragedy of Troy Davis' execution.
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comment to N.Y. Times editorial on indefensible punishment

Who are those represented by this editorial trying to protect, those who are executed, or the public from the pain of experiencing it? And let me offer another aspect, that there were two high profile executions on the day that Davis was killed, the other being Lawrence Russell Brewer. This editorial, which is against the death penalty In principle, not specific to this case, chose not to include him as an example of those will also be spared by such abolition.

There is another aspect that is ignored. There are grave everyday injustices in our criminal justice system, from arrest, interrogation, wealth inequities, to trial. Even though the aggregate suffering, shown by suicides, by those who get life without parole may be greater than those who are executed, they get almost no press for their punishment. We can argue this punishment allows more miscarriages of justice, yet such travesties would never rise to the public's consciousness if it wasn't for the brutality, the horror of taking a life.

If Troy Davis had been sentenced to life without parole the injustice of his conviction would never have been known to the public, nor would there have been any effort to ensure it not happen again.

Darrell E. Issa, our new Congressman

2011-04-30T16:46:00.000-07:00

September 2 , 2011

This is a copy a Guest Editorial with links to references cited that appeared in The Coast News.

Darrell E. Issa, our new Congressman

Under the new redistricting for the House of Representatives, the cities of Carlsbad and Encinitas will have a new incumbent for the next election, The last thing that Issa wanted was to have his new constituents introduced to him by a critical article in the left leaning N.Y. Times.

If you know that a major newspaper is about to do an article that is part of a series on Congressional corruption, you could work with the reporter to make sure it's accurate. The other strategy is to refuse to answer any questions, trusting that errors would seep through that could be used to refute the entire article as an irresponsible smear. This was Representative Issa's strategy, and it looks like it worked. Not only has the substance of the article been overshadowed by his claim that the article was libelous, but it has made most local media gun shy about reporting another newsworthy story.

The series of articles (available from the Time's web site) had included two legislators from each party to make the larger point; the individuals being examples of the damage that was done by the current lax ethical norms. The other featured legislators engaged in a dialog with the paper to improve accuracy; only Issa refusing to even respond to phone calls.

As chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Issa has the broad authority to look at every aspect of our vast federal government. In such a forest of agencies there is abundant low hanging fruit; some such as the ill conceived Mexican gun running sting approved under the Obama administration, and others of vastly greater importance, that represent endemic corruption of both parties by powerful special interests such as the financial industry.

In 2008 the repeal or lack of enforcement of laws overseeing financial institutions brought our country, and the world, to the brink of financial collapse. One company representative of this industry, Goldman Sachs, not only survived, but benefited greatly from the TARP bailout that was initiated under the Bush administration and continued under Obama. In order to prevent such a disaster from occurring again the “Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010” was signed, which has become one of the targets for repeal or evisceration by the new Republican majority in the house, with the effort lead by Issa's committee.

The very day that the Times article came out, Atlantic Monthly Online disclosed a relationship between Issa and Goldman Sachs. Going beyond the corrupting effect of battalions of lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, Issa seems to have pushed the envelope. He hired a lawyer who had been a vice President of Goldman Sachs under the name of Peter Simonyi to be in charge of writing revisions of the 2010 law. The reason this was not known to the public is that he had subsequently changed his name to Peter Haller.

The New York Times can ignore spurious accusations of libel, but smaller media outlets are hesitant to incur the wrath of a powerful legislator threatening lawsuits who is one of the wealthiest members of Congress. So, we can be sure that the Union Tribune, on whose pages the libel claim appeared, will not follow up with a challenge that Issa actually initiate such a suit-or withdraw the accusation; as the Times, after correcting two items, has defended the substance of its article.

The Supreme Court under the recent Citizens United case has opened the floodgates of corporate wealth dominating campaign advertising. We know that corporations such as Goldman Sachs can finance the ads that inundate us during elections, but we didn't know that one of their recent executives was drafting the laws under which they will operate.

North Coast San Diego now has a member of Congress with the power to make a difference in political life. This gives us, the voters, the potential to influence the direction of the committee that he chairs-- whether it shall be focused on partisan gains for next election, or on reforming the endemic corruption of government that threatens us as a nation. This is the ever greater historical challenge, one that will only be undertaken if we, Issa's constituents, demand it.

Al Rodbell
Encinitas CA
Alrodbell.blogspot.com.
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Full Text of N.Y. Times response to Issa's claim of inaccurate article

New York Times response to Darrell Issa

View more documents from lee_fang

Times article on conjoined twins

2011-04-25T15:50:00.000-07:00

May 26, 2011

This is a personal view, and an expansion of an article on conjoined twins that I wrote on Dailykos. com. It conveys personal thoughts that I wanted to be separate from the more objective article that I wrote there. Please view the Dailykos article first, if you have not been directed to this essay from there.

Empathy is something that we value in individuals, and assume it is the bedrock of compassion and a benevolent society. We (meaning the liberal consensus of 21st century America) desire lessening, even eliminating infliction of emotional pain on all humans. To do this we must undergo many mental contortions, and these have become entrenched into our very language. The idea is that if we have eliminated all words that are associated with disparagement, ridicule and hatred, than these evils will disappear.

This exacts a cost to our society, as we must sacrifice precision of communication in the elimination of such definitive terms. Recently the term "mentally retarded' has been abolished for use in the federal government by legislation. This term, that referred to congenital conditions that caused cognitive impairment was replaced with "intellectual disability" (passage of this law described in this essay) This new term can mean anything from a condition caused by lack of education, traumatic injury or senile dementia. With a stroke of the pen, a precise term was replace by one less specific. And worse, the goal is, and the effect will be that those who use the now discredited word will themselves be defined as either uneducated or confrontational. The language has been debased for no other reason than a disproved dream that abolishing words of hate eliminate the hate itself.

The condition of being born conjoined to another cannot be described by any of the accepted words such as "challenged", or "differently abled" And as the words that allow us to discuss the extent of this disability have been relegated to the ash heap, so has the tone of looking at profoundly debilitating conditions such as the two girls described in the N.Y. Times article. We have accepted a tyranny of a language, a version of Orwellian New Speak, that has precluded meaningful discussions that are raised by the article in the Times. .

This article, by examining the life of these two girls, by the assumption that exploring their lives is appropriate, ignores the greater issue, which is does society have an obligation to prevent the suffering that these girls will endure. The editors of the Times, once they decided to print this, attempted, based on evidence I will provide, to select comments that would be supportive of their world view. I personally sent in a sharply critical comment very early. For the first time after perhaps a hundred of such comments, it was rejected. Of the first fifty comments, only a handful were mildly critical of the article, the rest uncritically applauding it, thus conflating sympathy for the conjoined twins with rejection of views on the appropriateness of their being born.
The one comment that slipped through, #9 said clearly that it was irresponsible not to have aborted those with this terrible disability. If the first fifty comments were posted were even roughly consistent with those that were submitted, we would have expected comment #9 to be criticized or ignored. But, it turns out that this comment received ten times as many recommends as the average of the laudatory comments that were posted. My conclusion is that rather than posting comments reflecting readers opinions, they were selected to support the tone of the article.

Going beyond the media and linguistic aspects of this issue is the underlying question, is that of what is right. In the case of these girls, my empathy for them causes me personal anguish. It is strong enough that I have to do what I can to try to save them, and others like them, from this suffering in the only way possible, by making the case for not allowing them to be born. .

The writer of the article misconstrued the one example of another such conjoined twins who chose an operation with slim chances of survival rather than continue the suffering of such a life. Who can imagine what they went through reaching this decision? Here's a description of their lives before they decided to take the high risk operation from Wired Magazine.

Despondent, Ladan and Laleh returned to Tehran. They started taking antidepressants, eventually warding off suicidal impulses by upping the dosage of amitriptyline to 10 times the normal amount. Every move - getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, sitting down to a meal - had to be negotiated. Laleh took a liking to videogames. Ladan hated them but was forced to watch while her sister played for hours. They couldn't stand it much longer.

I suspect that this Times article will awaken a new interest in this tragic condition. A quick search on Google gives extensive descriptions, including videos of those who are surviving with this condition. One way we deal with situations beyond our control is humor, So tragedies such as this become a source of parody. An example is a video of two boys joined at the penis. There is no such case, yet there are others cases that are just as.......here words fail me, and they fail all of us. While the men with the common penis is a joke, it's not far from the reality of a few who our society says we should be able to treat just like everyone else. I suggest that such conditions go beyond our capacity for empathy, and so rather than emotional identification we have rejection, in this case in the form of ridicule.

The N.Y. Times, writer and editors, attempted to ignore this human reaction, the root explanation of freak shows and absurd youtube parodies. They did it in two ways. First they objectified the girls as a scientific phenomenon, their unimaginable suffering actually a cause for celebration by one quoted neuroscientist. The second method was a soft condemnation of those who reacted to the immensity of the probable suffering of these girls. The Time's article's message was,

"This is just a normal struggling loving family with special needs children. Keep moving along folks, and don't stare. (but don't forget to read the article with the provocative title....and keep an eye out for the new reality show that will expose the family to the world."

The Times belatedly decided to include comments that criticized the article, mine is linked here. , comment number 113.
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I will also take the occasion to post a couple comments from the Times, mostly personal experiences, that reflect the range of reactions, some supporting my position, others opposing it.
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114.
Valerius
I have a one-in-2 million birth defect and yes, it was very hard for me to be in public as a child. But I am 46 years old, and my childhood memories are 40 years old.

Times have changed and today, individuality rules. For me, the photo says that these kids will be okay. The father-son mohawks have me convinced this family doesn't really value conformity all that much, and have the capacity to love their girls not just in spite of their differences, but because of them.

There is a set of conjoined twins who live in the Twin Cities metro area, and people are used to seeing them. I've lived in Minneapolis, and people are used to seeing me. I do not get ridiculed or ignored. I am treated fairly and kindly when I am out. Then again, the Americans with Disabilities Act helped insure that I have equal access to stores, a job, housing... life isn't all that bad for people with disabilities if they have healthy, supporting families.

In terms of being bullied or legally discriminated against, these girls would be worse off if they were gay. ---------------
121.
Sally

I'm an identical twin. I could not imagine anything more horrible than to be conjoined, especially, as this article hints, one is more dominant (physically and emotionally) than the other.
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Chelsea's Law, an Opportunity Lost

2011-04-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

When Chelsea King, a popular high school student in a nearby town, was first reported missing, I had been planning to drive the few miles to where her car was found to join the many volunteers who were searching for her in the wooded area around a nearby reservoir. The next day her body was discovered, with the report that she had been raped before being murdered. I have a neighbor who had a career as a high level official with the California Department of Justice, and now works with registered sex offenders in the eastern part of the county. He has never been too detailed about what he did, but when the subject came up there was a sense of frustration, the feeling that that there was much that wasn't right with the system that he was participating in.

As the story unfolded, after the arrest and soon after the confession of John Albert Gardner, a young man who was a registered sex offender, my friend forwarded a document to me that few have read. It is a thirty-six page report requested by the governor on the details of the defendant with a full analysis of current incarceration, parole and supervision policy in California. This information, provided by the California Sex Offender Management Board (CASOMB) is so divergent from the public's perception based on news reports, that I felt compelled over the last few months to try make sense out of it all.

Very soon after the Gardner's arrest and his admitting to a previous rape murder, a movement to tighten existing procedures was spearheaded by the local member of the state assembly, Nathan Fletcher, named after the last victim, Chesea's Law. As part of his attempt to gather support he requested letters from local cities including Encinitas where I live.

While the vote in our City Council was in favor of sending the letter of support was 4 to 1, the actual events recorded on video show that two of the aye votes were by men who expressed reservations. One of them dismissed objection saying the current version would be revised, and the other wanted to include other issues. Yet, when rebuked by one member who focused on the single issue of greater punishment, both sided with him. Focused anger trumped reasoned consideration, as was recorded on ten minutes of video. Seeing that this episode at our city council mirrored the very dynamics of how the rules of mob pressure apply even to those elected to represent a city, I decided to speak out in objection. Now I was a part of this story, and although only seen by the handful who watched the proceedings in person or on television, I was about the only person who was publicly challenging both the substance and the process.

As the weeks went by and I read more, and connected with various officials, including Robert Coombs, the chairman of CASOMB that wrote the report on Gardner's case, I found myself in a bind, since being convinced of an injustice without attempting to rectify it is a special type of curse. If you know something is wrong and do not attempt to redress it, are you not partly responsible for the consequences? The injustice I'm referring to is not to the murder-rapist John Gardner, who deserved his punishment The injustice is to the those future victims who will be the next to be raped and murdered because of a law that is defective. As the CASOMB report concluded:

California has not effectively prioritized when making policy decisions about the management of convicted sex offenders. Many decisions seem to have been made for political reasons or what feels good at the time. As a result, money and time have been wasted on policies and programs that are politically popular but do not make our communities safer.

The pathology now being played out in creating Chelsea's Law is not of individuals, but of something much larger, our very social system. Just as individuals reach a breaking point, and may lash out against an available target, a spouse, a child or their pet dog.....entire societies faced with intractable frustration can identify an object, a designated evil; and by consensus decide with the focused rage of righteous indignation to eradicate it. It is the awesome symbiosis of concerted fear, hatred and revenge, something few willingly choose to be on the receiving end of. The power of this force of nature is reflected in the snowballing mass that has brought together the most die-hard liberal and extreme conservative.

Being in response to sexual offenses against children provides a special quality, as the sponsor said, "a special evil" a fundamental revulsion that elicits outrage against those who perpetrate such acts. Yet, the ability to get at the truth, to identify those offenders who can take advantage of the innocence of children either by familial, personal or institutional circumstances is elusive. Evidence of our particular society's failure to achieve this control is all around us; from the depredations of the highest level of the most ancient Christian Church, to the special privileges of selected luminaries of our own secular priesthood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (The sexual crimes such as those of Roman Polanski and of those priests protected by the younger Pope Benedict are specifically targeted for extended terms in prison for a first offense.)

When we actually find someone who is not of a protected group, who is actually guilty, even if the damage is less than traumatic, there is enough pent up rage that demands expression. Under these conditions, it is not only the perpetrator who is the enemy, but anyone who gets in the way of of consummating the full the act of revenge.

I probably would have done what most people do, and after a while go on to other things in my life, but the San Diego Union Tribune was persistent, keeping this story alive with several articles a day for months on end. On a front page editorial they proclaimed that they were going to take the lead in addressing this problem, with their "Call to Action." I had my suspicions of their motives, knowing that the paper had just been bought out by a venture capital fund that had an immediate need to raise circulation in order to flip their investment for a profit. The owners of a newspaper have an array of methods to implement their goals. While the editorials are the official voice of the publisher; in these times of decreasing job opportunities each reporter and columnist can glean, and then take their cue from, the unofficial tone of the boss. Selecting Letters to the Editor is an especially powerful way to promote the appearance of consensus, to reinforce a given movement and isolate those who challenge it. With these tools they create the image of a united community, with such image eventually becoming a reality, based on the universal human need to be part of their social group.

The Union Tribune's editorial was for "action"; something that could have been diffused by introducing the actual difficulties of dealing with this kind of criminality. It became a concerted campaign to arouse the public to express their loathing at this crime; but not in the abstract, in the person of the individual John Albert Gardner III. Although he was the main object of scorn, he had to be made to represent every defect of the current legal and administrative system of sex offender law. The narrative of his life had to be condensed and shaped, and if need be also distorted and censored; so that rage at child sexual offenders could be represented by this individual. He was the archtypical "poster boy," pure evil to keep in mind when designing a law that would apply to everyone who could turn out like him. The tragic fate of his two victims had to be associated not only with this man, but all that he came to represent.

It was all going well, when someone threw a monkey wrench into the process, in the form of a long candid interview with Gardner that showed him for what he is, a terribly damaged human being who perpetrated the most heinous crimes. But for those who listened to his hour long conversation, beyond the self serving distortions, the undeniable fact became evident, he was one of us, a disturbed tortured child of woman, and for those so inclined, also of God.

In Gardner's interview he made certain assertions, that his first conviction was an act of rage, a blowup with a friend that turned violent without sexual motivation, and that he accepted a plea out of fear of an even longer sentence. He described his life under parole after his release in 2005, which for the first year was without any infractions, something confirmed by the CASOMB report. He then described how it was only when the restrictions of Jessica's Law were implemented that he was forced to leave his apartment, without there being any acceptable housing available, causing him to live in his car and lose his job, making it impossible to continue child support and the relationship with his two children. He, requested, and recieved a commitment from the interviewer, that his statements be validated, not accepted on face value but investigated. Not only were they never verified or refuted, the substance of this interview has never been reported.

This interview could have destroyed the caricature, the personification of evil that had been carefully crafted by the Union Tribune and echoed by almost all local media. This media generated momentum was powerful enough to cause the cancellation of the planned full reporting of the interview by the local CBS affiliate. The U.T. Columnist Logan Jenkins, one of the more decent responsible members of his guild, did an about face from his previous article favoring justice for people such as Gardner, to one describing him as a loathsome monster whom he wishes to be killed by fellow prisoners. Chelsea's law ratchets up punishment for offenders such as the twenty year old Gardner, a disturbed young man whose crime was relatively minor. Like a masterful magician who amazes the audience by the seemingly sawed-in-half assistant appearing alive in the audience, in this case the switch, the unseen substitution is between the murderer rapist Gardner 2009, and his earlier troubled incarnation. We are about to pass a law that we are led to believe punishes predators who stalk, rape and kill vulnerable young women, yet when the curtain is lifted it will turn out that Chelsea's Law does no such thing, but rather destroys those who could very possibly be helped to lead a decent productive life.

A little background into my earlier foray into the world of penology might shed light on what underlies this article.. The location, the upper West Side of N.Y. was the Berkley of the East, about as far from conservative San Diego as can be found on this continent. I was active politically when I lived there, to the point of being invited to the local Democratic Club in 1995 to present my position on Capital Punishment. I knew If I were going to make any impact on this group that was opposed to my views, this would have to be dramatic, so I began with a narrative:

The young woman had taken a shortcut through a wooded area on her daily run. It was getting dark, and from nowhere, she was tackled, and felt the knife to her throat with the demand to comply as ordered. Helpless, she acceded, numb to the humiliation, to the terror, only hoping that it would be over. Now the attacker, physically satisfied but realizing what he had done, heard the girl promising that she would not tell anyone if he just let her go. But, growing calmer he had a moment to think, realizing that she was looking at his face, that she would report him. If he killed her, there would be no witness, no cry for help, and he could live, as miserable as his life was, he wanted to live, and so.......

I stopped there, and told the audience that what happened in this scenario depended on the outcome of this issue, that eliminating the risk of execution would remove the fear from this rapist of the ultimate punishment. I gave my argument for graduated sentencing, not out of concern for the criminal, but to protect the victim. It is this very same principle that motivates my opposition to Chelsea's Law, that the effects will be counterproductive and lead to more crime.

About this time I had a long conversation with Ernest van den Haag, Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Fordham University and strong defender of Capital Punishment. After a few drinks, he confided in me a rationale that was quite different from mine. With a glint in his eye, he said, "When someone is facing a possible death sentence, it is easy to get them to admit to something, to cop a plea." The same would certainly apply to someone who is caught in sexual exploration with a younger friend that goes bad, where she gets nervous and he panics. Under the proposed law, premeditation or a pattern of such activity need not be shown; and the threat of life in prison would be enough to garner admission to a reduced offense irrespective of guilt. Most of the literature makes the assumption that the first conviction has been plea bargained down from the actual more serious offense, but as Dr. van den Haag explained, it works both ways.

My personal dilemma is having an awareness of two truths that are diametrically in conflict. The first is that Chelsea's Law, though a defective product and a missed opportunity, represents something universal in human societies. This is the social expression of rage, of organized defense against those who offend against not only the human victim but the values that stabilize our world. Understanding the sociological underpinnings of this movement does not negate its value, but ignoring the power of this force to counter rational solutions, is a guarantee of excesses of unknown proportions.

It is part of a long list of such laws, some going back to 1947, that define and then stigmatize aggressive inappropriate sexual behavior, especially involving children. The power of a movement such as that driving this current law is not to be underestimated. Rational redress of actual crimes is the least requirement for what has been described as "Moral Panic." With distance, it is easy to condemn examples such as Witch Burning in Colonial America, or the Pogroms against Jews of Eastern Europe, recent enough for my own mother to have experienced them. In this country in 1942 there was a unanimity in believing that every American Citizen of Japanese descent was at his core a "hated devious Jap," who deserved "containment" similar to that which we are expanding with the current bill for all sex offenders. As is true today with sex offenders, there were some Japanese who were a danger, as they did identify with their ethnic homeland against this country, yet the "mob effect" was such that none would argue for the obvious truth that the vast majority were patriotic Americans.

Serious study of prevention of sexual predation is unpleasant, tedious and ultimately frustrating, since the causes are diverse and hidden. It is easier to ignore the reality that excesses of punishment, of over alertness to indications of pedophilia, take their own toll on society. The human condition is one of infinite risk, from instant death at the hands of drunk drivers, to contacting a fatal virus from the sneeze of a best friend, to lightening from a thunderhead that appeared without notice.....all of these orders of magnitude more probable than death under the circumstances of those of Gardner's murders.

Maintaining a society predicated on the elusive concept of "Justice" is only appreciated when it is gone. Unlike other societies, this belief protects judges, prosecutors and even police who are seen as supporters of this broad invisible concept. Achieving justice is more than guaranteeing a fair trial; it is maintaining a population of potential jurors whose view of the world reflects reality, not distorted by a belief that every man is a would be sexual predator so that even excessive, or wrongful convictions, becomes acceptable. We need not have a conviction or even a wrongful indictment to illustrate the loss of justice in this area. , In researching this article I connected with a young man from this area, who without the slightest hint of sexual impropriety was discharged from his job as an elementary school aid because of the disputed "crime" of having a door closed when children were present.

While this man only lost his job and damaged his future prospects, during the 1980s, having a classroom door open to the public was not enough to defeat the frenzy of convictions for sexual assaults by day care workers, dozens of whom served a combined hundreds of years in prison. Now, every one of these cases has been reversed, as controlled research showing the ease of obtaining false accusations from children was demonstrated. But the lives of these day care workers were grievously damaged, and worse, we see how easily a society can become obsessed with this crime to the point of irrationality.

In a recent conversation with the Chief of staff of the sponsor of Chelsea's Law, while his office acknowledged that residence restrictions are counter productive, they have no intention of redressing it. Not at this time, not when they are so close to passing this law, not when there is unanimous approval from those in both parties, not when this will be met by accolades from the Union Tribune that may never again mention the "grotesque" effect of forced homelessness due to residence restrictions. So those convicted of early sex crimes against children will spend their lives in containment, some inside prisons, others sequestered by constantly monitored GPS bracelets paid for by imaginary funds from a bankrupt state. And as the Union Tribune admitted, "has the likely practical effect of turning some relatively minor sex offenders into far worse and of spurring paroled violent sex offenders into acting again on their dark impulses."

Unlike with the relocated Japanese Americans, for those contained by Chelsea's law there will be no VJ day where the end of hostilities allows dispassionate reconsideration. World Wars only happen when entire countries are united in armed conflict, organized by the most competent leaders of nations, united in hatred of the enemy. Sexual predation is a pathology of outcasts, of those who for a myriad of reasons cannot direct their sexual urges according to the rules of their society. It is the product of our fallible human condition, so will continue to arise with each new generation. While it is a scourge that elicits the same emotion of mass rage as does military aggression, it is not amenable to the same marshaling of concerted force. How do we transcend this? How do we direct the primal outrage against the crimes of those like Gardner in a political system that demands response to emotions of the crowd, whether the results are effective or not.

There is something unique about the movement of Chelsea's Law through the state legislature. It has done what most American's wish for, eliminated partisan rancor, garnering the support of every single elected official of both parties. This is is so rare, that it becomes all the greater loss of an opportunity if we fail to redress the errors that have accumulated over the decades. It is only at this moment of heightened public passion that such correction can occur. We must acknowledge the truth, that the vast majority of us who voted for Jessica's law may be complicit in the death of the very person memorialized by this bill. We must demand from our media and public officials that they go beyond leading emotionally satisfying movements that result in a body of counterproductive laws. And at election time we must support those making a good faith attempt to forge rational penology, and turn against those who would castigate such effort as being "soft on crime."

Six decades of sex offender legislation, each cathartic to the public and advantageous to it's elected sponsors, results in the accretion of penological defects along with growth of its profitable and thus politically powerful infrastructure. Prison unions, GPS systems developers, psychotherapists and polygraph examiners are only a few examples. We have also seen how in this case more than others, any revision that can be construed as decreasing punishment of sexual offenders will be assuredly the subject of attack ads.

Perhaps, doing just one such revision, eliminating residence restrictions that are shown to actually cause more sex predations, would be the beginning of a rational sex offender penology. And, who knows, it just could possibly start to change the process of political dialogue in this once successful prosperous state.
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References to sources mentioned :

1-CASOMB report of John Garder, relating to Parole System

2-CASOMB list of reports, with link to letter to Nathan Fletcher, rejecting Chelsea's Law without remediation of residence rules.

3-Union Tribune's Editorial condemning Residence Requirements of Jessica's Law

4-Video of Encinitas City Council discussion and vote on bill. At 1hr 50min (last item on drop down menu)

5-Web site on Day Care Sex Abuse Hysteria.

6-Audio of full Phone Interview with John Gardner

7-California Coalition on Sexual Offending, report that surveys research showing counterproductive nature of residence restrictions

(c) 2010 Al Rodbell

Scalia on Burning Koran

2011-04-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

There are two approaches to eliminating blasphemy. which includes desecration of revered objects such as a Bible or Koran. The traditional way to prevent such blasphemous actions is through punishment, historically quite severe . We are now seeing this in the ongoing homicidal response to Reverend, no I won't use the honorific term, to Terry Jones' burning of a copy of the Koran at his Florida church.

Blasphemy is inextricably tied to the concept of the sacred, and can be extended to similar reverence for symbols of a nation or a people. The metaphysical aspect of such object is recognized in their essence being extended beyond the original artifact to any representation of it; thus a printed copy of the Koran, or a mass produced flag is imbued with such sacredness.

Those enraged Muslims, presently only in Afghanistan, make the assumption that, as would be the case in their own countries, because Terry Jones is allowed to do this act he has the tacit support of his government.

They are not completely wrong.

In this country we do not murder those who defile our own sacred objects, but we are not that far from doing so. I'll focus on one of these objects, a secular sacred symbol that is so revered by America that the legality of its treatment is decided by decisions of the highest court in the land.

The most recent Supreme Court Decision U.S. v. Eichman was a reiteration of the landmark more extensive decision Texas v. Johnson summarized in this conclusion:

The government's interest in preserving the flag as a symbol did not outweigh the individual right to disparage that symbol through expressive conduct.

These decisions that articulate a principle at odds with values that are entrenched in fundamentalist Muslim circles only passed by a hair's breath, Texas v. Johnson by a single vote of the court. The vast majority of Americans dearly want to punish those who burn our highest sacred object, the American flag. One state tried to get around the freedom of speech protection of the Court by proposing a law that the maximum penalty for any individual who violently attacked a flag burner would be a twenty five dollar fine. It was a law to foment mob revenge.

Flag burning is exceedingly rare in this country as the reaction against it can still be violent. The symbol is so powerful that almost every political figure wears a representation of it on their lapel, including the current President who had earlier publicly rejected this. It is a type of amulet to ward away the curse of "unpatriotism" that can be dangerous to life and lethal to a political career.

The last try in 2006 for a constitutional amendment that would have made this country more similar to those controlled by Muslim fundimentalists on this issue, by allowing punishment of those who burn our sacred object easily passed the House, but failed to get the required two thirds majority in the Senate by a single vote.

So what do we do about future Terry Jones wannabees, who now know that they can become a world figures, just like those such as James Earl Ray and Lee Harvey Oswald, by causing death and chaos, but without any possible punishment for their action. Do we want to carve out exceptions to our first amendment right to absolute freedom of speech. It's an option, but a bad one, as it taken to its extreme it could allow any group ruthless enough to commit mass murder protection against criticism.

This opinion happens to be shared by Antonin Scalia, the most conservative member of the Supreme court, as he said in this interview from last year that I happened to have watched days before the Koran burning.

When asked about the possible, then potential, reaction of Muslims to the burning of a single Koran should it be an exception to the rule of unfettered freedom of speech, Scalia responded,

Unless it's going to cause a riot here, which the police can not effectively stop, No, It may be a very bad idea, nevertheless it's perfectly constitutional (meaning it's constitutionally protected)

I had the privilege of meeting Justice Scalia, right after he had joined in the decision that protected the right of those who burn the American Flag. It was at a speech at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, where the audience was won over by this man who publicly proclaims that America is, in fact, a Christian country.

Scalia is an unusual man, as brilliant as they come yet also as down to earth, folksy, and warm hearted as can be. While widely despised by liberals, he maintains a strong personal friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsberg the justice who is most consistently, and vehemently opposed to his court opinions.

When Scalia proclaimed that burning of the Koran is protected by the Constitution, the act--and the reaction by Muslims, the taking of innocent lives had not yet occurred. As of this writing this article describes the carnage sparked by this action in Florida, so far twenty dead and eighty injured.

Now, I will switch the mode of this essay to addressing Justice Scalia directly, on the off chance that the senior official that I know on the Court should read this and choose to call it to his attention. It is my answer, the only answer I can think of to the conundrum between supporting the first amendment or protecting the investment of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to avoid the clash of civilizations between the Western World and Islam.

Justice Scalia,

I happen to personally agree with your stand as a self described "first amendment absolutist" which shaped your decisions on the two flag burning cases.

I was gratified to learn that one of your most respected Justices is Robert H. Jackson, whose decisions were cogently decided and articulated, yet there was a time when duty required his stepping outside of the court, to be the chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuremberg Trials.

This is such a time for you. While you were the deciding vote to keep our country from defining as a secular blasphemy the desecration of our national emblem, by this decision you could not change the de facto law, more powerful than statute, that does in fact make this object sacred.

You personally are on the horns of a dilemma, caught in a logical inconsistency defined by cultural norms that are only indirectly affected by law.   We do, in fact, protect our secular icons and we do condone violence against those who breach this strictures. Certainly not to the degree of the murderous mobs in Afghanistan, but given what has gone before and what is yet to come in this region, that protection of our first amendment means not only death of innocents, but perhaps the animosity of those very people whom we have sacrificed so much to bring to our side.

Freedom of speech as a constitutional protection does not translate well into Arabic.     Your courage in voting to allow flag burning, which implies allowing defaming any symbol of any group, is not convincing to those whose hatred for Americans is based on the belief that it is their religion that is being defamed, and not America's.

You may point to precedent, the refutation in law, yet it will not stop the slaughter this time, or any future time that one who emulates the Florida pastor chooses this quick way to fame. Words won't do the job. Protection of our first amendment right to freedom of speech, and our ability to avoid a disastrous clash of civilizations requires action outside of not only the court, but of existing institutions.

You, as an individual, as a patriot and as a Catholic, must participate in the desecration of your own icons, which would not be a desecration at all since that which is sacred remains so even after representations of them are destroyed. You, along with those who you can bring to such an event, must have a "book burning" but in this case not to destroy, but to liberate. The very pain, the distastefulness of such a ceremony is essential, as it reflects the pain of Muslims who see their own sacred icon defamed. Only by your own pain can you show, can you illustrate that we do not accept blasphemy as a concept, in our own religion any more than we do in theirs.

With each Holy Bible, with each American Flag, with each Christian Cross or Jewish Star that goes up in flames you would be proclaiming that no object shall have protection, that it is the ideas that are sacred. America will not prevent the burning of the Koran, as we should not. But we must demonstrate, in vivid dramatic imagery, that as we allow the defiling of their icons we do so to ours also.

Al Rodbell

I wish this could be done without Scalia, as a bottom up movement to show the world what America stands for. But I have doubts that such a movement, desecrating patriotic and religious icons could happen without the support of those such as him. And as much as those on this website may revile Antonin Scalia, I'm hot sure I can think of any other figure who is part of the religious right who would be a candidate for showing the world that even if we are a Christian country, we are also one that values the Enlightenment ideals of freedom of expression. And when push comes to shove, it is those ideals, that happen to be those of our founding fathers, that we will give priority to.

Tomorrow Belongs to Me

2011-03-31T11:35:00.001-07:00

A song, an anthem for a people, a rallying cry for a generation, an artifact of a perversion of humanity. What do we make of this song, shown in this video from the film version of "Cabaret" ? Watch it please (Imbedding is disabled) and note the cinematography, the old man's reaction, the building of connection among the crowd, first one, then a few, the young, then the old, the sense of destiny, of solidarity, of hope for a future, a tomorrow that will transcend the pain of defeat, starvation and degradation.

It is the representation of what historians of the Third Reich, call "Volk" as elevated to "mystical identity under Hitler." I place this in quotes as it is from the index of a book, an important book that this essay is reviewing, "The German Genius" by Peter Watson.

While I will point out two errors for discussion, it should be noted that I discovered them only because the amazing quality-- the clarity and lyricism of this encyclopedic tome in conveying the complex interplay of the forces that form a society. If interested in this subject you can explore it in two ways. You can start young and learn German, and start to read it's literature, beginning in the early eighteenth century. Start with Kant then Hegel, Heidegger and Nietzsche. While doing this should learn organic chemistry, some early pre Darwinian theories of heredity, then psychoanalysis. On weekends you may want to read some of Einstein's early works, including the development of quantum mechanics. Oh, be sure to squeeze in Marx and Engels to trace back their roots in earlier philosophers. Or, if you don't want to so dedicate your life, you could read this book.

Watson is a journalist, rather than an academician, and that makes all the difference. His readership, mostly centered in London publications, is a diverse group of interested educated people, most of whose earliest memories were violence and death originating in Germany. I don't know his life story, but I assume he shared this experience. It was an inherent act of courage to write a book that can be described as praising this country.

The vast majority of reviews of this book have been laudatory, some mildly critical of his dependency on secondary sources, which ignores the reality that such a coherent readable narrative would have been impossible without generalizations, and faith in such sources in weaving together the story of this unique culture. No human being could possibly absorb the primary sources that that underlie his narrative, his interpretation of how a country, a nation, a people, a linguistic community, can rise to leadership of the world in a wide array of intellectual endeavors over the course of a few centuries, only to fall victim to.....the "Tomorrow" that came to pass.

Among the more than a thousand names that punctuate this book, I probably recognize a couple hundred at most, and have read a few dozen or so. This was enough for me to do a sample, a type of informal statistical validation of his universe of sources, and it came out to my satisfaction. Even reading his hundreds of secondary sources is a lifetime endeavor, that he did the service of excerpting and organizing.

Among the generally laudatory reviews, there were some with just the hint, the tone of suspicion that this was, just perhaps, in spite of its intellectual appearance, a covert paean to the deepest strands of the ideology of Nordic racial superiority that justified German fascism. I myself have found, and will present, two items that could be used to support this theory, this criticism, and this personal attack on the writer.

I do it because the points are meaningful for the discussion of this book, and more importantly because they are in the spirit that the book was written. If Watson had set a standard of perfection, we would not have this comprehensive tome to spark these conversation, and the world would have been poorer for it's absence.

The first point is the song of the title of this essay. Watson attributes it to Hans Baumann, " The troubadour of the Hitler Youth" whose idylic childhood was tempered by the inflation and unemployment of Wiemar Germany. His earliest poems reflected this with titles such as " Unemployed" and "Four Flights Up" about living in tenement slums as a child. From "The German Genius" pp 636:

Bauman became active in the Catholic youth movement, this gave rise to some of his early songs, the most famous of which s, "Morgen gehort mir," "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," was popularized in the 1972 film "Cabaret." This song helped Bauman's rise to fame.

snip-

The song became famous among the Catholic youth movement long before it was taken up by the Hitler Youth.

The exact provenance, the actual author of this song is important as it still is alive for the present incarnation of this movement. The Ringtone of the song is available for those who see this song as more than an historical artifact, but a viable motivating force in their lives. For those who revere the spirit of this song and still long for such a "tomorrow" whether it was written by Aryian youth such as depicted in the film clip, or two Jewish songwriters, if of great importance. This discussion gives the flavor of why this matters to this group.

Watson is wrong when he writes that "Cabaret" "popularized," a song by the young Baumann, which implies "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" is close translation of the German original, rather than being loosely modeled on such songs. which seems to be the current consensus. There are a slew of motivated members of "Storm Front" who have searched the German archives for such a common original of "Tomorrow" to no avail.

The other incongruity of this book is of a different order. It is not a mistake of detail, such as attribution of a song, but something quite different. I will express it by excerpting this letter that I sent to Watson's editor:
----------

I was transfixed by the talent of one individual to convey the monumental contributions of the German Civilization into a compendium that read like a novel. I admired Watson's courage to present this story, without apology, as history needs none.

But then I came to a single paragraph, that I have not seen commented on in any review. It is on the last paragraph of page 829 of the hardcover edition. It does begin with the qualification of "For what it is worth" and then goes on to quote a "survey, reported in 2006" that shows that Germans have a greater brain size and I.Q. than other European countries, specifically those that were its enemies in the two world wars.

The carelessness of this inclusion is reflected in the note of attribution, a secondary source, a book by Gertrude Himmelfarb published the year before the survey. There is no attribution to the actual research, which was Richard Lynn's 2006 book, "Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis"

The rubric of this throwaway comment is actually profoundly important, as it reflects, and supports the underlying neo-Darwinism that was so distorted by the Nazi regime. This ideology sees races as sub species of humans which biologically may be accurate, and as such is a moot subject for understanding variations of cultures. However, It is a completely different analytic approach to explaining the "genius" of a culture.

Had Mr. Watson simply not included this paragraph, it would not have detracted at all from his masterful presentation, but to slip it in, apparently unnoticed by reviewers, is a shock to his careful readers. I suggest that this paragraph simply be removed for future editions, as it would take a book of size and complexity of this one to do justice to the controversy raised by its implicit premise. At the very least, if you want to "go there" present the concept, "that underlying genetic intelligence is the root explanation of cultural achievement" as inherently paradigmatically inconsistent with the rest of the book.

If Watson were serious about this paragraph being meaningful, he wouldn't need an 800 page book to carefully define the many threads of German achievement. He could put it on a bumper sticker that says, "Germans are greater because they are smarter."

But I don't think he would ever do this, or that he actually thinks this is true. Someone who thinks in slogans doesn't do the life long research to write a book of this magnitude, which is in its overall tone devoid of any taint of simplistic explanations. The scholarly tone combined with the journalist fluidity is an invitation for participation, a prod to thinking, that in my case led to discovery of these defects, but also to an overwhelming number of epiphanies, of connections, of new understanding that otherwise I would never have made.

Anyone who has slogged through this long essay, would be fascinated by "The German Genius" And, only by learning about yesterday, can we have any hope that our "Tomorrow" will reflect the common dreams of humanity, and not the nightmare that that was the culmination of a time and place so well explored by this magnificent book.

Encinitas Madonna

2011-03-18T17:02:00.000-07:00

Stupid Gringo that I am, I had never even heard of her. If someone had mentioned "Our Lady of Guadalupe" I would have responded with a quizzical, "Huh?'

Here's the news story, with a photo, from the local San Diego Union Tribune:

The city famous for its catchable waves and funky public art now has a new piece apparently installed by a brazen crew of bogus construction workers.

On an afternoon shortly before Earth Day and a few days prior to Easter, a group of men in hard hats installed a 10-foot square stained-glass mosaic of a surfing Our Lady of Guadalupe, complete with booties. “Save the Ocean” runs along the side of the mural. On the nose of her surfboard is the face of Saint Juan Diego who, according to legend, saw the Virgin Mary near Mexico City in 1531.

I feel a certain obligation to write this blog, since when I read about this I wrote a letter to the members of our city council that now has been tempered by some discussion and personal investigation. Here's that letter:

To the Encinitas City Council:

Interesting article in today's UT.

This time, I agree with Councilman Jerome Stocks (who was reported as saying it must be removed), plus these additional reasons to remove it.

The last thing we want in a tunnel, where cars are driving close to pedestrians is a visual distraction. Remember the tragedy in a similar site under I5 on Sante Fe Drive

We do not want to encourage Guerrilla Public Art, as it will always present this conflict of either removing, or tacit public support for the message in retaining it.

One way to deal with this is to consider a venue, a time and a place for open expression of artistic messages. However, this could also be more problematic than it's worth, as it could be a source of more contention, something we don't seem to be in short supply of now.

And here's an aside, not to be made public. The underpass of a train is a target for terrorism. A few sticks of dynamite with a simple cell phone type of detonator, could bring down the trestle, with great loss of life to a passing train. There should be a focus on how a group of people pretending to be authorized construction workers were not questioned by law enforcement. New procedures should be considered. -(Since the potential for something like this was subsequently publicised from Osama bin Ladin's computer, no need to worry about giving anyone the idea)

This is defacing public property, and it's not the council's job to be moral arbiters or art critics. Remove it quickly. And if you find those who did it take appropriate action for their infractions.

And suggest that they use the many venues legally available to express their artistic impulses.

When I spent some time at the mosaic, talking to several people, I got a different perspective. Sometimes we are better to benefit from an event like this, to explore what can be learned, rather than react as I did, that it was a breach of lawful process and that's the end of the issue. Actually, that's only the beginning.

I had a long discussion with Ava, a woman who came to this country from Mexico when she was a small child, and lives her life in both cultures. She was hesitant to be interviewed but then gave me the O.K. She described the complex feeling that she had about this image of what I learned was the patron saint of Mexico, a revered Icon that is the source of comfort for so many Catholics.

Her ambivalence, coming down on the side of keeping the mosaic in place, was only made clear when an older man who spoke only a smattering of English rode by on his bike. He looked at the mural and was disturbed by what was being done to this most sanctified figure of his religious belief. For those interested in his words in Spanish, here's the short interview.

He wanted the image of the virgin, that was fine, but without the surf board---just as he always saw her represented in his church. "She is not a clown" were his translated words. Of course having a such a picture of a Catholic Saint devoid of the social commentary that he objected to, would not work in a public space for various constitutional reasons.

Eva, told me how the Lady of Guadaloupe is more than a Church figure, but part of modern culture:

There was another woman who was visiting from Virginia, who was delighted by the mural. She was a gringo, and while being catholic did not have the same emotional connection as the man on the bike (sorry I didn't get his name, amateur that I am) She made a simple point to the crowd, with a broad smile. "Look how it has gotten us talking together."

She was right. The message in bold letters on the mural is "Save the Ocean" a sentiment that all, of every religious and ethnic background, can support. While this mural is an example of breaking the law, it raises the question of whether those who follow the law, those who are overfishing, and polluting the oceans, may not be doing far greater harm.

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The city council voted unanimously on May 18 to remove the mural, and to relocate it if possible.

One understanding of true art is that it provides a mirror to society, just askew enough to challenge unspoken assumptions. From this perspective the quality of the work is irrelevant. This is performance art, with the mosaic not being the focal object , but rather the precipitating agent of the month long drama that took place.

As performance art this a success, as both a diversion from the events of the day, and also a reflection on democratic governance. By removing this mural, the city made the statement that it would not allow a religious icon to be either glorified or defaced on public property. That's how this country works, whether on the Federal or Local level.

Good Job Council

Martin's Poem

2011-03-02T15:31:00.000-08:00

This is taken from the laureate’s essay on the occasion of awarding of the Nobel Prize in Medicine to Martin Rodbell in 1994.

To my Friends: Thoughts from “On High”

Life on a roller coaster, oscillating from hither to yon,
no respite for the iconoclast, wandering from dusk to dawn.
Conjuring strange thoughts foreign and twice forbidden,
like Prometheus unbound, this Nobelist climbs in vain
to Andean peaks, seeking what most would proclaim insane.

Why, he ponders, are there no answers to protean questions when others thinking cleanly and simply with Occam’s sharp razor proclaim what seems obvious given the beam of their unerring laser. Nature, happily unfettered with philosophy, or with cunning, or with intent moves relentlessly onward or even backward with energy unspent while we mortals test and probe with twinkling machines blinking precisely at each movement, striving to unravel its irresolute randomness, its fathomless, unlimited, meaningless rush into spiraling chaos, oblivious of its multitudinous trials & errors which we pontifically believe must be unerring truth & resolution.

The laugh is on those who, burdened with pretensions of truth, believe they can fathom within 15 minutes of human existence what has transpired over eons of space and time in this Universe .

So, I extol the intuitions encapsulated in the folds of my mind from whence occasionally they hurtle to the forebrain and in a twinkling of a proton’s discharge bring to fruition a thought, an idea borne on the feathery appendages of teeming neurons wedded in a seamless synergy. Those fleeting moments are cherished as are those precious impulses imparted by the innumerable individuals who nurtured and instilled unknowingly their encrypted thoughts in mine.

So, with these fanciful thoughts in mind I give praise to you - my friends, my colleagues, my soul-mates, my loved ones - for letting my soul and thoughts meander hither and yonder in this attempt at philosophy and poetry. We now belong to the Gods on high who praise us for our frailties and our achievements.

Martin and I had the same great grandfather, who died, long before either of us were born, in a Polish ghetto that neither of us would recognize. And, I’m certain, this man said his prayers, went to synagogue and believed fully in his God. I don’t know whether Martin believed in God; but if he did it was a very different one than our great grandfather’s.

Here’s what his poem meant to me: Rather than being frustrated by how little progress he could make in fully understanding his chosen area of research, he takes pleasure in being able to solve a small part of the puzzle. As he thanks “the innumerable individuals who nurtured and instilled unknowingly their encrypted thoughts in mine,” he fully expects others to similarly value what he has brought forth, “intuitions encapsulated in the folds of my mind from whence occasionally they hurtle to the forebrain and in a twinkling of a proton’s discharge, bring to fruition a thought. “ His thought. A part of the chain of knowledge that his life work extends by a single link.

His poem can be taken as a response to those who would claim that science’s paucity of explanation is indicative of some other process, a purposeful all powerful designer. “Why,” he asks, pondering his own limitations , “are there no answers to protean questions when others thinking cleanly and simply with Occam’s sharp razor, proclaim what seems obvious, given the beam of their unerring laser.” Whether the designer be God or some ethereal conception of an ordered purposeful universe, Martin’s answer is the same, “The laugh is on those who, burdened with pretensions of truth, believe they can fathom within 15 minutes of human existence what has transpired over eons of space and time in this Universe “

I’m proud of my cousin Martin, even though I never even met him, and never will, since he died several years ago, at what now to me, seems a such young age. He would be surprised to learn that the words of his poem, imbedded in an essay printed in a book for libraries and attendees at the Nobel Awards in Stockholm, are now available to billions of people with a few key strokes on their computers.

While we are constantly made aware of the suffering caused by man and nature in all its permutations, we are also in the midst of an explosion of knowledge that his work is representative of. While we deplore the inefficiencies and, at times, duplicity, of pharmaceutical corporations, there is the constant accretion of the products of basic research, that however twisted its path, enriches us all. This growth, this inexorable drive to understand the processes of life, from the molecular to the societal, has a tenacity that defies all attempts to extinguish it.

Martin’s life is intertwined with a singular event, the epitome of focused destruction of a people, his people, my people--- a people who happen to revere this quest for understanding in all of its forms. The woman whom he married and raised his family with, his widow Barbara Lederman Rodbell, was a teenager in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. She joined the resistance and actively fought against the invaders. She was friends with another family of Jews, the Franks, who tried to survive by hiding in an attic. The world knows of their story from the diary written by their daughter, Anne.

In this time of questioning the relation between church and state, it is claimed that science is simply another religion, another belief system based on faith. While there are certainly differences between the two worldviews, there is truth to this claim. Martin, and Barbara, had faith that their lives, dedicated to a quest for knowledge, would in some way, in some time, make for a better world. Martin’s life work explicated the processes of inter-cellular communication. He showed how each of the trillions of cells of higher organisms, of we humans, coordinate to mature and survive to achieve our purposes, whether profound or profane.

Martin spent his life in his own resistance movement. It was a resistance against ignorance, and the imitation science that masks it, exemplified by the Nazi genocidal hatred that took such an unfathomable toll. His weapon was not a more powerful bomb, or a new way of marshalling the passion of the masses; it was in discovering how a process in our body works. He knew we could never erase the horror of six million Jews killed in the holocaust, or hundreds of millions who died in our lifetimes in similar excrescences of organized hatred fueled by ignorance.

All he could do; all we can do, is support the mosaic of scientific knowledge--precise, objective, verifiable, and universal. This slow laborious slog of discovery seems so puny compared to the grandeur of those who offer comprehensive answers, mystical or scientistic, whom he described as “burdened with pretensions of truth.”

If there is such a thing as evil in the world, this universal apotheosis that transcends time and place, surely its essential element is ignorance, the blindness that leads to fear, and the destruction that follows. Such evil destroys like wildfire, or nuclear blasts, or mass murder by a master race. Yet, resistance to these scourges is not to be found on a comparable scale. Rather it is the wisp of a seedling after a firestorm. Resistance is a life of discovery, the articulation of a concept that clarifies forces hitherto unseen, and perhaps an unfinished diary of a young girl, who still had hope for a better world.

Nobel Lecture and Autobiography of Martin Rodbell

Super Bowl Nation

2011-02-15T09:31:00.000-08:00

John L. Lewis would be rolling in his grave. For those too young to remember, Lewis was the face of the union movement in the early part of the last century, taking over the mantle of those who led the battle for living wages and life itself for the abused lowest level of workers. Hated by the right, and tolerated by the left, he provided a strident voice, and eventually the political clout, to make a difference for the impoverished coal miners of his union.

"Union" and "management" are powerful emotionally laden words, so it's easy to focus on them, and then to choose your sides. Left supports workers' unions and the Right defends owners. But the meaning has changed over the years. During the early days, unions were the organizations that allowed the girls in N.Y. sweatshops a bit of sunlight and clean air, and enough income to provide their children a better life. This Wikipedia article on the ILGWU (Garment Workers) leader Dave Dubinski tells this dramatic story.

Each industry had it's courageous leader, and a cadre of union activists, mostly socialist, communist or liberal Democrats by default, who struggled in an era before there was a minimum wages or concerns over worker safety. Norman Thomas, the one political figure who advocated such policies rarely garnered 1% of the popular vote the six times he ran for president.

It's impossible to do justice to the labor movement that burgeoned in the early 20th century without understanding the dire conditions of workers, the industries and the national mood at that time. Picking up the same labels for this stand off, "unions and management," distorts more than it clarifies. Identifying with such movement makes good public relations, but ignores the differences.

Professional football is so much more than a sport; in America it has become a metaphor for who we are as a nation in this moment of history. The Super Bowl, has become a national holiday, one that unites and defines our culture more than any other single event. Far more people watch it than view a Presidential inauguration. The numbers or Americans who read a serious article on economics, history or politics is such a small demographic as to be meaningless to most advertisers, so such publications are struggling; the articles that are published often being sensationalized out of a desperation to survive.

Every Sunday in multi billion dollar stadiums, usually subsidized by cities who are laying off teachers, firefighters and police-- the spectacle is repeated. These games leading up to the post season tournaments transfix the faithful, with San Diego Chargers shirts worn even by bank officers in my area. The players, depending on their positions have diverse sets of skills. The majority of these "union workers" are selected for being the fastest, strongest, and possessing the most raw mass to prevail in repeated collisions. These are the best, those that have subordinated other goals to enhance these skills. Those rare ones are selected for the N.F.L in ceremonies, player drafts, that have been carefully defined over the years. These are media events, with the roster of players better known by more people than a state's congressional Representatives.

These "union workers" especially those on the line, get to make a deal. They will get paid millions of dollars for each year that they are at their peak, with the full knowledge that they are doing severe irreparable damage to their brain and body. This would seem to be in universal spirit of American free enterprise that few would condemn. However, there is a less generous way of looking at this; but this is the national sport, and every political party along with every commercial entity wants to identify with it rather than criticize it. It's just too damn big.

Beyond the potential cost in brain and joint damage to the vast majority of young people who play football and never make a dime out of it, is the shaping of these kids by top professional players. First lets look at obesity.

The average weight in the NFL has grown by 10 percent since 1985 to a current average of 248 pounds. The heaviest position, offensive tackle, went from 281 pounds two decades ago to 318 pounds.

The decision that these players make would be only between them and their bosses, if it weren't that they become the models for a generation of kids. The N.F.L players are getting well paid for their injuries, mostly hidden, but those who emulate them are not. And it starts early, with specialized full tackle leagues in my area starting at age 8.

It fits the model that a college football coach makes triple the salary of a Nobel prize winning professor of biology. It fits the model that students are allowed to graduate from college with only the minimal skills expected of those who earn a B.A., given the time required to hone their football skills. It fits the model that alumnae contributions increase more with a higher win-loss season than any increase in metrics of educational achievement.

Evidence is irrefutable that N.F.L. players, given their weight have a shorter life. While there is no way to quantify the role modeling effect of these heavier players on burgeoning childhood obesity, it is not an unreasonable hypothesis. For large swaths of kids, these men epitomize success, and what they do and how they live is emulated. Is there even a hint in these negotiations of putting a cap on average weight of a football team. It's not out of the question, as professional boxing has long had weight based categories, that acknowledges that proficiency is more than the mass of the contenders.

The players association is trying to get increased long term health care. But this is for their group only. They are not addressing the greater population of child leagues, high school and college players who will emulate their body size, with all the dire effects and nothing put aside for it's health consequences.

Is there any discussion in these negotiations about the what it means that city after city, willingly redirects funds from vital public services to supporting this game. Is there any discussion that the public lives of the men who represent the apotheosis of this sport should be held responsible for some modicum of civil behavior, even outside their professional life.

I won't even attempt to come to some equation that weighs the pleasure that many get, (including myself) out of following football, with the harmful aspects that I've described. Many of the best things in life takes a toll, implies risks, as individuals and as a society. However, what I describe are not trivial issues. Those kids who evidence now shows will suffer dementia and joint injury just a bit sooner will become a problem for whatever version of Medicare survives in the future.

The players and the owners are combatants, than they are in agreement on perpetuating the image of Football. They both have an interest that it continues to be more than our national sport, but our national metaphor.

This is America in the 21st century. And what is more American than reverence for power in all its forms, as well as absolute disdain for those who refuse to play the game. The sport's ethos was articulated by the revered coach Vince Lombardi, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." We reward those financiers who brought our economy to its knees by flouting every law and ethical standard. The only thing that seems to matter is that they are the "winners" so their unearned wealth brings not public disdain, or a hint of personal contrition. We can't help it, since "Winning is the only thing" And the losers, those whose lives they ruined by their ruthless quest for gain have no voice at all. "Let the eat cake" the dismissive words to the rabble of Marie Antoinette are now updated with, "Let them watch the Super Bowl."

Will we "win" our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? This is the question we seem to ask, not how many innocent civilians will have been killed or what perversion of democracy will be left in the war's wake. It is no accident that one of the main advertisers in the Super Bowl is the U.S. Army. The young viewers can both be an "Army of One", and at the same time be part of a winning team, just like those heroes they are are watching on the field to the cheers of millions.

National character is a complex mosaic where the most important elements are invisible because they are, like the air we breathe, without conscious awareness. It is only at this moment, when the mutuality of interests between the two major actors in Professional Football have broken ranks that we have an opportunity to think about this sport with a degree of objectivity. It affects more than the participants or even the fans, but all who pay taxes for their stadiums and who will ultimately pay for the care of those damaged by early participation in the sport.

This is important enough to move off of the sports page into the annals of serious pubic discourse.

Breaking: Americans SHALL trust in God

2011-01-08T14:56:00.000-08:00

The United States Supreme Court has just refused certiorari, thus confirming the rejection of this suit (PDF) to remove "In God we Trust" as our national motto. This is from a personal communication received today from the plaintiff and attorney, Michael Newdow.

His email was in response to one I sent him (see below) describing a speech yesterday by Newt Gingrich, where he described Newdow's earlier case as pivotal. The video of a portion of his speech is shown below, one that could set the tone for those vying for the Republican nomination.

This was my letter to Newdow, that describes Gingrich's speech:

I was watching Eliot Spitzer on CNN when they cut to Newt Gingrich giving a speech to Iowa Republicans. I almost got it on the DVR, but in his introduction, going over all the depredations of the left that have caused him to make the great personal sacrifice to serve his country as President he said this. "But the turning point was a decision by the ninth circuit, that American children don't have to say, (shall not say?) "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. When our country has fallen so far that activist judges can go against the will of the people, a decision that reminds me of the Dred Scott case, then something must be done."

He was on a roll, and I now paraphrase: "There is one major question for this next election, is America because of our declaration of independence, because we are "endowed by the Creator" an exceptional country, or just a regular country like all those others. God has given authority to the people, not to government. It is yours, you are the sovereigns......"

Powerful stuff, as obviously he is channeling the Creator and will be his figurehead in the Oval Office as he translates the sovereign people's will into......I would say governance but I don't think that this what he wants done by the government. His gobbledegook does get hazy. Yet he quotes a few central European scholars so he must be a true intellectual. The sad thing is that he just may be the most reasonable of the bunch of this slate of Christian soldiers who are going to save us from secular socialism.

This will be a crusade, as he said he will lead the most revolutionary change in our life time. He has identified evil, and whoever it was who was responsible for that decision of the 9th circuit will be the best one to respond to his accusation.

The full speech is not available, but this gives the flavor:

Gingrich riff about truth referenced the philosopher Albert Camus, who was part of an intellectual climate that would have either ridiculed, feared or despised someone who made the claim that his "truth" corresponded with that of God. While Gingrich may have known that Camus was an atheist, he was confident that none of his audience would know or care about this detail. There is no documentation that I could find of the Lincoln quote. There is, however, a long list of apocryphal quotes attributed to Einstein, Jefferson as well as Lincoln, that certain people use to give vacuous statements a patina of legitimacy.

Gingrich's using Abraham Lincoln to give credence to his assertion that his political platform is not based on man-made ideology, but rather that of the Creator, is a special kind of blasphemy. It is more egregious because Newt Gingrich enjoys the imprimatur of his doctorate in History.

Among all of Lincoln's great speeches, the most profound, the one that had he lived may have changed the course of our nation's history, was his second inaugural address. He was speaking for the ages, as he would only live for a few more weeks. He was directly addressing those who, like Newt Gingrich, would claim that their cause was God's cause:

Lincoln speech describes the two sides of the civil war,

Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.

The Wikipedia article describes a document that illuminates the contrast between Lincoln's deepest sentiments, and that of Gingrich:

Lincoln's points, that God's purposes are not directly knowable to humans, represent a theme that Lincoln had expressed earlier. After Lincoln's death, his secretaries found among his papers an undated manuscript now generally known as the "Meditations on the Divine Will". In that manuscript, Lincoln wrote:

The will of God prevails — In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is somewhat different from the purpose of either party — and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect this.[3]

Gingrich's wild inflammatory attack against a non existent "Secular Socialism" arouses all of the passions of those who see the world in apocalyptic terms, with Democrats being the party of Obama, the Anti-Christ. He will stoop to anything to reach the deepest atavistic levels of his audience, and still retain the image of the scholar. With enough bombast he hopes that his audience will gloss over his contradictions.

The day of this speech he was was interviewed by Gretta Van Susteren. He could casually say that he would do something about college becoming more unaffordable in the same breath as talking about the immorality of deficit spending. Gretta didn't ask him exactly how he could help those who can't afford college, or those seniors who would be thrown into poverty or continue to have a military that could act unilaterally; while at the same time slashing the federal budget.

Perhaps, the real message that Gingrich is making is that as God's Representative on earth, that which is impossible for mere mortals shall be given to him and his followers. It is not a new argument; in fact it is ancient. It should have been put to rest by the legion of thinkers over the last half millennium, but it still lives in the deepest recesses of unknown numbers of Americans.

Gingrich is counting on that number being more than we can imagine.
-------------------------------------

Newdow has offered to debate Gingrich..

many times. Now that Gingrich has scurrilously equated Newdow's suit to give students more freedom, with the infamous Dred Scott decision that denied freedom to African Americans, he has thrown down the gauntlet.

If he refuses to debate Newdow, added to his long list of character defects, is this one. He's a coward!

Pathology of Out Groups, tennis coffee group and Dailykos othodoxy

2010-12-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

I'm no Jew lover.....

It was a common expression a half century ago, so reflective of the American Zeitgeist that the words just came out in conversation, even among people who knew I was a Jew. The phrase had a companion, one used as a preface to saying something that could be viewed as supportive of a widely despised group that I will get to in a bit.

I am fortunate enough to have a regular tennis game with a group of men. The ages and background are diverse ranging from the 40s to late 80s; with politics from Ditto Heads to staunch liberals. And ethnically from Wasp, a few Jews to.....a single black man, who I'll call Cal. After tennis we have coffee, where we talk about anything and everything, politics, religion, personal problems, and a whole lot of jokes-- that because of our age can be told repeatedly, each time getting a laugh.

Cal is an outgoing educated man who is the youngest of the group, in his early 50s, and who has struggled financially. He works mostly in settings helping kids who have been in trouble and need some guidance. His humor dispels the tension of being a single black man in this group of whites; such as when a passerby commented on the manifest pleasure of our informal discussions, Cal said, "Hey, I'm not in the group, I'm just here as as a token affirmative action person"

He knows that feeling well, having been one of the early children bussed to elementary schools where he was not exactly accepted. But, out of that experience, while he understood the general rejection he faced, he also must have developed a great appreciation for those who accepted him as a person, who enjoyed his company, and invited him into their lives.

Just last week, as a few of us were lingering around the table, Cal was engaged in a conversation with a couple of men at the next table. It was good natured and animated, so I continued my discussion with Manny who is a retired teacher, the oldest of the group, who at 89 is quite clear in his liberal orthodoxy based on his life experiences.

We were talking about the need for scapegoats in all societies, my life interest and the theme of several books I had been reading. I lowered my voice to make a point, almost whispering I said, society needs its out groups, adding to the example of "I'm no Jew Lover" the phrase, "I'm no nigger lover.." Cal stopped in mid conversation, turned around and said, "What's that, What did you say!"

And then a smile broke out, and he laughed. He didn't hear the context of what I was saying, but as softly as I had spoken it, he did hear the word, the N word. But in this case, he knew that it was Al talking to Manny. And just as during all his days, from his early childhood, while surrounded by a diffuse casual racial animostity, he also knew that there were those who didn't see him as "one of those" , but considered him as just a person. And he knew that Manny and I were these people, his friends.

I did explain to him the context, but it really wasn't necessary, since he assumed that it was Al doing his thing, which is trying to understand, explicate and then share his observations. And he had no reason to make me feel bad for using this word, as at that moment I was part of the black community, at least this community of three, and I had the privilege of using this forbidden word.
================

Where the hell am I going with this?

Am I bragging to this liberal readership how colorblind I am, that I am so far above those who had to certify their innate red blooded bigotry with the words, "I'm no Jew/nigger lover," before saying a word that sounded like acceptance of these despised groups. No, I accept who I am, someone who was reared in Jim Crow Washington D.C. with at least a residual racism that I will have for the rest of my life. Cal understands, and doesn't hold it against me.

This fit's into many themes that I am currently involved in. First there is the issue of Julian Assange, and my knee jerk reaction to a report on his being an Anti-Semite. Like Cal, although I wasn't bussed to an all white school, I did attend a predominantly Christian public school, before the days when minority religions had any legal protections from bullying from kids, or more subtle assaults by teachers. Jews were then still certified Christ Killers, and there were no blacks on the premises to take the role of scapegoats.

So, just as Cal heard the N word through the din of the McDonalds, I heard the words "Anti Semetic...Assange" and the reaction was instant. He was my enemy. It doesn't matter that he may have exposed the underside of the cynicism and deceit of international players that are shaping our world. It doesn't matter that it took great personal courage to do this. And I no longer had to do the hard work of really thinking about the actual effects that this one man could have on world history. I knew enough. He hated me and my people, and therefore I hated him.

That's who we are. We being the vast majority of humans. We are interested in many things, and we try to learn as much as we can, but there are more primal concerns. We are wired to discern danger. And in a literate world this means seeking out patterns, words that represent such danger in the form of hatred towards self or group.

A Jew can see a Swastika in the most convoluted abstract design, and a black person can see an epithet in a word such as "niggardly" which has no etymological association with the taboo N word. And an avid Dailykos member can discern a "right wing talking point" in the midst of a more complex essay, subjecting the writer to anger that is immune to any explanation.

We can never eliminate the inborn acute sensitivity to words of hate, words of attack, words of danger. The best we can do is try to rise above it. When all communication is reduced to either the inclusion or exclusion of such words, there is no actual discourse. There is no possibility of transcending these primal feelings to go to a different plane of interaction.

It is foolish to underestimate the power of such words, such symbols, so loaded with historical violence. When such words are made taboo, they may in fact have greater potency. They then enter the world of coded messages, "dog whistles" only meant for those of like values. When we no longer accept the legitimacy of explicit language, we have not eliminated the underlying causes of such expressions or the sentiments behind them. We now have transformed the function of language, from an ever evolving medium for advancing knowledge, to a collection of phrases to be used for eliciting emotional response.

"Framing" is the current word that is used for this activity, this "language as propaganda." It is the stuff of the practice of politics but not of the understanding of political forces. It degrades language, the most definitive artifact of our Civilization, this tool that gave us the ability to understand the forces that shape our world. We are trading in this medium, this language, for something atavistic, a collection of symbols, a call to arms, a rallying to hatred of the outsider.

As with my working class friends at the Automat in the 1960s, who before saying a good word about blacks or Jews prefaced it by say, "I'm no lover of them," I feel similar pressure right on this site. Only the hated out-groups are different. These guys, had a strong need to be part of something that was defined by who was denigrated by their group, the regular Archy Bunker Americans; and it was so strong that they couldn't imagine that their friend Al, who they knew was one of them, was really one of them.

Dailykos note:

The need to belong is powerful. For me Dailykos was a rare venue of both friendship and intellectual stimulation. I had never found it before. Not in undergraduate school nor at Columbia University Graduate School. It was a wasteland, a high level vocational school, during the 1970s when I attended. I did have two friends, one a staunch Opus Dea Catholic and the other the most stalwart liberal. Both of them who were open to the most searching probing discussions. I write about them here, as they both just died within the last three months.

So, if the subtle changes of this new version of Dailykos makes it no longer my venue of intellectual stimulation and friendship, it is not a minor loss. It's damn serious for me. This was part of my identity, and those recs were little shots of endorphins that said "you belong here." It was so easy during the Bush years to get my daily fix, and now I really don't know how. Oh, yeah, you notice I'm just like those people who needed to be part of the anti-semite anti-black, anti-communist or any body, just so they could belong.

I just don't know how to do it anymore here. From the very top of Dailykos, as enshrined in the official guidelines, "Conservative" is conceptualized in a way similar to how a Jew was viewed during the run up to the final solution. Jews had been seen previously in Germany as a belief system, that could be changed like one's political party registration. Variations of Judaism were nurtured during this period, with versions that facilitated the rational exploration of religious functions. It was only with the evolution into the concept of being in the blood, that Jew hatred became the driving ideology of the perversion of Germany during the Nazi era.

And so use of "conservative talking points" is grounds for TR/HR which in excess can lead to banishment. The implication is that use of such words are inherently disruptive, a sign of out group status. Therefore making an argument that happens to be one generally espoused by conservatives, is not refuted on its merits, but because the person making it is identified, disclosed as being part of a hated group. It is sad to say that the official, not universal by any means, use of "conservative" is exactly the way the rabid right wing uses the word, "liberal." Once the source is identified, anything said by such out-groups are inherently to be attacked.

"Identity Politics" is usually used to describe race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation and other sociological entities. I see it right here, on dailykos, with the same dynamics. It could be that it is even more nefarious on this site, since the great potential is to bring together those of diverse backgrounds who should be able to expand each others perspectives. There is really a subtle, but important difference, it creating an umbrella group to unite disparate identities, which is what political parties do in a two party system, and what I'm talking about.

A political party has a goal, which is limited to use language as a tool to sell their organization as the best option available to each customer. With this goal, framing, glorifying the goals of their group and vilifying the opposition is their job description. It is not in the tradition of "value free" academic exploration of social historical forces, at all. It is a specific application of the tools of propaganda and public relations. Just as a successful lawyer must subordinate his/her goal of a better society to zealously advocate for their client, so those who write to advance a political party, must negate a wider understanding that their party may be harmful on some dimension.

Dailykos is defined clearly as having the purpose of "elected more and better Democrats." Implementation of this goal has always been mediated by users, those who had varying commitment to this goal, especially when it conflicted with larger insights. The new version has changed the format just enough that the exact degree of enforcement that this is an organ of the Democratic party is still to be determined. Will the roving band of TUs who act as antibodies to any sniff out talking points that signal an alien presence gain predominance?

Orthodoxy never appealed to me as a religion or a political movement. Life if much too complex and easy answers are always illusory. How did I ever get so attached to a web site that defines itself by one of a two party system, and tolerates if not endorsing rejection of all perspectives from the other side. The answer lies in the actual composition of the users, and in my own personal need to get what I could out of it.

It is telling that as of now this is only posting in my private web site.

The loss of a friend

2010-12-02T12:56:00.000-08:00

Last night I got a strange email from a tennis friend, simply saying to meet him at the club that that I had quit a year ago. He said it was important and gave no details. I quit the club for many reasons, but one of them was because of a man who had a part time job there. He was about my age, vintage 1940, who became an unlikely friend.

Jon was a devout Catholic, Opus Dei variety which means condemning the debasement of tradition such as the modernization of the mass. His politics matched his faith, ultra conservative, meaning a staunch supporter of those such as Joe McCarthy, Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley.

I am a left leaning secular Jew, yet we connected on many levels. You can tell a lot about someone when you play tennis with them. Jon was always kind, not only to me but my wife who is not a strong player. We used to have evening get togethers and he always made her feel welcome, even though she may have made more unforced errors than most.

And then we talked politics. He expanding my thinking, and there was a certain cordiality in interacting this this man, a throwback who didn't have a television, and actually read books. He was born into an Irish household, and he told me how his father, a wealthy gambler, fell apart when his wife, Jon's mother, died at an early age. With less money they struggled to get by.

He once brought in a cassette tape from the station in L.A. where he was the D.J. of a Spanish Language program. He was part of the tennis gambling crowd of the 50s and 60s, lead by Bobby Riggs, whom he would play on a regular basis, "always losing no matter how many games he spotted him" he said with a wry smile.

Jon downfall began out of an act of kindness. A man who regularly visited an orphanage in Mexico asked him if there were any old clothes in the lost and found box. Jon just grabbed the whole box and gave it to him. A few days latter when it was discovered that he had included some clothing that was being asked about, and he admitted what he did; there was a clash of wills. One person in accounting demanded that Jon apologize, but just hunkered down, and told her to "buzz off." This escalated, and always a bit of a drinker, he became more antagonistic.

I was there the Saturday he came in pretty loaded, and boldly said that he wasn't going to be pushed around by anyone. He said that he was going to quit, "the fucking job, and cursed out the owner whom he had known for decades, and who had kept him on even after such conflicts as this. But this time he had gone to far. I sat with him for a couple hours while he sobered up before I let him get into his car and drive home.

A few of us tried to keep in touch with him, having dinner at a pizza place once together. But a new polite person was hired to take his place. I quit and only dropped in occasionally as a guest, but I missed him, and the opportunity to just drop in when I had nothing to do and have a talk about religion, or politics, or history.

The letter had just arrived a few days before:

I'm sad to say that Jon K___ took his life on the afternoon on November 19th 2010. Jon came to stay a few days at our home, found a pistol that I kept in my bedroom and committed suicide.

It turns out that Jon had come into the club a few weeks prior asking for his old job back. I knew what that job meant to Jon, as it was reflected in the pleasure that he got out of our companionship. We both enjoyed each other, and when he was gone something was missing for me; but I had other options, other activities and other friends. He was now indigent, his pride and self respect being damaged beyond repair.

Life is amazingly fragile. For Jon, the good life was being part of a tennis club, where he worked for probably less than minimum wage, but was in the center of things. He made appointments, handled court allocation, and then filled in when we need a forth for doubles. And he had his integrity, his belief in God and those who fought the scourge of liberalism in this great country.

I don't believe in a soul; but I do believe in a certain spark of humanity that has the quality of transcending all that divides us. Jon never had any need to convince me of anything, nor did I of him. When we discussed issues, there was an intimacy inherent in sharing such divergent views, disguised so no one but we could really discern what was happening.

If he were around I would challenge him on one tenet of his church's teaching, that committing suicide is a mortal sin that deprives one of a heavenly after life. I would argue that no God worthy of reverence would ever be so cruel as to punish someone for escaping unremitting suffering. I don't think I would have convinced him, even though I know that I'm right.

Darwin v. Intelligent Design: you won't guess who wins

2010-11-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

Many years ago I devised this way of explaining, actually demonstrating, the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. First the atheist: in a strong firm voice I pronounce, "There is no God." Now to describe an agnostic, I lower my voice, get closer to the listener and softly intone, "There is no God."

I don't buy the traditional distinction being one of degree of certainty. If one doesn't know, then they are denying the validity of His holy word, which is an act of rejection. I would say the difference is in emphasis, how strongly one feels offended, or threatened by those who believe in God. I have had no problem describing myself as an atheist, and expressing this in public, in a loud clear voice.

One manifestation of my atheism is my opposition to to teaching the controversy over "Intelligent design" in public schools. So, I was encouraged by the Dover decision rejecting this in 2005. In this case and other discussions of this issue, Intelligent Design was always contrasted with Darwinism, the principles defined in his 1859 book, "Origin of the Species"

Let me back up a bit. Several months ago, at the time that I was reading a fascinating book, Life Ascending" on current research in molecular bio chemistry, with a focus on evolution, I read an announcement of an open house at the nearby "Creation Museum." I cleared the day, and decided to attend. This is a museum dedicated to advancing "young earth creationism" based on the conviction that the universe is no more than 7000 years old and created in seven 24 hour days.

After the first lecture by a biologist who presented a factual taxonomy of the pathogens, antigens, viruses and antibodies of the secondary immune system, I asked him a question. I forget what it was, but it was respectful of his religious belief since I felt that he showed humility in saying he was one of four that he knows who share it in the entire field. (This describes my response to the two lectures) As I was leaving I was approached by the man who had introduced the program, whom I learned was the sponsor of the museum, Tom Cantor. Those interested my interactions with this fascinating man may want to view this video blog that I created on a visit that we made to his antibody facility just south of the border in Tacate Mexico.

We live in a world of spin, predators and con artists. The most egregious scams are perpetrated by those of the same ethnic background as their marks, as they feel they are among family and make the mistake of trusting. And Tom and I are both from the same Jewish background. But if Tom is trying to scam me, it sure is overkill, as his financial success is no illusion.

I'm convinced that this man is only guilty of sincerely attempting to prevent my having a fate that will cause me eternal suffering. I'm also aware that his desire to bring me into the fold is also a confirmation of his faith, that although he expresses absolute certainty, must be subject to a degree of doubt.

With all of my hyper rational rejection of the supernatural, my decades of inculcation in religion being the opium of the masses, all of my identification with others of my perspective; the absolute sincerity of this man is having an effect on me.

The immediate effect is that I am no longer an ATHEIST, but am now an atheist. Yeah, there is a difference. The one concrete change that exemplifies this is my attitude toward "Intelligent Design. or I.D. " I did not read the full Dover decision, but I suspect that I.D. is not being presented by its advocates in the correct manner. Just as Charles Darwin first enunciated the principles of Evolution by Natural Selection, it appears that concurrent with this, he articulated the principles of what was to be known as Intelligent Design.

I now feel that I.D. should be taught in public schools, separated from science, based on the principles of
"Nonoverlapping Magisteria" as articulated by the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Here's where Charles Darwin defined this principle in the chapter "modes of transition" in "Origins of the Species":

It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye with a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous?

Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with spaces filled with fluid, and with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form.

Further we must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully preserving each which, under varied circumstances, in any way or in any degree, tends to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better one is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed.

In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?

This set the principle, that all that is discovered by science may, if one chooses, be viewed as the design of the Creator, with no impediment to understanding the processes of the natural process. This is now the explicit teaching of the Catholic church, with only the requirement in the belief that God, at some point intervened in merging a soul with the corporeal mantle.

This is not faithful enough for Tom, and it will be too much for many here, as it was for me before my recent experiences. But now I accept the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools, not as fact, but as a belief of many people that is consistent with scientific discovery. If it is taught it should not be as a refutation of science, but as something completely different, that neither adds or detracts from the scientific process of discovery.

I've undergone more changes. I now have a broader view of religion that includes both the benefits of traditional ones, along with the dangers of those secular institutions that inadvertently take on aspects of religions, the very worst aspects. It has even resulted in my conceptualization of the recent Health Care Law as promoting, and worse, establishment of a religion, as sketched out in this recent blog.

And in a way, I have gained an understanding why Tom, rare among those of his educational, ethnic and economic background, had embraced this particular strand of fundamentalist Christianity. Ironically, if he were of a more fitting progressive denomination he would have no need to expend the emotional effort to save me, and by doing so divulge so much of his own life.

Tom Cantor, having achieved a unique success of not only founding, but then managing a complex multinational science based enterprise, could be a member in high standing of the elite of our society. Yet, he chooses rather to expend his efforts, and a good deal of his wealth into what is a fringe, and ridiculed, interpretation of literal Christianity.

He is an aberration, a throwback, a mutation, but like the mutations that have formed all humans they have the nature of being Pleiotropic, meaning having multiple effects, some beneficial and others harmful. (Clue: it's the reason we all age and die.) This has narrowed his focus; he rejects not only the consensus of modern evolutionary science, but also the norm that one's success is defined by material wealth. He seems to have no secrets, as his openness to me were not the actions of one who calculates the risk-value of every interaction.

So, I can't think about this man, or even fundamentalist Christians in the same way I did before I met him. In fact I am holding back on some of the criticisms I have about his activities, mainly because he has heard them all before, and secondly I want to understand him better. And then there's the the story told by Woody Allen that explains how I get a certain deep pleasure out of Tom's effort to save me from eternal damnation. You've probably heard it:

The man goes to the shrink and say he's at his wits end, that his wife thinks she's a chicken, all the time, "Cluck, cluck, cluck" And the scratching, the clucking, it's driving me nuts. The doc say, why don't you just explain to her that she's a human, without wings or feathers, and certainly not a chicken. The man thinks for a minute and then confides, "I would, but we need the eggs."

.

We now have an Established Religion, and no one noticed it

2010-10-04T12:46:00.000-07:00

November 4, 2010

It was signed into law last year with great fanfare, yet no one made the connection.

Religion connotes a loose congeries of beliefs and practices, often associated with organized social-legal structures. I like this definition from WorldIQ.Com

One definition, sometimes called the "function-based approach," defines religion as any set of beliefs and practices that have the function of addressing the fundamental questions of human identity, ethics, death and the existence of the Divine (if any). This broad definition encompasses all systems of belief, including those that deny the existence of any god, those that affirm the existence of one God, those that affirm the existence of many gods, and those that pass on the question for lack of proof.

I would append the aspect of social-legal structures to the cited definition. While we have a conceptual hard line of what is a religion, actually in the United States this is defined, not by any agency of official religions, but by the Internal Revenue Service, which by recognition of an organization as a religion allows an array of exclusions from taxation. Scientology is the perfect example, as this is a certified religion based on I.R.S acceptance which leads to the United States international objections to other countries,such as Germany, that treat it as a cult.

Scientology does practice psychotherapy with impunity, with no requirement for the licensure of non-religious entities. This therapy is efficacious for emotional distress among many people, and by definition virtually all of those who voluntarily choose to belong to this church. It receives a subsidy from every taxpayer, as their status as a religion means they do not pay their share of the common cost of various services, public safety, eduction, national defense that secular groups pay in their taxes. But since we are not forced to directly pay for this church it does not breach the establishment clause.

Scientology psychotherapy is based on a simple biofeedback device, an E-meter, that measures what they believe to be elements of pathology, and by identifying and desensitizing them results in elimination of emotional distress. It is only effective on those who chose to participate, who have belief in the religion. It is a short term treatment modality probably as effective as the ministrations of Doctors of Psychology or Psychiatry, but only among believers.

Most of us have no problem distinguishing Scientology from the products and practices of what I will term the "Medical Industrial Complex.(MedIC)" This term includes physicians of all specialties, but also the institutions of treatment and research, associated professions of all levels, and various therapies and treatments. It is the entire two trillion dollar a year enterprise that the vast majority of Americans avail themselves of to various degrees. I use the term to be most inclusive, and also to focus on the similarity with the only other thing of this magnitude, the Military Industrial Complex.

Because we have conceptually separated them- we go to a hospital or we go to church; it may seem of little value to engage in this exercise, to explore the commonalities between what we consider Religion and the MedIC. For discussion purposes I want to conceive of MedIC most broadly, from your trusted family doctor, to the chiropractor who has never seen a spine that doesn't need adjustment, to the purveyor of pharmaseuticals. This MedIC has grown dramatically over the last six decades, largely due to advances in research that has allowed exploration and amelioration of the vast array of illnesses that previously had caused debility and death. From less than five percent of GDP when Truman first proposed universal health care, it now represents fifteen percent, and growing rapidly.

With this preface, let me assert, that the recently passed Affordable Health Care for America Act (Health Care Law) using the above definition of religion, breaches the first amendment stricture, "Congress shall make no law relating to the Establishment of Religion."

First let me dispel any simple refutations of my thesis. When injured in an auto accident, when afflicted by a stroke or heart attack, when faced with realization of chronic pain or weakness; seeking doctors, hospitals and medication, while sharing aspects of a religion, is beneficial to the individual and to society.. I am making a more nuanced argument, that the very acceptance of the MedIC that gets a heart attack victim to a hospital, expands a set of values that are the province of religious beliefs.

Religious Aspects of Medical Industrial Complex

This segment of a White House Bioethics Report, could a preamble to U.S. Medical care as religion

Attitudes toward Death and Mortality: An individual committed to the scientific struggle against aging and decline may be the least prepared for death, and the least willing to acknowledge its inevitability. Therefore, given that these technologies would not in fact achieve immortality, but only lengthen life, they would in effect make death even less bearable, and make their beneficiaries even more terrified of it and, in a sense, obsessed with it.

Fear of death is ubiquitous, as is aversion to suffering in ourselves and those we love. Other species may mourn their dead relatives, wolves and elephants come to mind, but none anticipate their own fates. All societies from time immemorial have had ways to deal with this knowledge, from modern religion, shamanism to Utopian visions that transcend our mortal existence. All of these also happen to entail a degree of acceptance, so that death is reinterpreted into something meaningful, transcendent, and as such, acceptable.

Only in recent times has this been changed, so that death and debility is seen as preventable, or at least able to be postponed until the distant future. We no longer believe in magic. We don't believe that a trip to the shrine of Lourds will allow the paralyzed to walk, the blind to see or cancer riven to be cured. Yet, we have not given up on faith, but rather changed its focus. Whatever our religious perspective, we have added a new tenet, that a modern health system can "save" us.

These metaphysical beliefs, in the guise of medical science that have been expanded under the Health Care Law have potential consequences that are rarely articulated, but have profound effects on political life and the future of America. And further, the rejection of this law by many Americans is not based on misinformation or distortions by partisan opponents, but are rooted in fact-based internalized constitutional traditions of this country.

Within the vast complexity of the law is this reference of to the religious metaphor that I am positing here.

RELIGIOUS CONSCIENCE EXEMPTION — Such term shall not include any individual for any month if such individual has in effect an exemption under section 1311(d)(4)(H) of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which certifies that such individual is a member of a recognized religious sect or division thereof described in section 1402(g)(1) and an adherent of established tenets or teachings of such sect or division as described in such section.

While the details of this clause are subject to regulations yet to be written, it is clear that the default religion, in the absence of membership in a different religion shall be that established by this law. Of course those who promote the MIC religion, claim that that it represents "truth" in this case verified by the secular God of "evidence based research." If this were the case, if this ever could be the case, my argument would be much more vulnerable.

While the literature on the failures of the Medical Industrial Complex, are abundant, rarely are they so well articulated as in this article by a physician epidemiologist, whose work has been taken seriously by those within the very system he criticizes.

Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.

This article is striking, but it shouldn't be, as Ionnidis's work only points out what should be obvious, that the mega institution that I call MIC has all of the pathologies of self interest that are found in any such vast endeavor, from the Catholic Church to the Military Industrial Complex. Just as those practicing Catholics, while angry at individual sexual predating Priests, still defend the institution, it is similar among the depredations of the "Church of MedIC."

An example is yesterday's article from the official defender of the faith, the New York Times, Genentech Offers Secret Rebates for Eye Drug It was on the first page, but it didn't get much attention from the readers, didn't make the most frequently blogged list, since this Genenteh is part of the priesthood, and the fact that they were inducing doctors, also priests, into charging medicare fifty times the cost of equally efficacious drugs....well, no big deal.

This is not an aberration, just a clear example of the entire MedIC not being anything like that which is presented by the Democratic Party in passing this bill. The image that was used to pass this legislation was "intelligent, humane, science based Democrats" opposed by "confused heartless, and mean spirited republicans." The promise that under this bill the MedIC would be rationalized and tamed by Government would be laughable, if it wasn't accepted by those who should know better. With the increased power, and the promotion of this legislation to the realm of religion, (yes, if not promising eternal life, damn near it with the proper medication) not only the benefits, but the excesses will be amplified.

My personal antipathy towards the Affordable Health Care Act goes even beyond the monumental waste of resources that it will incur. And as for the heart rending examples that are used to illustrate the benefit of this expansive law, I will posit without verification that 80% of clear cases where medical care would be beneficial could be provided at 20% of the ultimate cost of this vast legislation. The section on the recently passed law that would finance a large expansion of low cost clinics, as a parallel treatment resource with emergency rooms, would not have the adverse consequences of this law as now passed. The proper way to evaluate alternatives is not the myth of the most advanced care for all, but the options that are affordable without the adverse societal effects described here.

Government regulators don't have a chance against this behemoth, the MedIC enhanced by the steroids of the Health Care Act, any more than they did against banks writing absurd mortgages, or weapon manufacturers still selling mega dollar planes to protect Europe from the USSR. Regulatory Capture is ubiquitous, and will occur in Medical care with a vengeance, that will soon be as unstoppable as an attempt to stop building nuclear submarines.

Passage of the Health Care Act of 2010 was done under the banner of humanitarian egalitarianism, that just because someone is poor, he or she should not be denied all the benefits of modern medical science. To advance this economic reality was ignored, and grossly distorted to convince enough members of the single pivotal body of government, the Senate, to pass this bill. Serious objections were depicted as acceptance of scare tactics of the opposition, and were dismissed as such. Now both the federal court and the court of public opinion are weighing in, and indicating that they reject this legislation for reasons that are not based on misinformation at all, but a deeper understanding of its inevitable fiscal and societal consequences.

Good intentions do not make for good policy, as we should have learned when increased home ownership became a metric that obliterated the imperative of sound economic structures. So, the result is decreasing home ownership, and a seismic shock to the foundation of our legal-economic underpinning of home financing. I am a long time secular liberal, by instinct as far from the Tea Party as possible. Yet, my anger over this legislation is strong. It is only made more disturbing by the nature of the options in redressing the damage that has already been done.

Participatory Democracy, Encinitas Style v1.0

2010-09-22T13:48:00.001-07:00

Submission to Community Commentary

The Cardiff Forum for city council candidates held a few weeks ago was the setting of some serious drama, a real audience participation "reality show" with no commercials. There were hot local issues, mainly that of details of the large athletic park known as the Hall Property that has been simmering for years. For me this forum provided some closure on something that I had personally explored that, while only tangentially addressed by the city council, exposes the dynamics of this local body, along with insights into our state's perennial dysfunction.

The issue is a bill to amend the state penal code that will have several effects. First, it will divert funds from the criminal justice system that now are used to incarcerate violent felons, causing early release of even more of them, along with reducing all of the modalities that exist to counter their crimes. Second, it will prevent certain heinous sex crimes against children. The law, named after one such victim, Chelsea King, was passed without any serious evaluation these opposing effects. It was a classic populist movement, sparked by a primary human response to protect our most vulnerable from harm, then fueled by "yellow journalism" that stoked the outrage with daily reporting of this particular criminal activity, distorting it beyond any approximation of its actual rare incidence. And once the ball was picked up by a local politician, it became a crusade, imbued with the quality of being untouchable, and also irrational. Just as one's patriotism would have been placed at risk by challenging going to war to revenge 9-11 with a country that had nothing to do with it; considering whether this law to stop sexual predation would actually do so was simply not acceptable.

The closest our entire state came to such a dialog on Chelsea's law occurred at the Encinitas city council in response to a request from the sponsor of the bill to write a letter to the legislature endorsing it. Council member Maggie Houlihan, acknowledging the need to counter sexual offenses, brought up the myriad other criminal outrages that would be increased by funds diverted to this one crime, and suggested that the letter be broadened to incorporate such broader imperatives. It quickly devolved into a heated exchange with Jerome Stocks demanding that the letter not be altered at all, making his point by simply reading the letter out loud. When presiding officer Dan Dalager softly suggested the addition of two words, "in principle" to the letter, Stocks refused. Four members of the councils voted to pass the resolution, to send the letter as submitted by the bill's sponsor, including Dan Dalager.......but also Teresa Barth, the only member who had not participated in the debate.

This brings us back to the candidate's forum at Cardiff. Dan Dalager was attacked by many in the audience, as much for the recent revelations of questionable ethics as for his votes over his years in office. The Encinitas City Council, its members nominally without party identification, still tends to follow the left-right cultural divide. There is the Rotary Club faction, that of development, law enforcement and business interests; contrasted with the faction more interested in conservation, limited growth and open government. It happens to conveniently correspond to the three men being former and the two women the latter. With the election of the outspoken Barth four years ago, the division was exacerbated, with the majority Rotary faction going so far as to eliminate the traditional opportunity for two members to agendize an issue, to bring it to a vote.

As I had spoken twice at the council on the defects of both the process and the substance of Chelsea's law, the vision of Dalager accepting the rejection of compromise on the letter, even one that he proposed, was fresh in my mind. It was that, and the disenfranchisement of the "minority faction" even though one of them recieved the highest percentage of any candidate when she last ran, that rankled me. I concluded my long question by demanding he make a commitment right there that, should he be re-elected, such actions, ignoring the will of the electorate by ruling as a "Junta of three" would end.

Later when we walked together to his car he countered my depiction of his falling in line with his faction by saying he was the most frequent lone dissenting vote. When I pointed out that this was meaningless, since on pivotal issues he never failed to be a reliable vote for his faction whether, as illustrated by the Chelsea's Law Letter, he was even in support of it. As we ended our conversation there was a sense of connection, that he may have understood that the mandate of a non partisan city council is to reach consensus, that each member has been elected by a plurality of citizens and the majority has a duty to respectfully consider each member on every issue.

I was touched by Dan Dalager's defense of his accusation at the public meeting, specifically that his failure to include a loan he recieved was because the form excluded loans on primary residences, and he missed the part at the end that when it is from a private party it had to be reported.

The mystery of Barth's silence on the Chealsea's Law letter was also solved, as she announced right after Dalager responded to my question, "I was against sending that letter,but I knew that if I voted against the proposal, I would be accused of coddling child molesters. It was a setup." What she acknowledged could be echoed by large numbers of state legislators, all of whom like she, voted to advance this bill. Usually, votes are by party line in Sacramento, and in Washington, so perhaps it's natural that our legislature follows the pattern. While the passage of Chelsea's Law may be viewed as a welcome example of bi partisanship, as not a single individual of either party voted against it; actually it is just a variation of the same dynamics, of elected officials passing laws that will not incur the wrath of their constituents, in this case united against even seriously examining the difficult complex challenge of sex abuse penology.

The sense that I had that Dalager actually was responding to the anger of the audience, that he understood my accusation that he was part of a group that was denying democracy by shutting out elected council members from even placing items on the agenda was dispelled at the council meeting on October 13, where once again following the lead of Jerome Stocks, he voted to continue the power of three men to shut out the elected minority members. And as eloquently explained by Maggie, when an item is not on the agenda, council members have no access to the information gathering resources of city hall that the public is paying for so dearly.

It also turns out that Dalagers claim to be expecting a full report on the accusations against him by a state ethics agency was false, as a copy of a letter sent to him denying this was shown by a speaker at the council. This makes me doubt any confidence that I had in him. It makes me wonder whether his expanation about his not reporting the loan was accurate, whether the loan was on his primary residence or an investment property, something that trusting his word no longer has the meaning it did for me only a month ago.

While the more I learn about Encinitas City government, the more disturbing it becomes, the larger question is whether our structure is a major part of the problem.   We will continue to have a City Manager, with great power who is unresponsive to citizens, and all but the majority of council members. The present system makes it difficult to identify, and then through a series of elections, replace an existing faction. At the October 13 meeting Stocks, a member of the faction kept referring to the right of the Mayor to put any subject on the agenda, pretending that this position is as usually understood, the elected executive of city government. It was an illusion strongly dispelled by Maggie Houlihan, but still the assumption of the general public.

We need a city charter where a Mayor is elected as a full time job with reasonable compensation. It should be sought after by highly competant motivated people, with no term limits.   Such a person would be motivated to bring compensation down to competive private industry rates, making a high salary for such an effective Mayor the greatest investment that this city could ever make.

Two approaches to scientific creationism

2010-08-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

After attending an open house at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee California, I wrote the following letters to the two lecturers. They describe the substance of their presentation, and my reaction to how each represent a different approach to reconciling literal Christian beliefs with the secular consensus.
---------------
Joseph W. Francis Ph.D
Joe,

It was a pleasure attending your two lectures yesterday and speaking to you afterward. I just read your article, Peering into Darwin's Black Box cell division processes required for bacterial life, actually reading isn't the word, since the level of analysis was far beyond my ability to critically comprehend. What I did notice is that while you pointed out some of the defects in evolutionary assumptions you did not define an alternative explanation.

There was another speaker at the open house yesterday, John Baumgardner, also possessing a doctorate in a scientific disciple. It is worthwhile to contrast your differing approaches, (his described here) how each of you reconcile a personal belief in the literal Genesis "young earth" with mainstream explanations of evolution. This is vitally important, especially in this country, where such beliefs, while dismissed by the scientific community, are widely shared by the general public. In a democracy, the people ultimately trump expert knowledge, which in this case has severe consequences for the long term viability of our country.

Having recently renewed my exploration of microbiology, I was taken by the rigor of your presentation of the incredible complexity of life forms, of cells, bacteria, viruses and their amazing interactions. The explosion of knowledge of this organized chaos is far beyond our ability to comprehend, much less to systematize   You choose to approach this by organizing it as a purposeful manifestation of a higher being, of the work of God as articulated in the bible. But unlike the approach exemplified by Dr. Baumgardner, there was nothing in your presentation or in your article that required a belief in this biblical explanation.   You did not take the Bible as evidence that refuted current beliefs, but rather argued that the accepted approach to understanding the earliest manifestations of life were far from proven.

As someone who often finds himself outside of the mainstream, I support your willingness to maintain a position that is at variance with your academic peers. I also congratulate your excluding from your professional endeavors those positions that would require refuting legitimate understanding of your complex field of research.

Although I personally reject the dogma of organized religion, I do understand the function it serves in those who embrace it. It is a difficult path that you walk, that you do rather well. The unappreciated value of your position is a promotion of a deep skepticism of accepted scientific paradigms, eliciting a fluidity of thinking that leads to future breakthroughs that we can't even imagine.

------------------------------------------

John Baumgardner. Ph.D.
Dr. Baumgardner

I was in the audience for your first presentation on the "Mechanism behind the Genesis Flood" at the Santee Creation Museum yesterday. (rejecting carbon dating and concluding that billions of years of major tectonic shifts occurred during the 40 days of the Genesis flood)

This morning I did some research on your work, and I am impressed. As an atheist, I pride myself on my beliefs being based on reason.   Your work goes a long way as depicting some of the accepted principles of paleo-geology and evolution as being a bit short on this. It seems that your opposition is mostly against those who do not rigorously define the degree of evidence for their science. Much theory in the above fields is acknowledged as hypothetical, tentative explanations that require further research. Let me quote from your statement in the Los Alamos Debate on origins of life on your web site.

Is there anything in the laws of physics that suggests how such structures (first replicating life forms) might arise in a spontaneous fashion? The honest answer is simple. What we presently understand from thermodynamics and information theory argues persuasively they do not and cannot!

I am with you until the last two words, "and cannot." and would emphasis your words, "what we presently understand." If you had been writing a few centuries ago there would have been a myriad of research tools, material and intellectual, that you, and everyone else, would have said were inconceivable; which are now everyday tools of scientific discovery.

Here is my central objection to your work: While you rightly demand a rigorous level of proof for the assumptions of mainstream evolution science, you demand no such rigor for your alternative, a literal belief in the Bible. If the invention of life through random molecular interactions is, as you say, unlikely even to 10 to the minus 100 power, then do you not have some obligation to present a mechanism that would allow a super intelligence to have done this job? And when you have defined such a mechanism, to then evaluate whether it is of a higher likelihood than the exceedingly low probability of random molecular interaction now posited.

You do write of your personal reasons for becoming a Christian, yet this has no bearing on advancing a scientific theory. This is an explanation for a personal philosophy, a private solution to deep imperatives of human existence, that requires no evidence or even public affirmation. Your questioning the limits of understanding origins, along with the truisms that have been promulgated and accepted by the public, is both legitimate and valuable. However, replacing this limited product of the scientific ethos, an ethos that you have embraced in many ways, with a Chirst-Jehova belief is unsupportable.

You make the assumption that the lacunae of science-based explanation is an argument for the Biblical alternative. To this extent, although you gain credibility from your scientific academic credentials, you abandon the principles inherent in such certification in your promotion of your alternative explanation.

I look forward to an articulated hypothesis for your assertion that a supernatural entity created the world as adumbrated in a historic document called "the Bible." It should be based on at least the degree of verifiability and evidence that now exists for the accepted premises of evolution and paleo-geolgy,   Since you quote the late biologist Steven J. Gould in your work, perhaps it would be preferable that you accept his explanation of religion and science being "non overlapping magisteria" so that your religious beliefs, which I respect, and your science do not result in a cross contamination of both.

It is most unfortunate that your effort, your use of science to advance a premise that has no scientific support, has the unintended effect on children such as those in the yesterday's audience. To the degree it is accepted, it hinders their participation in the great adventure of our age, the scientific quest for understanding the most profound questions of our human existence.

Regards

A visit to Scantibodies Laboratories, Tecate Mexico

2010-08-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

Friday, October 23, 2010

I'm still sorting this out in my own mind, whether my host, the founder Tom Cantor was candidly baring his soul, or was about the most effective evangelical the world has ever known. Actually, it was both. I'm honored to have been treated to the full thrust of his VIP presentation for embracing his particular version of Christianity, and even though it was no sale, it was a transformational experience in many ways.

The trip started at the Santee facility of Scantibodies Laboratory where I first met Tom a month before an open house at the Creationism Museum, which he sponsors and is part of this complex.

The story of Scantibodies, Tom starting it with his wife in their garage in 1976 to grow to one of the major developers and producers of therapeutic and diagnostic antibodies is the archetype of the American financial success story. But Tom's story is different in many ways, as it intersects with the underside of corporate malfeasance, the ongoing struggle between Christian and secular dominance of our country, and an aspect of globalism that is not described in economic seminars.

It is a complex story with many facets that I was given a glimpse of during the time we spent together. I won't go into many of these details, and will just share a bit of this meaningful experience.   We took the back road to Tecate past unspoiled vistas of mountainous terrain, during which time Tom told me the story of how he took on Quest Diagnostics in a five year battle to end their use of a defective diagnostic test that cost the country hundreds of millions in Medicare reimbursements along with great human suffering. . I won't go into the details here, which are worth recounting for the preternatural persistence of Tom in an epic battle where he was ultimately rewarded the accolade of Whistle Blower of the year for 2009 by Taxpayers Against Fraud. Whistle blower is the wrong phrase of his concerted effort of hundreds of meetings and letters to officials at every level of drug enforcement. The story that he told me was confirmed in every detail in this description from the Department of Justice web site.

In anticipation of my trip to Mexico, I joked with some friends that he could hold me hostage unless I succumbed to his evangelizing efforts, and got one man to promise to rescue me. When we walked across the border, and I shared my concern laughingly to Tom, I wasn't reassured when he told me that we were going to be picked up in an armored car. He wasn't kidding, as the SUV that came for us was reinforced with a ton of steel plating and one inch thick bulletproof glass, as seen here.

In a few minutes we were at the gate of the industrial park where the following two videos allows you to share my introduction to the facility, which is a combination of the latest in bio-technology and a living biblical museum, for example the dimensions of the building coinciding with the best guess of those of Noah's Ark, as articulate in Genesis.

Those trucks will leave the bay and go directly to New Jersey as if there were no international border as we see the effect of NAFTA at work.   This did not make Lou Dobbs happy when it opened, and was a reason that the U.S. President kept a low profile at the event. Now to the front, where we start to see the multifaceted nature of this facility.

The walk from the driveway to the lobby is punctuated with biblical references, and Tom's personal dedication to making this enterprise a part of his celebration of his personal salvation.   What follows shows more than Tom's rejection of the norm of separation between business and religion;, but his affirmation to stand boldly on the edifice of commerce to proclaim both his and His message

Make no mistake, this building in the dimensions of an ark whose reality is doubted by most scientists incorporates the highest level of bio technical, environmental and construction technology. If there were ever a world wide pandemic, being in this facility in a poor Mexican city may be the safest location in the world.   Scantibodies produces antibodies for human therapy and testing which require a host, in this case tens of thousands of mice, to be carefully bred and protected from adventitious pathogens. To this end this facility must be hyper sterile. This will be touched on in the next videos, as we jump two millenia from biblical artifacts to explore this most advanced medical therapeutics facility in Mexico.

We now go past the vivarium, with this video that describes some of the critical infrastructure. Near the end you will share the discovery of a creature, doubted to exist, that has recieved a great deal of press during this mid term election of 2010.

We walked through the private elementary school for the children of employees as well as the public, and Tom described the bible centered approach that is used, with techniques to involve the children on multiple levels. Then we went through a door that figuratively separated church and state, creationism from established science and we were upon a space being prepared for a 2000 seat church. He then walked me through the backstage facilities for those who were taking the step to proclaim their acceptance of Christ in the form of baptism, complete with private conference rooms, changing areas and processional walkway to the public immersion in the sanctified water of redemption.

This was only an abbreviated version of this trip, and I hardly touched on the spiritual emotional changes that I underwent. For starters, I don't think I've ever even used the word spiritual in a sentence describing myself, they just didn't go with this hyper realist atheist. I guess the final stop was the convincer that this was not a sham, that the good vibrations I felt among all the employees from the packaging machine operators to the designers of ultra high security biolabs was genuine. It was a visit to the nursery, where the toddlers of workers spent the day.   Three year olds are either happy or not. They don't do pretend, unless they are in the mood to. Here the final video of them.

Yeah, I'm getting a bit giddy. It had been a long day.

And then, the drive to the border, the walk through customs, and we were on the way home.   I was a bit intoxicated by the whole thing.   For this day, not only was I a part of the unique community of Scantibodies Tecante, but of all of Christiandom. For this day, I was not the Jew, later to be the atheist, the one who was different. For this day I was with the Ur-Christian, who espoused the exact words of Jesus and boldly plastered them upon the walls of his monument to God and to Mamon. If he made money, if his persistence in fighting Quest to get them to stop causing untold suffering resulted in a pot of Gold, it was to be put into this effort to prevent suffering. He would marshal his energy for the "little job of saving lives and the big job of saving souls."

But the transformation he offered me was not to take hold. I was not to be born again, any more than my brain was to be transported into one of those mice. For me, both were equally illusory. But I have a new found respect for illusion, for belief. It sure had one hell of an effect in motivating Tom Cantor to create something that should never have been possible. Someone with a BA in chemistry doesn't build an international biotechnology enterprise, or take on the largest diagnostic testing company in the country, and win to the tune of their forking over a third of a billion dollars to the feds.

That morning before we had driven to Tecate, Tom showed me his new building in El Cahon. There he is building a facility to draw blood plasma from four hundred people a day to produce antibodies that he is hoping, betting a bundle, will result in a cure for HIV/AIDS. No one else thinks it will work, any more than they thought he could defeat Quest pharmaceutical, and replace their defective test with his antibodies as the new standard for monitoring treatment of hyperthyroidism.

I think it's a long shot, but from what I've learned about this man, I wouldn't bet against him.

©2010 Al Rodbell
Reference: Letters to speakers at Creation Museum open house

Court Confrontation

2010-06-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

Actually this is about a Tennis Court Confrontation, one that came close to becoming a physical altercation. It's worth sharing with those who were there, and those who know me personally, and even some on this site, (Dailykos) who just know me from my user name, ARODB.

Although it could be seen as a trivial argument among two people, it illustrated some rather important issues that have consumed our country, those of race, class and the ongoing effort to forge a society where in spite of our inherent conflicts, we manage to muddle through. It began on a public tennis court on a beautiful Sunday morning in a small Southern California city.
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"Stentorian." For those interested in the fine points of this word, meaning "loud voice" here's the list of synonyms from Merriam Webster. I have such a voice, one that I use frequently while playing tennis. So, I start this tale with an admission of guilt, but quickly follow by a general defense, which is the game requires such a voice at times.

When a ball is served and it is "out" it must be called so immediately in sufficient volume that the server knows that it is a "fault." And there are other such out calls, along with the score to be called loudly enough to be heard clearly seventy feet away, in many cases over considerable background noise. But there are other shouts that are not in the rule book, such as after a highly competitive exchange of strokes, with increasingly acrobatic parries and returns, and then your partner chases down a ball that he manages to hit with a running stroke that lands right over the net on the opponents side on the line to win the point, and in exultation, and relief, I shout, "Fantastic shot!"

While he and I give each other high fives and catch our breaths, and all four of us on the court have lost the count of the game during the exchange, the noise of the mutually expressed pleasure happens to be traveling beyond the courts. Sunday it was heard by a man (call him Richard) who had heard these sounds before, many times before, pretty early in the morning for him since he had been up with a sick relative, and felt that the noise that he had been hearing went beyond what was necessary, and finally he had taken enough.

He walked out of his house, across the street, into the play area ignoring the ongoing games, to one person, the source of the disturbance, explaining the effect of the noise on him personally, and accusing this individual of being the sole source of this disturbance, reinforced by his avowal that he had heard his own friends on the courts telling him to be quiet. It was I whom he was addressing through the chain link fence, with his twelve year old son at his side.

Although I admit I am loud, I knew that the person who had been really loud over the last few weeks, to the point that many players did ask him to be quiet, wasn't there at the time, as I tried to explain to Richard. But, he didn't accept my explanation, and continued to accuse me of personally being the cause of his family's disturbance, and asserting that it was only his reasonableness that deterred his calling the police on me. Finally I told him enough is enough, that I got his message; and started move away to resume play.

But this was not acceptable to him, so he started to walk around the fence to approach me, and as he did I picked up my tennis racket and told him not to come forward, that I would not be threatened and would use this to defend myself.

Now to take a step back to give a larger picture. This took place in a suburb of Coastal San Diego County in a public school facility used by the community. This small city happens to be mostly White, as were all of the players on the court, and the neighbor, Richard, happened to be part of a demographic of less than a single percent of the population, African American.

As he walked around the fence to approach me, one man blocked his way, and others repeated my statement that I had not be the person that he claimed to have heard repeatedly. But there was no vigorous defense, except for one man, an older guy, (I'll call him Jeff) who came of age far before Political Correctness was in anyone's vocabulary. Others were somewhat stunned by what was unfolding, and while a few tried to correct the premises of his anger only Jeff was forceful enough to point out the obvious, that now it was Richard who was "disturbing the peace."

Finally with a few harsh words in my direction, Richard walked away past the gate and on to the street. I attempted to to resume playing, but I was too shaken, so I picked up my tennis case and walked after him. Seeing him a distance away, I called out to him, "Hey, stop, lets talk about this." Realizing that I had brandished my racket previously as a weapon, I put my case down. He looked back and walked back toward me.

Now it was face to face, no audience, just two guys talking. The first thing I said is that I was sorry if I disturbed him, and then I described how I once lived near an elementary school, and became amazed at the volume of a few hundred children during recess. As he softened I told him how when I met a family with a child in the school I told the kid in mock seriousness that he should ask all the other kids to be quiet during recess.

His anger was quickly dissipated, as I shared other times when I had been in situations like his and felt the same anger. During his initial rant at me on the courts he pointed out how he paid taxes for these facilities, but didn't begrudge it because he valued public recreation, pointing to his son who was on his middle school tennis team.

With that, I pointed out that I also valued public courts, that the very courts that his son uses had been slated to be privatized when I found out about the plan. I told him that he can look up a couple of OpEds in two local papers that I had written that first opposed the privatization, and described my speaking at City Council to have successfully helped keep the courts open and free-so far.

As the conversation continued, it would be hard for anyone who had passed by to believe that fifteen minutes before, these two men had come close to a physical altercation. As we were wrapping up, after acknowledging that he played tennis himself, I invited him to join us. I can still savor the smile on his face from this invitation.
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This experience has elicited a cascade of thoughts and feeling for me. Well into our conversation after telling him my own experiences with noise annoyances, Richard said with a smile, "you and I are more alike than you realize" That's true on many levels.

Only two weeks before around ten on a Saturday night, from a more rural area behind my yard my wife and I heard the sharp sound of speakers at what I would guess was originally in the 130 decibel level, blasting a particular genre of music, obscene rap, which is not to my taste. It was a clear night and the sound probably could have been heard for miles. I called 911, first telling them it was not an emergency to get the general number. After finally reaching an operator I explained the situation, telling the operator that although I don't have the exact location, "tell the deputy to open his window, and he won't miss it."

As the time went on, and noise continued unabated, I was considering getting in my car finding the house and going inside with the very same anger that I had been the recipient of Sunday, remarking to my wife, "If I do this, it will become a 911 emergency." I didn't care that it was a party with dozens of people, who in party mode were oblivious, if not contemptuous, of those whom they were annoying. I was just angry. Luckily I didn't have to test this out, as before long the noise ended abruptly, as I assume the police, having no trouble locating the source resolved the situation.

Yeah. Richard and I had many things in common, but also differences. We still live in a segregated society even after the half century of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. I can go weeks without interacting with an African American, and when I do, that is the salient quality, at least initially, that I'm aware of. Far from the ideal of a color blind society, we still have a society that in all ways except among certain professions, are separate and far from equal.
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While this is an aside, I have to include this somewhere in this essay. Richard was convinced that it had been I who had been the sole voice of disturbance for many weeks. He recognized my voice, and I probably was the loudest person there that morning, but as confirmed by several people, including K. the organizer, it was the other person whom people had told to be quiet. It was a case of mistaken identity. In this situation it culminated in my bruised feeling, and an aborted physical confrontation. But such faulty identifications, especially across races often have more dire effects, such as convictions of felony charges based on just the certainty that Richard had of my "guilt." Strong emotions affect these perceptions, and the person, in this case usually a white person identifying a black, are as certain in their identification, as Richard was in his.

Perhaps it is awareness of this, along with a myriad of other injustices that are still built into our society that cause those other players mostly to be mute, not to come to the defense of this white man against a black man, since whatever the circumstances in this case, even in this conservative area, there were enough other things for Richard to be angry about that were best left unaddressed.
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Recreational tennis can be a cruel experience, or more accurately, reflect the inherent injustice of life, as in some people being endowed with attributes that others have less of, in this case athletic ability. Tennis is also a painful reminder of the cruel realities of aging, as even the best players lose their speed and reflexes, and then something rather terrible happens, they are no longer desired as players. There are ways that that this is conveyed; the call to join a game that never comes, or noticing that a new set has just started and somehow you were excluded.

Every player is vulnerable to this rejection, which among many is simply accepted as the person moves down a notch to others of comparable skill. It is this vulnerability that was sensitized when Richard, rather than a general complaint about noise from the courts, accused me of personally being the source of the disturbance, of being inconsiderate to the point of causing not only his discomfort, but that of his family, some of whom were ill, in his home. His accusation, only slightly refuted by some in the courts, since all play had stopped during the argument, could have been construed as a zoning issue of allowing private homes fifty feet from a playground. But there were other, more primal emotions, in the fore at that time.

When I walked after Richard it was not so much anger at him, but disgust with my fellow players. They knew that it wasn't me who had been the persistent cause of his anger, although I was one of many who had made noise. In fact our system of round robin play requires all four people on court one to shout "Time" when their game is over, to be heard by everyone in the complex. Perhaps seeing Richard's anger most in the group felt a certain relief that there was to be no collective responsibility, but Al was going to take the hit, justified by "he is kinda loud after all."

Only Jeff, with his lack of concern that he be seen as racist, spoke sternly to Richard, saying that his confrontational attitude was not appropriate. Ironically, it was Jeff's support that allowed me to reach out to Richard, as it lessened the sense of ostracism that I was starting to feel among the group that after a year I had started to consider friends. It was Jeff, the "racist" who was able to go beyond race, and to speak his mind to a black man who later tacitly admitted was overreacting and misdirecting his anger.

I do hope that Richard shows up next week and joins us. I also hope that he is up to our level, but not too much above it, as we have limited court capacity; and I'm just a middling player myself who is fighting off the ravages of decades flying by. And I also hope that when I make a rare great point, that he lifts his voice in appreciation, spreading the joy and pleasure of the game that, at it's best transcends gender, age, race and everything else, in the simple fun of winning a set of this game that, at least for a moment, provides surcease from all existential pain.

Facial Features of Dangerous Criminals

2010-06-05T23:00:00.000-07:00

A little before 1 PM today I got home from the grocery store after playing tennis in the morning. When I checked my email I was struck by this listing of events:

SPECIAL EVENTS—from newsletter of Encinitas Library

Facial Features of Dangerous Criminals

Saturday, June 5
2-4pm

Each facial feature has a corresponding psychological interpretation that will reveal a person’s true inner nature. Learn about specific visual features that will help you protect your family, date safely on the internet, and gain more of an understanding of news and politics. Barbara Roberts will teach you the patterns in body-mind psychological assessment that she’s seen on 6,000 people’s faces in her 20 years of practice. More information at FaceReading1.com

Having spent three years doing graduate work in Social Psychology, while I never did my dissertation, I did learn quite a bit about human behavior, enough to know that there are no distinctive facial features of Dangerous Criminals, other than perhaps a tattoo of a gang insignia.

This was an offering of the public library of my city, one that I have participated as a citizen in it's governance and had a degree of involvement with. The clock was running, as I was a ten minute drive from the library, and needed to change and shower from tennis. First thing is I went on the speakers web site, and it got worse. Here's a video sample of her "science," applied to O.J. Simpson.

I was running out of time, as I was thinking of how I would respond, whether I would confront her as she was speaking, or try to be more reserved, I wrote the following letter that I decided to give to the highest level person on duty at the library:

There is a point when good old fashion hokum crosses a line and become a danger to society, to the people who believe in the nonsense being spouted. This appears to be the case for Barbara Roberts, who has gone from claiming that she has a system to read faces to allow for financial and romantic success to something much more serious.

She was featured at a municipal library, Encinitas California with the headline: Facial Features of Dangerous Criminals. She also alludes to vague psychological and medical credentials, such as a phi beta kappa in Social Psychology. She may have a Phi Beta Kapa, but it is not IN social psychology. She seems to have achieved a BA in these areas with no advanced training at all.

Her Internet site describes her system as “science” yet the essential element of science is verifiability, that the conclusions are subject to objective critical review. There is no evidence at all that her “facial reading” is even in this tradition, much less accepted. Actually it is too silly to even be called “pseudo science”

The greatest danger is that those who actually believe that they are gaining scientific expertise are the same people who could end up on juries, deciding the fate of those accused of crimes. Such people could use these tools to help them decide guilt or innocence, without knowing that they are absolutely without any scientific support. Innocent people will be jailed or worse, because of Ms. Roberts nonsense.

One would have to question the ethics of someone who would perpetrate such a false sense of being able to understand the criminal tendencies of an individual. Based on her claims it is meant to assure a parent that the person they entrust their child with is safe, or a women that an Internet dating connection is not a danger. If taken seriously this person could cause serious harm, and more so, since it seems that she has been validated by an official at the city of Encinitas.

P.T. Barnum was right about a sucker being born every minute. But this person who is taking advantage of this truism, could be causing more harm than she imagines.

I got to the library exactly as the talk was beginning, gave my letter to the librarian and entered the auditorium. The first part of the presentation was innocuous enough, a variation of palm reading, tarot cards or astrological charting. She brought a few women to the front,( only two others of the thirty three in attendance were men,) and gave the standard personality evaluations for these venues such as, "You often feel disappointed in life, but you manage to keep on trying" or "sometimes you have difficulty making decisions and after you do often regret it." In other words every variation of "face reading" were the universal qualities of human nature, give in a way that seems like personal insight.

As she said herself, her career began with advising women in areas of "Love, Sex, and Money” Only later did she expand into something of much greater seriousness, and where her exaggeration of her credentials and absurd "teachings" can have life altering effects.

I had to make sure that my concern about these people who now feel that the shape of an ear, or the whites of the eye can be the signal of a dangerous criminal with "95% accuracy" was valid. So, gently, when she asked for questions I broached the issue. Taking careful notes, here's the gist of the conversation:

AR (arodb): This would seem to be useful if somebody were on a jury with a really tough case and you hear stuff from both sides and if you have these cues I guess that could help a jury decide......

..... people who have internalized and learned your material, they could be better jurors.

BR: They could be better jurors or better jury selectors (a profession that advises lawyers on selecting jurors).

AR: No, jurors, I'm talking about people who are jurors.

BR: Could be. Well, I think the bottom line of face reading is whether you're a juror or you're working with your teenager or working to rear a child or you're dating or you're trying to get along with your boss, it helps you to see people clearly, know where they're coming from and know what they're capable of. So it would be great for a juror.

AR: It would be. They would have a better idea. You know sometimes the evidence is unclear. So they would be able to tell.

BR: Sure. Absolutely. (spoken with a strong voice)

AR: Thank you very much.

At the end of the second part, on Criminology, where she went into excruciating details of the facial characteristics that betray criminal minds. Mustaches were important. Anyone who had a little mustache like Hitler is a bad man. And rapists tend to have mustaches that are a quarter inch below the top of the upper lip. An oddly shaped ear is another giveaway. These were all accompanied by a picture book that she was selling, including one of Jesus Christ illustrating features representing pure goodness.

This would all be easy to dismiss as beyond absurdity, yet the books that Ms. Roberts has written on this subject have been quite popular, and her audience is amplified far beyond little gatherings such as this, being a frequent guest on local and national television. Actually, the experience was frightening, not for my personal safety, but it was chilling to be surrounded by seemingly intelligent individuals who actually bought into this inanity.

Since I was there, I felt the least I could do was connect with Ms. Roberts on a personal level. So, as the program was wrapping up and she asked for questions or comments, with a calm respectful voice, I started off by saying that I admire her, that she has followed the American Dream of finding her niche and creating a career. Then I told her my concerns, in these words:

Most of what you do is in areas of love, money and relationships. What disturbs me very much is that in our county everyone here is a potential juror. Everyone here could be looking at a person on the dock to try to find out whether he is someone who deserves to go to jail for a long time or even be executed. You are claiming, erroneously, that you have tools that will aid these people. This is not the place to go into a debate on the details, but unfortunately I don't know whether you are even aware of the potential damage you could be doing.

She listened intently, without any attempt to refute my comments. I continued, after responding to some members of the audience, who were surprised and interested in my words

You mentioned that one sign of a character defect is that the left eye shifts outward. When I was 12 years old, and you can still look at my eye and I can make it shift out, but my mother, bless her soul, took me to a specialist who helped me control it. Whatever my personality flaws I can attest that controlling this problem, amblyopia, has absolutely no effect on my character.

As I walked out I checked with the librarian whom I gave my letter, who assured me that it will be passed up the chain to the person who made this booking. She read it and understood my point clearly. She told me that Roberts had given two earlier talks on the "fun" aspects of face reading, and that this topic may have slipped by. I'll be looking for a response from whomever did the booking.

And that was it. It was 3:45 and I was on my way home.

There are many problems in this world, a few that I feel I have some insight into, but no way to make a difference about them. But this time, by acting on my instincts, it's just possible that this particular woman will always wonder whether there will be another person like me in the audience, or watching her TV appearance, who will point out the absurdity and the danger of what she is promulgating.

Let her stick to her fun specialty, giving her followers some sense of control over “Love, Sex, and Money” and stay away from identifying "dangerous criminals" and I would wish her all the luck in the world.
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Addendum: A few days latter I got a call from the local branch assistant librarian who dismissed my letter with, "You didn't have to attend the event." I went further connecting to the main office of the library, and recieved this considerate letter:

Mr. Rodbell,

Thanks for your letter and please accept my apology for being so late in responding to your concern: I've been off for some days.

I can see your point regarding the appearance of a scientific approach in a program that is clearly not based on science. While I have not attended this particular program myself, and people do seem to enjoy it, the library has a responsibility to present facts accurately while providing materials and programs that express many points of view. Of course there are no doubt many materials in the library that are unscientific, and we do many programs simply for entertainment, but your concern brings up an issue with this particular event I would like to look into further.

Thanks again for bringing this to my attention.

--Ruth

Ruth Ketchum

So, perhaps there will be less pseudo science in the library, which was certainly worth the effort.

End of Life Care in America

2010-05-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

(This essay appeared in Dailykos blog with multiple comments for those interrested)

This is a review, more of a strong recommendation for reading a long article in New Yorker Magazine "Letting Go, What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?" by Atul Gawand on end of life medical care. It is well researched, written by a physician who follows several individuals facing death from terminal cancer. While this depressing subject is systematically ignored, for many reasons it must not continue to be so. I am writing this because I learned important information that is contrary to what I thought about the Hospice movement, and how it is handled under Medicare.

This article does not focus on the fiscal effects of end of life care, as important as this is since the current system is far beyond this nation's financial ability to maintain. Written by a physician, he writes with both a professional and a human sensitivity. While there is a natural aversion for individuals to face their own, or loved one's, impending death, one of the tragedies that has exacerbated the inherent difficulty of the subject is it's being distorted for partisan political purposes. As a person who did considerable research resulting in serious objections to the recently passed Health Reform, this article describes one laudable, and actually cost saving provision that encourages primary physicians to discuss this issue with their Medicare patients. This became part of the attack by partisan opponents, decried by many as a foot in the door for "Death Panels."

For those who don't read the long article, I will cover a few of the points that were most important. The writer introduces the subject with:

(pp 4) Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer. When Cox was transferred to hospice care, her doctors thought that she wouldn’t live much longer than a few weeks. With the supportive hospice therapy she received, she had already lived for a year.

Hospice has tried to offer a new ideal for how we die. Although not everyone has embraced its rituals, those who have are helping to negotiate an ars moriendi for our age. But doing so represents a struggle—not only against suffering but also against the seemingly unstoppable momentum of medical treatment.

Dr. Gawand does not place himself above the pressures that militate for treatment beyond objective reason. He describes his own experience, this time in his role as a surgeon. It was with one the patient followed for the article, a women named, Sara Monopoli, in her thirties whose terminal cancer was discovered shortly before giving birth to her first child:

Ealier that summer, a PET scan had revealed that, in addition to her lung cancer, she also had thyroid cancer, which had spread to the lymph nodes of her neck, and I was called in to decide whether to operate. This second, unrelated cancer was in fact operable. But thyroid cancers take years to become lethal. Her lung cancer would almost certainly end her life long before her thyroid cancer caused any trouble. Given the extent of the surgery that would have been required, and the potential complications, the best course was to do nothing. But explaining my reasoning to Sara meant confronting the mortality of her lung cancer, something that I felt ill prepared to do. (Eventually he said:) We could monitor the thyroid cancer and plan surgery in a few months.

I saw her every six weeks, and noted her physical decline from one visit to the next. Yet, even in a wheelchair, Sara would always arrive smiling, makeup on and bangs bobby-pinned out of her eyes. She’d find small things to laugh about, like the tubes that created strange protuberances under her dress. She was ready to try anything, and I found myself focusing on the news about experimental therapies for her lung cancer. After one of her chemotherapies seemed to shrink the thyroid cancer slightly, I even raised with her the possibility that an experimental therapy could work against both her cancers, which was sheer fantasy. Discussing a fantasy was easier—less emotional, less explosive, less prone to misunderstanding—than discussing what was happening before my eyes.

Under Medicare, to receive Hospice care one has to agree to forgo aggressive treatment. In surveys this is appreciated by those in their final months, and their families suffered less, including measurable indexes of depression. Much of the article goes into the details of this type of treatment. The following experiment by a private insurer went further, with unexpected result that has serious implications on the the fiscal and individual level

(pp8) In late 2004, executives at Aetna, the insurance company, started an experiment. They knew that only a small percentage of the terminally ill ever halted efforts at curative treatment and enrolled in hospice, and that, when they did, it was usually not until the very end. So Aetna decided to let a group of policyholders with a life expectancy of less than a year receive hospice services without forgoing other treatments. A patient like Sara Monopoli could continue to try chemotherapy and radiation, and go to the hospital when she wished—but also have a hospice team at home focusing on what she needed for the best possible life now and for that morning when she might wake up unable to breathe. A two-year study of this “concurrent care” program found that enrolled patients were much more likely to use hospice: the figure leaped from twenty-six per cent to seventy per cent. That was no surprise, since they weren’t forced to give up anything. The surprising result was that they did give up things. They visited the emergency room almost half as often as the control patients did. Their use of hospitals and I.C.U.s dropped by more than two-thirds. Over-all costs fell by almost a quarter.

snip-

Among elderly patients, use of intensive-care units fell by more than eighty-five per cent. Satisfaction scores went way up. What was going on here? The program’s leaders had the impression that they had simply given patients someone experienced and knowledgeable to talk to about their daily needs. And somehow that was enough—just talking.

The marshaling of the most advanced technology for medical care creates issues that we as a society have managed to ignore. We are a religious people, and too easily ascribe to a higher being the right to determine when life should end. And that "higher being" is as often wearing a white coat with a stethoscope as he is a clerical robes. This article gives some practical information on those facing these painful decisions for themselves or loved ones, and raises larger questions that we must answer as a society.
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Addenda:

Here is a previous diary from Dailykos about an article by this author looking at the business side of medicine that shapes these excessive treatments.

During the HCR debate I wrote this essay, that gives some of the roots causing treatment for hopeless cases. I paraphrased the conclusion of a White House Bio-ethics report that expresses the underlying thinking

Modern medical advances make death and debility seem no longer inevitable, and as such, even less bearable. As we learn of both the reality and the myths of such advances, those who fear being denied them become terrified, and at times, enraged. The stakes are high, and getting higher as the previously mysterious causes of death and disease start to be understood, with the growing real prospect of intervention.

Paul's Last Message

2010-02-20T16:45:00.000-08:00

This is for the friends and family of Paul Newman.

I'm writing this as a memento of a man whom I knew only a short time, perhaps getting together a dozen times during the last six months of his life. After he passed away, I came across a message of his that I had kept on my cell phone that I shared with Augusta, and wanted to make it available for those who knew and loved him.

Here are his words, with a background view overlooking Rancho Santa Fe.

It's kind of strange to say that I miss someone who I had known for such a short time. ,  He and I are pretty intense guys, and while he was overwhelming to many, to me he was engaging.   His passions were matched by the depth of grounding in his opinions, always open to new perspectives even if they were not his own. We were both at Columbia University at about the same time. He studying Law, and I Graduate Psychology, neither of us to finish our professional degrees. That's a bond that only those who share it can fully understand.

My wife and I visited Paul's organic vegatable garden in Rancho Sante Fe, and since I never met his mother, sister or brother in law, all I had to go on was my stereotypes. And how we love to fill in the blanks. And then I met Augusta, after Paul was gone, and I had an understanding where he got his vibrancy, and his ability to keep on going in the face of some pretty bad breaks.   I never could understand, nor would I ever ask him about how a man of his talents ended his days in dire financial straits.

While it's easy to claim a lack of weath  is for refusing to "sell out"  In Paul's case although he never made the claim, I believe it to be a fair explanation. He didn't merely argue principles, he seemed to live them. It was always a pleasure debating politics with him, but unlike when he led the debating team, he didn't care about winning, rather savoring the challenging exchange of ideas. How rare is that?

He and I are both open minded, and in this area of California I'm often considered the liberal of the crowd. But, not compared to Paul, who challenged any criticisms I made of President Obama. This explains his words on the message:

I hope you're understanding why I think we've managed to luck upon the best President we've ever had.

I can see his smile now, knowing that these were his last words to me.....never to be refuted.

Adios, good buddy.

Dailykos Uncensored

2010-02-08T11:30:00.000-08:00

NOTES

From Washington Monthly interview Jan. 2006
Republicans, he believed, had a "noise machine,"--a coalition of coordinated advocacy and opinion media outlets that pressured the mainstream media into reporting, and repeating, GOP-friendly spin. "The simplest fact about American politics," he told me, "is that Republicans have a noise machine and we don't." Daily Kos, he decided, would become the Democratic noise machine, pressing the case against the Bush administration and the Iraq war in the strongest terms possible.

From CCC speech He answers a question with at 45 minutes: End Roberts Rules of order, and hold meeting at picnics where people can enjoy themselves, and be casual, like blogs

"I don't think blue color people will ever be at dk, its people who switch from :DK to their spreadsheet at a professional job." He also says that new media MUST be used to reach various demographics. Blogs are just a slice, and other media...cell phones etc must be used.

He admits to emulating conservatives, in their universal indoctrination, a marketing procedure, that fits every segment of their base, they "create, market and close on election day"

Al's note....too much emulation, ideology and reality are incompatable.

Blogging as, same or different, journalism was last question:
doesn't like the word "blog" as it can mean many things. Journalism site vs. blog. Standards? Forces people to think. What I have going for me is my credibility. Let others probe, I comments. Thruthout is under attack because of false story. Profession of Journalism is a cesspool of divided loyalties, conflicts of interests. I don't have a lot of respect for traditional media, reporters are overworked, no time to research or fact checks, must accept press reports from political parties.

Asked if he had conservative friends and his answer for the first time was simple, "No"

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Dailykos is a web site founded in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas that is well known by those who consider themselves progressive Democrats, with a current membership of over 300,000; "Web Site" doesn't convey the extent of this social, political cultural phenomenon. The month that I joined, June 2006, was when this site was introduced to the wider public in this column by David Brooks of the New York Times. Comparing Kos, (Moulitas' preferred name, which is the basis of the title Dailykos) of being the latest incarnation of the corrupt political power broker he ends his indictment with, "He has challenged his enemy and become it."

While Brooks may have captured an element of truth about Moulitas with his depiction as "The Keyboard Kingpin." It is similar to reducing any media figure to his most sordid aspect, as if JFK were simply a womanizer, Walter Winchell a right wing propagandist, or William Randolf Hearst as a ruthless war monger. An exaggerated partial truth distorts the more accurate larger picture.

Dailykos'com is a chronicle of a particular period of time, the administration of George W. Bush, that history may yet define, and some historians are now speculating, may be the turning point, that marks the unstoppable decline of the United States of America. This administration coincided with the growth of the internet, to a degree that it became the means of communication, and interaction for the vast majority of literate, politically active Americans. It was at this exact moment, that Kos initiated his web site,

has managed to attract a diverse, generally highly educated, articulate group of contributors, (and others less so, such as me, user ARODB .) Its core content is essays (called "diaries") that, rare among sites of this size, are not only written by regular members but featured prominently with an extensive introduction on a secondary page. This means that every diary is subjected to at least a cursory glance by most of those who are on the site at the time as it faces its fate on the "recent diary list" Usually they don't attract much attention, and with a few comments sink to the bottom and then oblivion; occasionally, based on quality or timeliness, it is promoted to the more limited Recommended diary list to be viewed by thousands; and very rarely the group may find a diary so offensive that the writer is banned from the site.

The nature of this public venue where all essays, all opinions, "were" subjected to a group consensus resulted in some predictable dynamics. The past tense is used since at this writing Dailykos is in the process of a change in format from Version 3.0 to 4.0, to be implemented on February 13, 2011. Diaries, which had been limited to substantive essays of no more than one a day, are to lose these restrictions, thus generating a volume too great to be viewed by the users at large. The approach will be different; as there will be sub-blogs called groups that will provide a different type of selection, by a user administrator, rather than the body of Dailykos users.

Many users, including this writer, feel that this will result in Balkanizaiton, a fragmentation of what had been the core quality of the site, as essays, and the compendiums of values so derived can be nurtured in the sub blogs outside of the view of the larger group. This core quality, this consensus was not without a serious adverse consequence; the "group think" effect, also termed "preaching to the choir" or in it's extreme, a "virtual lynch mob."

At its most extreme manifestation, unsupportable beliefs were fostered, including refusing to believe the early reports of John Edwards infidelities, and the concerted rage at political figures such as Joe Lieberman, where no insult was off limits. But the best example of the extremes of this web site, also shows the strengths. It is this one, Will Bush walk away in 2009?
It does illustrate a frenzy that gripped the membership at the time, affectionately referred to as Kosacks, that President Bush, rather than allowing the constitutional secession, would engineer a coup to remain in power. Yet a careful reading of that diary shows that it described laws that had been passed in the reaction to 9-11, that could have laid the legal groundwork for such a coup. So, while this fit the mood of the membership, even this diary was mostly recieved as rank speculation, and treated by most with an appropriate skepticism.

Those who cherry pick diaries or comments could easily conclude, and then make the claim as Bill O'Reilly does, that it is a "hate site." It is an unabashed partisan venue, one that excludes a full exposition of the rationale for the opposing political viewpoint; but hate is only one occasional part of the vast mix of tones and content that makes up this vast enterprise. There have been those who have ventured into opposing the consensus, and with proper understanding of the audience, such essays are not only tolerated, but occasionally rewarded.

Those who are regulars on Dailykos are welcomed here to read the articles, and to test the water by registering to to make comments and write Diaries. Articles, unlike Diaries, are moderated, so they may take some time to appear. We like to use our true names here, unless there is some good reason not to. The one-diary-a-day limit is alive and well on OpEdNews, to make sure that those substantive diaries (or articles) get the attention they deserve.

How I changed the presidential oath of office.....maybe

2010-01-30T10:16:00.000-08:00

I have to include this story. Remember the Justice Robert's flub of the administering of the Presidential Oath of Office. Saying this will make me sound delusional, but there is a good chance that I, single handedly, had something to do with that. The connection is a dialogue with Mike Newdow, whose suit for an injunction of the words "so help me God, was prompted by an email I sent him. And as he responded when I asked if others had suggested this, "No Al, it was only you." I laid down the background of Newdow's suit in this diary: Newdow's Innauguration Suit...Why it Matters Roberts was aware of this pending suit, and also that Newdow was correct, and previous administrations of the oath had been unconstitutional. In this affidavit submitted by Jeffrey P. Minear, Robert's counselor, this was resolved by describing phrase "So help me God" as being "after the conclusion of the constitutional oath" But if this oath to God was after the conclusion of the oath, how was this to be conveyed to the world? My guess, is that Roberts decided to pose it in a different grammatical mode from the constitutionally prescribed oath, as a question in the second person. This change was never rehearsed between the President elect and the Chief Justice and it is reasonable that it was on Roberts mind that noon hour in January. In a letter to Minear I asked for confirmation of my hypothesis. Of course he was not going to breach Lawyer-Client confidentiality, but he did respond that he read my email "with fascination" and that while he can't comment he hopes that I will continue to speculate on it. (I take that as CONFIRMATION!)

A Human Face to the Culture Wars

2010-01-15T18:24:00.000-08:00

Too often when liberals look across the chasm to that other side, the snarling faces of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Glen Beck or perhaps Pat Robertson are envisioned. It is quickly relegated to the "Great Right Wing Conspiracy" to be rejected out of hand without serious consideration.

It's a bit different when the voice is from an 84 year old woman, Kitty Werthmann whose antipathy towards the left is based on her own experiences as a child when Hitler took over her native Austria. I have a good friend, Bill S., a bright man of generous spirit, who at my request keeps me up to date on the viral email that he gets as a bonafide Christian Conservative.

I read most of them, and when I point out those that are fraudulent he sends my "correction" back down the email chain, hopefully having some effect on the most extreme accusations. Recently I recieved one that is the basis of this diary:

The email that was sent to me is long, so I made it available here. After I wrote some pointed criticisms, implying that the whole essay was fiction, my friend sent me this site, which showed the actual woman giving a long speech, 45 minutes, that the original letter fairly condensed.

I watched it carefully, taking notes, doing research; and I want to share my response, not only with my liberal friends here on Dailykos, but to Bill, whose fairness and good will continues to provide hope that our political divide can be productively bridged.

I'll intersperse my comments in italics to her excerpted letter:

America Truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don't Let Freedom Slip Away
By: Kitty Werthmann

What I am about to tell you is something you've probably never heard or will ever read in history books.

I believe that I am an eyewitness to history. I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. We elected him by a landslide - 98% of the vote. I've never read that in any American publications. Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force. In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25% inflation and 25% bank loan interest rates.

-she then describes her home life, her mother helping those in need.

The Communist Party and the National Socialist Party were fighting each other. Blocks and blocks of cities like Vienna, Linz, and Graz were destroyed. The people became desperate and petitioned the government to let them decide what kind of government they wanted.

-she then described how much better things were in Hitlers Germany adding:

Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group -- Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone was happy.

-Here was my first gotcha, so I thought. Surely Kristalnacht would have been widely publicized. So, I did some research and while the statement was too broad, since the Nuremberg Laws that restricted Jewish participation in German Society had been promulgated in 1935. But in almost all of Eastern Europe such restrictions were not uncommon. And Kristalnach, the beginning of Nazi homicidal antisemitism, was still eight months in the future.

I happen to have a yellowing copy of Liberty Magazine, one of the most popular publications in the U.S., of May 1938, probably written almost exactly at the time of the Anschluss Here's the conclusion of an article by Edward P. Bell, that is mostly laudatory of Heir Hitler:

I left convinced of his sincerity, his rectitude of intention, his high purpose according to his light. The international danger, such as it is, arises from suspicion and fear and misapprehension and their ugly, formidable children, hated and swelling armaments.

This was the conclusion of an American mainstream publication, that it was not Hitler who was the danger to world peace, but those who overreacted to this sincere man. The writer, and supposedly the American people were satisfied with Hitler's answer to the question of the "Jewish Problem" which was, " we are not against Jews, we are for the Germans as Germans"

Around this same time, people such as Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes among many others spoke kindly of Hitler, especially when he was seen as the bulwark against Stalin, who was considered the far greater evil. So, Ms Werthmann's memory of Hitlers persecution of his people was not beyond belief.

I can see that this process of critiquing all of Ms. Werthmann's essay here, and her video would make this much too long, so I invite readers to go to the links above if interested. In the process of responding to her position, I actually have discovered that many of Adolf Hitler's social policies were somewhat similar to those of progressive Democrats. (*do not stop to flame this diary, but please continue to the end)

This is something like asking, "Other than that Ms. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" Every reader here looks back at Nazi Germany with knowledge of the horror it would inflict on the world, and finds it difficult to go much beyond that. As an aside, I will reference this article: Nazi Medicine and Public Health Policy By Robert N. Proctor

The Nazis...supported many kinds of science, left politics (as we often think of it) out of most, and did not abandon ethics. There was an ethics of Nazi medical practice -- sometimes explicit, sometimes not.
snip-
The story of science under German fascism is not, as conventional wisdom would have it, only a narrative of suppression and survival; a truthful account will explain how and why Nazi ideology promoted certain areas of inquiry, and how projects and policies were championed or disappeared because of political considerations.

This article was not from Stormfront.com or even National Review, rather it is from the website of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism.

While Ms. Werthmann does make some errors of fact, after some careful analysis, acknowledging that I am not highly versed in this specific history, I believe that her writing and speaking for the Republican party, now going on for some two decades, is based on her actual memories of events.

In a certain slice of the left right economic spectrum both Adolph Hitler and Barack Obama were believers in a left oriented mixed economy. This means that both of them favored more government participation, even control, of some areas of life than those of the right. In this narrow spectrum Adolph Hitler was a progressive.

Here, of course, is where the similarity ends, and Ms. Werthmann makes assumptions that such similarity means that those of the left have the same intention, are of the same mentality of Hitler. She is very careful, never to say these exact words, but the allusions are obvious, as I will show in this example from her video:

In her essay she wrote

Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn't support his family

In the video she goes on to say that this caused women to be drafted to fight along with other soldiers (which I doubt) but what was telling is she referred to Hitler's new rights for women as "The equal rights amendment" which, of course, was a provision that would have amended the united states constitution. It is highly unlikely that Hitler, who at the time was ruling by edict, needed an amendment of anything to do this.

This is just one clear example that Ms. Werthmann has managed to seamlessly merge in her own mind the most heinous man of the twentieth century with any Democratic Leader, specifically at this time, President Barach Obama. I believe that to her the actual fact that Hitler removed the crucifixes from the public schools, means that being opposed to Catholicism is the necessarily and sufficient condition for brutal dictatorship. The counter example of Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco, who as a defender of Catholicism ruled as an absolute dictator for over thirty five years does not interfere in this belief, since she benefits from the simplicity of her thinking.

Conclusion:

What is important is not so much this one person, but that what she says resonates with many in this country. They know how one political leader promised his people everything, eliminated all organized opposition, and then destroyed their country, not to mention a good part of the rest of the world.

While many here on Dailykos, can't understand why Obama would not make health care a national program with the simplicity of single payer, or why he did not nationalize the banks that were no longer viable economic entities....the answer lies in Ms. Wertmann's speeches, and the reaction of them to a fairly large following----currently under the banner of teabaggers.

Hitler did (to the best of my knowledge) actually nationalize the banks, and in Austria replaced private health insurance companies with British Style universal care. And this was a surprise to me--he believed in an activist government that in other ways would protect the people (well, not all people) in promoting epidemiological studies and preventing use of tobacco (See ADL article)

The ADL article linked above actually describes the positive aspects of Nazi governance and refutes the illusion that since the regime was the apotheosis of evil, that nothing about it could have been positive. I doubt that such an article could have been written much before now, after those who lived through the Nazi horrors are mostly gone.

What I can tell Bill, and Kitty, were she ever to read this, is that she misses the essential quality of Hitler, that his quest for power was built on hatred--- of Jews, victors of WWI, Slavs, and all of those whom he saw as inferior. He happened to have emerged at a moment of great distress of the Germanic people. He was enough of an intuitive master of the art of politics to marshal this suffering to his own ends.

Hitler's job was made easier by the degree of hatred, the vicious murderous state of the Kulturkamph, a permutation of our own culture war that currently is on low simmer. Ms. Werthmann equating Obama to Hitler, does a disservice the her adopted country, that I'm sure she loves.

While it didn't come in the person of the previous president, as many on this site were sure it would, nor will it come in the person of our current president; the constant drumbeat that lawful exercise of Presidential power is a precursor to tyranny creates a dire risk. That is that healthy heated political dialog becomes the vehicle for rabid mutual hatred, resulting in the chaos that opens the door to tyrants that promises vanquishing one side or the other.

Nazism has not become the epitome of evil because Hitler promoted equality of women, universal health care or secular public education. We may or may not endorse these policies. He will forever be equated with evil because of a remorseless hatred that was divorced from reality. Our country has been immune to such excesses because with all of our disagreements about policy, we have preserved a common set of values, mutual respect for those whom we disagree with, that precludes such hatred.

I somehow sense that Bill may agree with me. I only hope that Ms. Werthmann and her many followers could understand this also.

Kitty Werthmann-Right Wing Spokesperson Extraordinary

2010-01-15T14:39:00.000-08:00

1938 Austria

America Truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don't Let Freedom Slip Away

By: Kitty Werthmann

What I am about to tell you is something you've probably never heard or will ever read in history books.

I believe that I am an eyewitness to history. I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. We elected him by a landslide - 98% of the vote. I've never read that in any American publications. Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force. In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25% inflation and 25% bank loan interest rates.

Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn't want to work; there simply weren't any jobs. My mother was a Christian woman and believed in helping people in need. Every day we cooked a big kettle of soup and baked bread to feed those poor, hungry people - about 30 daily.

The Communist Party and the National Socialist Party were fighting each other. Blocks and blocks of cities like Vienna, Linz, and Graz were destroyed. The people became desperate and petitioned the government to let them decide what kind of government they wanted.

We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany , where Hitler had been in power since 1933. We had been told that they didn't have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living. Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group -- Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria . We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back. Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler.

We were overjoyed, and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed.

After the election, German officials were appointed, and like a miracle, we suddenly had law and order. Three or four weeks later, everyone was employed. The government made sure that a lot of work was created through the Public Work Service.

Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn't support his family. Many women in the teaching profession were elated that they could retain the jobs they previously had been required to give up for marriage.

Hitler Targets Education - Eliminates Religious Instruction for Children:

Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler's picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn't pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," and had physical education.

Sunday became National Youth Day with compulsory attendance. Parents were not pleased about the sudden change in curriculum. They were told that if they did not send us, they would receive a stiff letter of warning the first time. The second time they would be fined the equivalent of $300, and the third time they would be subject to jail. The first two hours consisted of political indoctrination. The rest of the day we had sports. As time went along, we loved it. Oh, we had so much fun and got our sports equipment free. We would go home and gleefully tell our parents about the wonderful time we had.

My mother was very unhappy. When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn't do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly any fun - no sports, and no political indoctrination. I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it. Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing. Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn't exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy.

Equal Rights Hits Home:

In 1939, the war started and a food bank was established. All food was rationed and could only be purchased using food stamps. At the same time, a full-employment law was passed which meant if you didn't work, you didn't get a ration card, and if you didn't have a card, you starved to death. Women who stayed home to raise their families didn't have any marketable skills and often had to take jobs more suited for men.

Soon after this, the draft was implemented. It was compulsory for young people, male and female, to give one year to the labor corps. During the day, the girls worked on the farms, and at night they returned to their barracks for military training just like the boys. They were trained to be anti-aircraft gunners and participated in the signal corps. After the labor corps, they were not discharged but were used in the front lines. When I go back to Austria to visit my family and friends, most of these women are emotional cripples because they just were not equipped to handle the horrors of combat. Three months before I turned 18, I was severely injured in an air raid attack. I nearly had a leg amputated, so I was spared having to go into the labor corps and into military service.

Hitler Restructured the Family Through Daycare:

When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. You could take your children ages 4 weeks to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, 7 days a week, under the total care of the government. The state raised a whole generation of children. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about equal rights. We knew we had been had.

Health Care and Small Business Suffer Under Government Controls:

Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna . After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a. m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries.

As for healthcare, our tax rates went up to 80% of our income. Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families. All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing. We had another agency designed to monitor business. My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn't meet all the demands. Soon, he went out of business. If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control.

We had consumer protection. We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the live-stock, then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it.

"Mercy Killing" Redefined:

In 1944, I was a student teacher in a small village in the Alps . The villagers were surrounded by mountain passes which, in the winter, were closed off with snow, causing people to be isolated. So people intermarried and offspring were sometimes retarded. When I arrived, I was told there were 15 mentally retarded adults, but they were all useful and did good manual work. I knew one, named Vincent, very well. He was a janitor of the school. One day I looked out the window and saw Vincent and others getting into a van. I asked my superior where they were going. She said to an institution where the State Health Department would teach them a trade, and to read and write. The families were required to sign papers with a little clause that they could not visit for 6 months. They were told visits would interfere with the program and might cause homesickness.

As time passed, letters started to dribble back saying these people died a natural, merciful death. The villagers were not fooled. We suspected what was happening. Those people left in excellent physical health and all died within 6 months. We called this euthanasia.

The Final Steps - Gun Laws: Next came gun registration. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long after-wards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily.

No more freedom of speech. Anyone who said something against the government was taken away. We knew many people who were arrested, not only Jews, but also priests and ministers who spoke up. Totalitarianism didn't come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria . Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.

After World War II, Russian troops occupied Austria . Women were raped, preteen to elderly. The press never wrote about this either. When the Soviets left in 1955, they took everything that they could, dismantling whole factories in the process. They sawed down whole orchards of fruit, and what they couldn't destroy, they burned. We called it The Burned Earth. Most of the population barricaded themselves in their houses. Women hid in their cellars for 6 weeks as the troops mobilized. Those who couldn't, paid the price. There is a monument in Vienna today, dedicated to those women who were massacred by the Russians. This is an eye witness account.

"It's true.. those of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity.

America Truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don't Let Freedom Slip Away

"After America , There is No Place to Go"

Here is the web site - I encourage you to go here to hear Kitty speak. www. sdfamily.org/Kitty+Wetrthmann

Union support is not "Law Enforcement's Choice"

2009-10-09T14:50:00.000-07:00

This was submitted to the North County Times Community Forum

Encinitas Council Candidate's Claim Questioned.

Knowing little about Kristin Gaspar before attending the first candidates forum a few weeks ago, I checked out her web site. When I met her there I pointed out that the most important section, "positions on issues" was empty. Rather than correct what she said was an oversight, she removed the entire section. Now, with no explicit policy positions or legislative record, we are left with the headline on her signs seen next to allied candidate Dan Dalager, "Law enforcement's Choice." It turns out this claim is based on the endorsement of one group, DSASD, "Deputy Sheriffs' Association of San Diego County." whose web site describes ttself as "the professional labor organization" of the county's Sheriff's deputies.

Any public official who has too cozy a relationship with their government employee's union has an inherent conflict of interest, since it is his or her responsibility to represent the taxpayers in negotiating salaries and benefits. While this conflict is so clear that candidate Teresa Barth previously refused this unions invitation to be considered for its endorsement, in the case of a union representing those with police powers it is even more problematic

The pressure on elected officials who negotiate with law enforcement groups is rarely articulated. Few want to be the enemy of any organized well funded labor group, much less when its members carry badges and guns. There is a wide degree of discretion allowed in enforcing California's law. Almost everyone rolls through four way stop signs, so it is the deputy's decision who will get the expensive traffic ticket. A recent example of a more serious abuse of discretion was enforcement of a noise complaint at a political fundraiser in Cardiff last year. This possible infraction escalated to deployment of a helicopter and eight patrol cars, followed by the forceful arrest of three attendees.

Law enforcement groups circled the wagons defending the deputy's actions, including an unprecedented letter by the DA blaming the homeowners. Now, in response to a lawsuit by those arrested, the truth has come out in a training manual released by Sheriff Gore in anticipation of conceding the validity of the suit against the department. This manual shows that every action taken by the arresting deputy was contrary to city, state and constitutional law. From his entering the premises without permission to demanding information from the homeowner, who properly refused to answer, there was a clear abrogation of law including the fourth and fifth amendments. This directly relates to the responsibilities of the Encinitas City council, which refused to revisit the noise ordinance, described by experts as unconstitutionally vague.

The group, DSASD, that endorsed Kristin Gaspar is primarily a labor organization promoting the interests of its members who happen to engage in "Law Enforcement" Ms Gaspar, by her actions, has shown a lack of understanding of the complex challenges, conflicts, and obligations to taxpayers of an elected public official in this difficult area.

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Those interested in this issue may want to read this essay. It is on the larger problem of Enciitas government, and my argument for a new charter.

Note: Readers please leave comment so I can have some feedback.
AR

Police action at Busby Fundraiser

2009-08-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

This is the text of my article (pg A5) from The Coast News of July 2, 2009

Going forward after the fundraiser controversy

Last Friday a noise complaint against Francine Busby's Cardiff fundraiser blew up into a full scale police action -- complete with helicopter support, massive reinforcements, fire truck and canine squad. It ended with several people handcuffed, pepper spray discharged and the homeowner jailed for resisting arrest.

Had the police (represented by San Diego County Sheriff's Deputies) been raiding a terrorist explosive cache or a major drug cartel, this demonstration of force would have been warranted, but actually the nature of the meeting was quite the opposite. The gathering was an integral component of the democratic political process, a candidate expressing her views and asking for citizen support.

Political speech is not only tolerated in America, it enjoys special protection. This principle has been upheld in diverse settings such as protecting a march by a Neo Nazi party through a Jewish neighborhood to allowing publication of scurrilous satire of a conservative minister.

Yet, last Friday, rather than the local police protecting a peaceful political meeting from a neighbor's harassment, it responded to a noise complaint, unwarranted based on city law, and used it as an occasion to disrupt the most sacred ceremony of a secular democracy, political assemblage.

While a single deputy seemed to be the point man for this excess, the immediate response from the department spokesperson, which was to ignore the fundamental injustice and defend the actions of their officers, shows that there is a deeper pathology at work. It has been referred to in other settings as the "blue wall of silence," the cohesion of a group that protects its own even in the face of wrongful acts by its members.

Let me be very clear about one thing, there is no evidence, nor do I believe, that the San Diego Sheriff's Department that covers Encinitas is corrupt or incompetent. To the contrary, from my limited experience with this agency it functions at a high level of professionalism and integrity; And that is exactly the reason that this is the time to ensure that this continues.

The police action at Cardiff just so happens to parallel the cultural divide that exists in this country.....left against right, liberal versus conservatives....a culture war that permutes all issues into stark political extremes. The deputy whose behavior caused the escalation may have just listened to some vicious political accusations, such as the commentator on Fox national television who said the current president was plotting a dictatorship. Perhaps inflamed by such fevered rhetoric, breaking up a "cell" of such a "subversive" organization, the Democratic Party, may have seemed like a courageous patriotic act.

Democracy works in two directions, top down from the federal branches in Washington, but also bottom up, from local referendums and the decisions of city councils throughout the country. Under the best of conditions, any agency given the mandate and means of enforcing laws has a potential for systemic pathologies. This toxic brew of danger and power changes people, all people, along with their groups. This has been confirmed by psychological research and a long tragic litany of excesses. The dynamics within any such police group are pernicious as well as predictable.

In many ways Encinitas is lucky that this particular wake up call came with no deaths, no riots and no deeper disruption of inter-group comity. What would be tragic is if this were to be ignored and treated as an isolated incident, and not seen as a sign of something deeper. Waiting for an internal report of this incident is exactly what should not be done. This event was of the public, and the process of investigation should include those who are not a part of the closed system that went astray.

Creation of a Civilian Police Review Board may be one appropriate step at this point. It should be staffed by those with an understanding of the challenges, difficulties as well as the temptations of those whom we authorize to use force to maintain our laws. The time to initiate this is before it is needed, before cynicism and anger has displaced the original motivation of those who don police uniforms.

Local government provides a unique opportunity for the individual citizen to participate, to help shape the incremental steps that can become a model for other locales, and just possibly have an effect on the larger culture. Of course this only happens when the existing structures-- media, office holders and general public feel there is a possibility of success.

Those of us who live in Encinitas and other nearby environs are truly blessed. With all that we have going for us we should aim for the democratic ideal, rather than accept the cynicism that is so pervasive in our society. Let's hope that this flareup at Cardiff will supply the incentive, and the light to lead us in this direction.

Al Rodbell
Encinitas CA

Traffic Scofflaws Rejoice

2008-06-20T20:19:00.000-07:00

By Al Rodbell

Yes, I'm talking to you- those who probably this very day were guilty of an infraction of the California Code that requires coming to a full stop at every stop sign, even those four way signs where the cross street gets a car or a pedestrian every few minutes at most.

You may have slowed down to a few feet a second, scanned both directions safely, but as long as those wheels are turning, according to the law it is exactly the same as going through the intersection at full speed.

About a year ago when some people in my neighborhood suggested that they were going to propose another stop sign on the road along the wide greenbelt that is the delight of residents of Village Park, I decided to do a bit of research. I presented my findings to the Encintas City Council, that the results of dozens of studies show that inappropriate multi way stop signs, far from preventing accidents, actually increase them.

It's really not that hard to understand, as good drivers actually have their attention diverted, not by looking for cars or children who could dash into the intersection, but for the police car that might need another ticket to top off his day. To make it worse they often make up lost time by speeding up between stop signs, rather than driving at a steady safe speed all along the corridor.

My arguments about the deeper “moral hazard” of turning law abiding citizens into law breakers fell on deaf ears. Inertia is a powerful force- whether in multilevel systems of government, like those that determine traffic regulations, or the amount of force converted to heat required to bring a two ton vehicle to a full stop. And herein lies the hope for us law abiding scofflaws who commit the routine crime of performing “California Rolling Stops.” It is copper. The element that happens make up as much as twenty five percent of brake linings.

Copper is just fine as we normally use it, as wires in our homes and in the pots of upscale cookery. But when heated to high temperatures during braking there are problems, as a recent editorial in the Union Tribune stated, “ Copper is Toxic. As motorists use their brakes, copper dust is released and settles into roadways... to be washed into storm sewers and roadways. It destroys marine life, plants and animals”

The editorial does not suggest ways of lessen the use of brakes, but approves of a law to require less copper in them, even though they acknowledge that “not enough is known about the potential environmental hazards from replacement materials.”

Multi way stop signs, although shown to be worse than useless, are a product of bureaucratic inertia. (need I mention it also being a sweet piggy bank for cash strapped local government?) The energy required to change public perception has been too great, but now there is a new force, that of the conservation movement, those of us who care about the environment that provides a home for all the flora and fauna of our world... which just happens to include us.

Unlike traffic lights, which are the best way to regulate two major arteries that cross at an intersection, multi-way stop signs have long been known to be subject to political pressure, and defective in many ways. Now there is a new element. Beyond the waste of millions of gallons each year in starting those cars from a full stop, we have the biological hazard of a toxic material being added to the food chain with each unwarranted stop.

In a world full of intractable problems, this one is amazingly simple to correct. It's as easy as changing few words in the California code, or the replacement of most four way signs with Yield signs. But Inertia is a powerful force of nature. So while we are waiting for the law to be changed, remember those tickets for rolling stops are expensive, and quoting this article probably won't get you off.

Al Rodbell
June 22, 2010
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This is the link to the survey of the literature on multiway stop signs mentioned above:
Comments can be made here or on The Coast News article of June 25, 2010
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The following comment was made to the discussion forum of the Dept of Transportation:

This problem of unwarranted multi-way stop signs must be conceptualized differently once the inappropriate signs have been in place, as opposed to deciding whether to implement them. Most of the problem intersections would be warranted as 1-2 way stop signs, yet over the years due to political pressure they were made multi-way.

I've explored Gary Lauder's proposed TT sign, and it seems preferable to use existing signage. Here's the dilemma. Since rolling stops are the norm, those with a full stop sign on the secondary street will not notice that the little-"all way" is missing from the bottom. So, they will now roll through as they have been all along. Those on the primary street, if we did this correctly, will not slow down at all. This is a potential danger, only because of the original error.

Yield signs on the primary road would seem appropriate, along with regular stop signs on the secondary road. In California the yield sign seems to turn into a TT when vehicles are lined up on the secondary road as described here on Cal DMV site:
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Yield Signs: Intersections

21803. (a) The driver of any vehicle approaching any intersection which is controlled by a yield right-of-way sign shall, upon arriving at the sign, yield the right-of-way to any vehicles which have entered the intersection, or which are approaching on the intersecting highway close enough to constitute an immediate hazard, and shall continue to yield the right-of-way to those vehicles until he or she can proceed with reasonable safety.

(b) A driver having yielded as prescribed in subdivision (a) may proceed to enter the intersection, and the drivers of all other approaching vehicles shall yield the right-of-way to the vehicle entering or crossing the intersection.
Amended Ch. 623, Stats. 1988. Effective January 1, 1989.
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Part b, would seem to dictate a taking turns, as Lauder's TT sign proposes, without the need for new signage.

I welcome comments

AR
alvrdb-12@yahoo.com
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It would seem that Yield signs on the primary road, matched with stop signs on secondary road would be acceptable, based on this from the California DMV
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Traffic Signs

An eight-sided red STOP sign means you must make a full “STOP” whenever you see a STOP sign. Stop before entering a crosswalk or at a white limit line which is a wide white line painted on the street. If a crosswalk or limit line is not painted on the street, stop at the corner.

A three-sided red YIELD sign means you must slow down and be ready to stop, if necessary, to let any vehicle, bicyclist, or pedestrian pass before you proceed.
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DA on Child Molesters,

2008-05-09T19:57:00.000-07:00

When the San Diego Union Tribune printed the opinion piece, “Striking hard at child molesters,” they saw no reason to also print the opposing point of view, because there was none. Written by two elected officials, including the city DA, the only question was how much venom they could pack into their essay. The “Horrible fact of life” that these “despicable criminals” commit “horrendous crimes” are their words from the first two paragraphs.

Political attack ads focus on the smallest deviation away from the most draconian punishment for any sexual offense that includes the word, “child.” Liberal congressman Bob Filner lit into his opponent because he missed a vote to increase penalties for this crime. And the opening salvo of the ugly campaign for Duke Cunningham’s congressional seat was that Francine Busby was dangerous because of her response to a teacher involved in child pornography. Had he procured children to perform sexual acts or profited from this industry? Well, not quite. He simply had joined a web site, along with thousands of otherwise respectable men, that featured images of those under eighteen. Francine Busby’s sin was before having him fired, she commented that he had been a good teacher.

The major point that the writers of this article make is that no adult should be trusted, pointing to predators who are our “children’s teacher, doctor, clergy and even the scout leader.” A clean record, rather than being reassuring, should be a red flag, since we are told most convictions are for first time offenders whose age ranges from 18 to well over 60. They tell us that we should be most suspicious of those who are, “charming and someone you know.” as they are under the radar of suspicion. Got it kids, trust no one, especially those who you know and like.

This is hysteria that is spiraling out of control. The very term “molester” is so encompassing that it makes no distinction between traumatic acts of violence and other offenses whose effect on the victim is far less severe. Sexuality, from childhood on throughout life, will always be a source of both joy and pain. Injury, whether from rejection after intimacy or from the unwanted touch of a stranger is a risk of living. We cannot legislate against the emotional pain of sexual humiliation, or that which comes from cruelty or betrayal of trust in all of its forms.

The bruises of life, under supportive conditions, can be a source of maturation and strength. A child who is inappropriately fondled by an adult has been assaulted. The child should be helped and the adult should be dealt with. While this country no longer looks on such an adult as deserving of help, the degree of punishment should be, at the very least, commensurate to the harm that is done.

Right now, a person convicted of touching a child’s genitals can get almost the same punishment as someone who takes a child's life. And, as the writer proudly points out, if it were two children so abused, the punishment can be exactly the same, life in prison. Proportionality in sentencing has long been a foundation of penology. Besides basic fairness, it is mandated by the limits of the capacity of law enforcement. When a category of crime such as this rises to the level of hysteria other crimes receive less attention. Diminished enforcement of drunk driving laws means more kids are killed, while the courts shift to victims of “bad touching.”

Do we really want our children to grow up in a world where every adult, especially those who show affection, are seen as potential predators. And if "abuse" does occur, should the punishment be so extreme as to exacerbate the event in the child’s eyes, thus increasing his or her trauma. And, finally, if the sentiments expressed by the article become accepted, just what person in their right mind would accept any position where unsupervised interactions with children would make them vulnerable to false accusations with life destroying consequences.

While caution should be taught, so should trust. Finding the balance is a delicate task for a parent, but the recommendation of presumed guilt of this article would come at a great price. The natural bond of affection between young and old, even among strangers, would be replaced with defensiveness and suspicion. It is far from certain whether such a world will be safer for a child, but it certainly will be sadder.
----------------- Entire Article Follows------------

Striking hard at child molesters
By Bonnie Dumanis and Dianne Jacob
June 9, 2006
There really is no way to tell whether someone is a child molester until a victim cries out for help, law enforcement catches the predator in a sting or the suspect slips up. Case files have proven these criminals can be our children's teacher, doctor, clergy and even the scout leader. It's a horrible fact of life, but it's the truth.
The District Attorney's Office deals with these despicable criminals, but not as often as one might imagine. It's just that when these hideous crimes are reported by the media, they lead the nightly news and are splashed on the front pages of our newspaper. Still, there are many facts that are not being reported about these horrendous crimes.
In 2005, the District Attorney's Office prosecuted 219 cases of lewd acts upon a child in San Diego County. This resulted in an incredible 94 percent conviction rate. Most surprising, only nine of these defendants had one or more serious felony priors, and one of the defendants had three violent felony priors. Nearly all of the sexual predators that this office prosecuted last year had clean records. Their ages ranged from 18 to well over 60, with the majority of molesters ranging from 26 to 39 years old followed closely by those aged 40 to 59.
The child molester is despised within our community and rightfully so. Our office recognizes the gravity of charging a person with this crime. When the police submit their case and evidence to the Office of the District Attorney, strict policies and procedures are in place for our prosecutors in order to ensure justice for all the parties involved.
Once we have a good-faith belief the case can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt then, and only then, do we charge a person with this section of the law.
Child molestation is so egregious the molester must be put away for a long, long time. This is why we diligently utilize the “one-strike law.” One provision of the one-strike law permits us to seek a life prison term if the molester has molested more than one victim.
We were successful in using this important sentencing tool when a local second-grade teacher was convicted for molesting girls in his class. This teacher is now serving a life sentence for his crimes. When someone in that type of position betrays the trust of parents, schools officials, and damages forever the innocence of children, they have forfeited their right to live in our community.
If voters pass Jessica's Law, which will be on the November ballot, we will not have to wait until the molester strikes multiple times. The very first time a sexual predator assaults a child, we could put that person away for 15 years to life. If he or she molests the child while committing a burglary or a kidnap, prosecutors could seek 25 years to life. We know from experience that sexual predators do not stop with one victim, and that's why these tough sentences are so desperately needed. That's why we are asking voters to help us pass Jessica's Law.
What is even more startling about these cases is that most convicted molesters never exhibit any outward clues that they would harm a child until it's too late; they would easily pass any background check at a hospital or a school. The child molester typically will seek out occupations that offer him or her ready access to children. Particularly, they choose occupations that entail trust, such as a teacher, counselor, doctor, coach or cleric. The child molester is frequently charming and someone you know. All of these factors enable the molester to fly under the radar of suspicion and “pick and choose” his next vulnerable victim.
We in law enforcement and government can do only so much; parents must look at those who are closest to their children. According the Department of Justice and our own statistics, 90 percent of those children who are raped under the age of 12 knew his or her offender.
If you suspect something is wrong, trust your instincts. Talk to your child today about “good touch/bad touch.” Encourage your child to tell you if someone has touched them inappropriately. Remind them that they can always tell you anything, at anytime, and that they won't get in trouble. Equally important, know what your child is doing when they are on the Internet. Take steps today to make sure your child is safe. We are doing are part, please do yours. Child molestation is a preventable crime.

Dumanis is San Diego County district attorney. Jacob is a member of the county Board of Supervisors.

U.T. Article: Striking hard at child molesters By Bonnie Dumanis and Dianne Jacob

Constantine's Sword, the Film

2007-08-25T13:29:00.000-07:00

June 25, 2007

Report from L.A. Premier of film from“our”side-(posted on dailykos.com)

This is a brilliant documentary that explores the dark side of Christianity, both from a historical perspective and todays aggressive evangelizing among the American military. You can read my review that is now on Internet Movie Data Base, and then some personal reflections on attending the premier.

The film is “Constantine's Sword” and I wrote about it's opening on Sunday a few days ago trying to get some of you to fill the seats at the L.A. Film festival. I hope not too many hopped a plane to get here since it turned out to be an SRO crowd. For me it was a real treat since it was an occasion for my meeting one of the people featured in the film, Mikey Weinstein, along with having a few words with the writer, James Carroll.

A premier of a film is a unique experience. There are no reviews to read, no buzz from people who have seen it, only anticipation, and in this case hope that it would fulfill my expectations. I know the writer, James Carroll well, as do all who have read his books. Jim (we are that close) is a scholar, yet all that he writes is channeled through his own perceptions. From a child growing up in a devout Catholic family, to a young man enjoying the pleasures of sports, girls and pranks, to the transformational experience that caused him to join the priesthood, Jim shares his life with his readers.

Meeting him and shaking his hand in front of the theater was like greeting an old friend. As I write these words the memory of Jim's real Jewish friend of his childhood, a “best friend,” whom he called Peter Seligman, described in his book just popped into my mind. I have the book by my side and I just read the part again where he is first introduced into the soft antisemitism of the era, when he asked Peter why he didn't go to the local pool club. “We don't go there, “ he said simply. “Why not” “Because it's a club, and we're Jews.”

I could have told the same story, but from the other side, of realizing that I was not quite welcomed by my childhood friends in all parts of their lives. The kids couldn't help it, it was something bigger than we could understand from our child's eye view. Jim made it his life work to understand why this was. I greeted him in the line as Peter would have embraced his old buddy.

Jim and I have gone down different roads in dealing with the hurt of exclusion because of religion. Jim, although leaving the priesthood, still believes in the tenets of his faith, in the revelation of Jesus Christ as part of the trinity of God. He explores the pathologies of the earthly stewards of this truth with a vigorous precision of expression that I can only describe as exquisite.

My route is different from Jim's, rejecting the core of belief that, in spite of the history of genocidal hatred, unites Christian and Jewish theology. We both view with alarm the resurgence of evangelical power in this country, but I from a rationalist atheistic perspective, and he from his understanding of the true meaning of Jesus Christ. This is an intellectual divide that can not be breached, yet I feel nothing but affection for this person Jim Carroll, and those whom I know who are cut from this same cloth.

This film allows its viewers to meet Jim Carroll, as he guides us along his journey back and time and connects this with a potentially frightening vision of a theocratic America.

After the showing I spoke to the producer, Oren Jacoby, who agreed with the film being in limbo at this time, with success only possible if this gets good distribution deal. We need to connect with others, most importantly at this moment, theater owners or perhaps local television stations, to express our enthusiasm for this film.

This is one of those occasions where those on this site can make a direct difference to our country's thinking

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Here's the site for more extensive information about the film from the producers, including the trailer:

N.Y. Times Drone Article

2006-10-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

Oct. 7, 2001

Here's the dailykos essay that gives the background to the email questionnaire I sent. This has resulted in two corrections, including the most misleading, the caption to the photo of the model, saying a "real one" was given to the suspect" I'm told by the reporter that this correction is being made, although it has been done so as of Friday.

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Man Is Held in a Plan to Bomb Washington
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Published: September 28, 2011

BOSTON — A 26-year-old man from a town west of Boston was charged Wednesday with plotting to blow up the Pentagon and the United States Capitol using remote-controlled aircraft filled with plastic explosives.

Photo of model airplane with this caption on side of article
U.S. Department of Justice, via Reuters

A model of an F-86 drone, a real version of which was reportedly given to the suspect.

The suspect, Rezwan Ferdaus of Ashland, is an American citizen and has a physics degree from Northeastern University in Boston, according to an F.B.I. affidavit. Mr. Ferdaus also tried to provide detonation devices, weapons and other resources to Al Qaeda to carry out attacks on American soldiers stationed overseas, law enforcement officials said.

The arrest was the result of an undercover F.B.I. operation that included a cooperating witness with a criminal record, according to Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I. office in Boston. According to the affidavit, Mr. Ferdaus began planning to commit “violent jihad” against the United States in 2010, modifying cellphones to act as detonators and supplying them to undercover agents who he thought were affiliated with Al Qaeda.

His alleged plan to attack the Pentagon — detailed on two thumb drives that he delivered to the undercover agents, the affidavit said — involved using three remote-controlled planes, similar to military drones, guided by GPS equipment.

Mr. Ferdaus went to Washington in May to take photographs of the Pentagon, the Capitol and places in Potomac Park from where he planned to launch the explosives-filled aircraft. According to the affidavit, he described Americans as “enemies of Allah” and told undercover agents that his desire to attack the United States was so strong that “I just can’t stop; there is no other choice for me.”

In what seems an elaborate operation, undercover F.B.I. agents who had been talking to Mr. Ferdaus for months provided him with some of the necessary components for his planned attack, including six assault rifles, three grenades, 25 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives and even an F-86 remote-controlled aircraft. The explosives and guns were provided on Wednesday just before his arrest, law enforcement officials said.

“The public was never in danger from the explosive devices,” Carmen M. Ortiz, the United States attorney in Boston, said in a statement.

Catherine Byrne, a lawyer for Mr. Ferdaus, did not return a call seeking comment. Mr. Ferdaus is charged with attempting to destroy federal government buildings using an explosive, attempting to destroy national defense premises and attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

Fightclub Politics

2006-05-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

Attack Ads and the Culture of Corruption

From the television ads for the 50th district California congressional election, we learn that Francine Busby, the Democrat candidate encourages child pornography while Brian Bilbray, the Republican, is responsible for people dying from the food supplements. But wait, there are other ads. Here’s one showing Bilbray courageously mounting a Bulldozer to personally push back sewage from Mexico. Here’s another one with Busby describing how she will personally change the culture of corruption in Washington.

Let’s talk about a paradox in national opinion polls. When asked about the performance of congress, less than 25% are satisfied. Yet when asked about their own member of congress they love him, with approval rate well over 50% Congress is made up of these elected members of congress. They pass the laws, make the rules and define the traditions with absolute autonomy. Yet, voters continue to admire the people who create a product, our laws, or lack thereof, that they abhor. What is going on here?

Just what kind of a system allows public figures to avoid the consequences for the defective quality of their output. The ads that are running on every local station for this election tell the story. You see, once you make a commitment, once you cast your vote for your choice for office, the very process is an affirmation that it is the other guy, the other party, that represents all that is wrong with Congress. Simplify and vilify. It works for grabbing an audience for a B movie, and it works for selecting a candidate with thirty second sound bites.

Readers of this page would prefer a more reasoned process of electing candidates. What is unfortunate is that right now there isn’t one. Because of the prevalence of sound bite campaigns designed for those who buy into it, there is a defensiveness against doing or saying anything that would provide material for these sound bites. This makes actual discussion by candidates about solutions to the real issues that face us impossible.

It is only in the fantasy land of thirty second ads that solutions to actual problems are painless. Years ago, projections were available showing increasing demand for oil from developing countries, while we knew that all of our supplies came from politically vulnerable regions. Our use of oil could only be curtailed by mandated conservation or increasing the cost of petroleum products through selective taxation. Both of these solutions became fodder for sound bite vilification so they were excluded from the political lexicon, unless it was to tar a poor unfortunate who did not get the word. No pain then, but now there is plenty, each time we fill up our tank.

It is the same now with the deficit. There are only two ways to cut it, by reducing expenditures or increasing revenue. Well there is another way, which is when tax cuts stimulate the economy leading to increased tax revenues. But this has limits, or else zero taxation would bring the highest revenues and we would all live happily ever after.

Actually doing either of the two viable choices, raising taxes or decreasing services, would exact a political cost, so they are not done, or even considered. Happy talk replaces the process of making choices. And even if you try to find out what a candidate stands for, it is nearly impossible.

The attack ads run by both major party candidates in this election is an integral part of the pathological partisanship that distorts our national legislature. Since these ads do not give in-depth information about the candidate’s positions, they gain effectiveness by repetition in the most expensive media. The money for these ads come either from special interests, from the left or from the right, who are rewarded by favorable legislation The problem with this type of campaigning is not esthetic. It leads to laws that are as distorted as the depictions of opposition candidates.

A book has just been published entitled, Fightclub Politics, how partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives, that begins to describe how far this institution has fallen from the ideal. It will not be fixed by those who are benefiting from the status quo, the entrenched incumbents of both parties and the special interests that feed the divisive campaigns that keep them in power.

Change will only come from an active citizenry who are willing to demand something better .

A Penny’s Value

2006-04-29T15:05:00.000-07:00

On one episode of West Wing it was introduced as comic relief; someone was lobbying to get rid of the penny, wasting the valuable time of White House staffers. William Safire wrote a column “Abolish the Penny” last year; pointed, well argued, with a tone of bemusement over thinking that the public would ever take up such a trivial cause.

Yesterday, I was going through the process of trying to turn my small change into real money. I wouldn’t consider dumping it all into the tip box at my favorite coffee shop as it would be insulting, so I decided to distribute the pain. Our banker got a handful. And then I counted out the $2.08 for the copy shop. I had put it on the counter since the clerk was busy. He finished up and we counted it together; and it turned out I was about to stiff him, since what I thought was a quarter was the new nickel.

You see, I knew what a nickel looked like for this last sixty years, and it wasn’t that coin on the left in the picture above. That coin is shiny, with a design I didn’t recognize, so it had to be one of the variants of a quarter. And lying there among the other coins, I didn’t notice it was smaller. I will learn to recognize the new nickel, but there is more mischief ahead. We are about to be challenged with a new dollar coin that will have four different designs each year for the next decade, this while continuing to mint the existing design.

Safire’s article ended on a note of irony, “get out those bumper stickers, “Abolish the penny.” That is not going to happen, and this is why the penny, which is now junk sprinkled among our coinage, will continue to be minted, along with the new “novelty” dollar, imposing a sorting tax of a few extra seconds on every American for every transaction. That’s a lot of seconds.

We shouldn’t need bumper stickers to have a national coinage optimized to achieve its function. This is what we pay our elected officials for, to provide coinage with ease of recognition, security against counterfeiting, and appropriate denominations pegged to purchasing power. Every other advanced country manages to do just this. But rather than make improvements, the rationality of our coinage is being further eroded.

One basic rule is that even the lowest denomination should have a value greater than its transaction cost. A penny, which when first minted got you a newspaper or a child’s smile, now is an insult. A minimum wage worker would be misusing his time to pick one up from the ground.

So as you sort those coins and wait in line at the checkout counter a bit longer, as the job of low paid cashiers gets just a bit more tedious, think about those people whom you elect to federal office. We do not get to look inside the Department of Homeland Security, or really examine how the Defense Department works, but what we do know shows striking similarities with our coinage. Achieving their stated goals are incidental, when there are lobbyists to be appeased, industries to be supported, and connections to be established.

So, I say keep those pennies coming. Each coin, although of little monetary value, provides a priceless symbolic message. Each one illustrates just how little the good of the general public stacks up against the concerted efforts of special interests; and just how far we have to go to get our democracy back.

2006-04-08T13:56:00.000-07:00

Pictures, yet!

The blogger--- no photoshop, no artificial lighting, only to be seen until I can get one up that is a little more jolly.

American enterprise at work.

Just days after the controversy over the renaming of the Encinitas parade hit the newsstand, this entrepreneur designed and produced a commemorative sweat shirt.

Note, in keeping with this parade being named after the American, rather than the Christian, Christmas there are only snowflakes and bulbs illustrating the occasion.

Regional Tennis Center

2006-02-03T10:08:00.000-08:00

OpEd article in Union Tribune 2/6/03
Regional Tennis Center

First, last month the Encinitas City Council approved a plan for the new Hall Property Park, with soccer, baseball fields and a world class swimming center. Then Carlsbad announced its plan for the Alga North Park, also featuring a major aquatic center. Finally, the Encinitas YMCA announced that they are removing their six tennis courts. Why? Mainly to make room for an expanded swimming center. So, while this area will soon be awash in lanes for chlorinated lap swimming, what's happening to tennis?

Tennis is my sport (although some observers might challenge this assertion). When we moved out here from the east coast, before we even looked at houses we checked out the tennis situation. The six courts at the Y were the clincher. They will be gone, so now what? The three hundred people who signed a petition to save the Y courts over a single weekend are asking the same question.

There are plenty of courts in the area; some in exclusive private clubs, others scattered in public parks and private residential communities. What is missing is a public tennis center like those in LaJolla and Balboa Park. These were built on city land with city funds, but now operate at no further cost to the public. Each has a tennis association, open to all at moderate cost, that pays for all maintenance and runs the programming. And what programming they have. Tournaments for all levels and age groups up to 90 year olds, (where just showing up gets you a medal) leagues, mixers and clinics. Pee Wee and junior classes along side of senior games. Balboa even has a special challenge court, no reservation needed, just pop in and play.

The key to the success of these centers is the concentration of courts in one location. There is a minimum number, around ten, that is required to produce special events while maintaining regular weekly programs. With this activity level, facilities such as rest rooms, food stands and pro shop become self sustaining. In Manhattan, one such tennis association has fund raisers featuring top tennis pros and world class entertainers. People are eager to volunteer their services and join the association.

Since this type of center would draw players from the entire region, funding should be equally broad based, perhaps involving several coastal cities and the county. The Hall property, while planning is still in flux, could be a good setting. This type of public-private facility has been successful across the country. More than just an amenity, it becomes an attraction that adds luster to its surroundings. Our unique strip of sun kissed paradise deserves nothing less.

Al Rodbell
Alvrdb-12@yahoo.com

Preview of New America

2006-01-17T10:21:00.000-08:00

January 23,2006

While some liberals may applaud the announcement of the decision affirming the state of Oregon's Assisted Suicide Law that allows people in the terminal stages of an illness to receive drugs to end their life, it sends a message that should be deeply disturbing. The Supreme court was two votes away from a different outcome.

Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas disagreed with the majority. In his dissent, Scalia wrote: "The court's decision today is perhaps driven by a feeling that the subject of assisted suicide is none of the federal government's business. ... If the term 'legitimate medical purpose' has any meaning, it surely excludes being used to produce death."

The above statement is not part of American jurisprudence or found in the Constitution, but happens to be a central tenet of Roman Catholicism. This is so ingrained in the thinking of Anton Scalia, that for him it was “surely” self evident. His quote is missing the conclusion that follows inexorably, “Only God almighty decides when a person’s time on earth is over.” While written by Scalia, it was endorsed by Thomas and Roberts.

It is a travesty that during John Roberts’ nomination hearing an examination of how he would integrate his religious beliefs with his constitutional responsibilities was off limits. Religious bigotry was not an accusation any Senator was willing to face. Roberts is a man who goes to mass every week to receive the sacraments, predicated on forgiveness for any sin, including that of disobeying the ex cathedra proclamations of the vicar of Christ on matters of faith or morals. Yet no member of the Senate would ask him how he would reconcile these ecclesiastical laws with those of the United States Constitution.

Now we have the answer. In this dissent, shared by two of the court’s other practicing Catholics, the law of God trumped the laws of our country. Of course, this was not the rationale of their dissent that was couched in the arcana of precedent and statute, interpreted contrary to the majority, to achieve their moral and religious ends.

A sovereign state decided that use of drugs for ending life, under carefully defined conditions, was to be allowed. This was decided by the most direct process of democracy, a referendum. Not once, but twice. This law had been in practice for several years, was not subject to misuse and was achieving exactly the effect desired by the people of Oregon. None of this meant a thing to Thomas or Scalia,, and now, we know, to Chief Justice John Roberts.

The words of John Roberts still echo in the Senate hearing room. “Humility, Respect for the law, limits on enumerated authority of the Federal government……“ so many hollow statements, all to be ignored when his personal, religious beliefs were at stake.

Sandra Day O’Connor, who voted with the majority is about to be replaced by Samuel Alito, who talks the same talk, and practices the same faith as the three dissenters. That would leave us a single seat away from a very different court; a five person majority whose decisions just happen to adhere to the strictures of their religion, rather than the laws of their country.

Let us have no more illusions. The same moral-legal calculus of the dissent that justified preventing tormented cancer victims from ending their own lives, will also prevent the ending of the life of a fetus, whether a day, a month or six months from conception. We wonder whether Roe v Wade will be overturned; based on the logic of this dissent, abortion could very well be made a federal crime.

Democratic Senators, along with moderate Republicans, must stand up for their constituents, who are actually the majority of Americans. You now know what confirmation of Samuel Alito, and those who share his values, will mean. If the Senate is put in crisis; if the nuclear option is invoked, then so be it. If not now, when?

Read the dissent. Buried in its tortuous logic is the outline of a new America. Our laws and the institutions that shape a nation, where final authority resides with the people, will have been transformed. Our laws will have a new caveat, “valid unless contrary to the will of God.”

This will have been imposed under the guise of following the very constitution that is being undermined, by men emboldened with the peculiar arrogance only found by those who claim adherence to a standard higher than that of we mere struggling mortals.

The confirmation vote on Samuel Alito will shape this country for decades. If you concur with my evaluation, we must make our sentiments known. Copy, or send link to this essay; talk to friends. An individual Senator can force a cloture vote. Now is the time to take such a stand.

February 2, 2006

There was an attempt to filibuster by Democrats, that was easily defeated, leading to a 57 to 42 confirmation. Just today, on a hopeful note, Alito's first official action as Supreme Court Justice was to side with the moderates to postpone an execution.

Death Penalty cases are the most partisan in the recent history of this court. At one time, according to Edward Lazarus, who was clerking for Blackmun at the time, Scalia and Rhenquist would automatically vote against any action that would have the effect of delaying an execution, while a few Thurgood Marshall and others were so opposed that they would always vote to cause a delay. Neither of these groups looked at the merits of the case.

From this one vote, it looks like Alito, has shown he is not going to join this group. Roberts, however did join Thomas and Scalia. If Bush only got one out of two of his goal of radicalizing the court, I would be delighted. My greatest hope is that the course of events prove the warning of this essay to be wrong.

Description of Oregon Death with Dignity Law

Text of Supreme Court Decision

How Democrats represent majority in Sanate

Incisive article by Justice Scalia on Church and State

Getting a Dog

2006-01-12T12:24:00.000-08:00

Chumley

It was an uphill battle for Sheila to get me to break down and get another dog. We both had loved our Westie, Chumley, and were devastated when he finally had to be put down after a long illness. Much had changed in the five years since that day. No longer shuttling back and forth between our Manhattan apartment and our country spread, we had ended up in a suburb of San Diego, Carlsbad, California.

In the country Chumley had seventy acres to romp around, had he the inclination, which he didn’t. Even when he was healthy, he was a stick-at-home type of guy, and could always be found within shouting distance of the porch. Except when he was called to action, joining his pack of Sheila and me in chasing the geese.

We had this pond near the house, and twice a year during migration, Canadian Geese found it a convenient spot to rest, and give birth to their goslings. Sounds delightful, except for one thing, Goose shit. Globs and Glogs of it, on the pier and along the water. So, we really didn’t want the word to get around goosedom, that the Rodbell’s pond is open to the public. We loved nature, but not that much. So, when the geese alighted on the pond, the alarm went out, Goose Alert! The whole team was mobilized, Sheila, Chumley and Me.

This experience has given me a great respect for geese. You see, when they were right in the center of the pond, they were just out of range of my stone throwing ability. So, with an instinctive talent in trigonometry that any junior high school kid would covet, they found that center spot. So, we had to raise one hell of a ruckus to get them to fly away. And it worked, until it didn’t any more.

Now there were goslings, and the geese were parents. They could fly away, but their little babies couldn’t, so they were staying. We weren’t vicious. We had some sympathy for the avian family, but we just wanted them to find another pond. We would have even given them directions.

And this is when I was humbled by a species that you usually think you can outwit. We had herded the family of Geese to one end of the pond, and they knew they were in trouble. One of the parents, can’t tell which one, walked out of the water and started to limp towards the trees a couple dozen feet away. He (or she) seemed to have an injured wing, which was being favored with an awkward gait.

I walked after the injured goose, in an attempt to make sure that he was well chastised and wouldn’t come back, when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the other big goose, and the half dozen or so goslings, running into the woods. When they had disappeared I returned my focus to the injured Goose, and would you believe it. As soon as his family was safe, he took off. His damaged wing restored.

It had been a ploy to get my attention. Now, in the history of goosedom, rarely have any been pursued by one with as benign intent as mine. This goose was prepared for the worse. He was sacrificing himself for his progeny. So, Geese, the species, is in pretty good shape, and will continue to thrive for some time, I would imagine. Along with goose shit.

Memories of Chumley were like this. He was our companion on cold snowy nights when we all huddled together in front of the fire (really the satellite television, but it’s the same idea.) And when we were in the other extreme of our dual habitat, our 30th floor apartment on Broadway he was also there. There it wasn’t geese, it was in-line skaters who were our nemeses. Chumley didn’t like them and went to grab a bite of their ankle when they went by, which made them jump which they didn’t like. So, I had to try to hold him back, and hold myself back (which I didn’t) when one guy made a really nasty threat when we were along the river that time.

Finding Mitch

But, it was time for a new dog. And over the months Sheila tried to break me down. I really wasn’t ready for the interaction that comes with having a dog. You may never piss in your neighbors yard, but your dog will. And there are those who find this offensive, and want your dog to go in the street. I understand their point of view, but the problem is, a dog doesn’t. And did I really want to be defender of my dog, in this suburb where I certainly did not feel a real part of. I steeled myself against Sheila’s entreaties. But the pressure was being ratcheted up. “Maybe we could just visit the shelter along the highway. You know, Rancho Coastal where my friend in the orchestra used to work.”

It was Sheila’s desire for a pet, against my desire to keep my defenses intact. A few things worked in Sheila’s favor. A few months before I broke down, this little kitten, maybe a few months old, would come into our back yard. There wasn’t any collar, and we both really got attached to it. Then there was a second one. We would feed them, and play with them in our house, and then I sneezed. Once, twice, then incessantly. No way, we were not going to take them in, or any of their species.

And then there was Maggie, Denny’s boxer, who we walked with a few times a week. Maggie was one sweet pooch. And Denny was my pal. So, I confided in him my ambivalence about getting a dog. I said, “There are good things and bad.” And Denny responded, “No, there are only good things.” So, that was it. My resistance broken, we headed to the dog shelters. There were several visits to the ones in the area, where I was ready to take any dog. We even visited the snooty Helen Woodward Kennel in Rancho Santa Fe, where we didn’t quite measure up. They wanted my commitment that even if I were allergic to their dog, I would get treatment rather than return it, which I was not prepared to promise.

Once my defenses were broken there wasn’t much discriminatory skills to bring to bear to the decision. We did pick up some dog breed books to do some research, but it almost gets too confusing. We knew we didn’t want another Westie, since we didn’t want to merge Chumley’s memory with the new one. When had gotten Chumley from a pet shop, it was the same type of indecision. (Possibly a character trait of the writer?) I even managed to get a rare one week return option on that purchase. And, as it was expiring, I was still evaluating my options on whether to return our little bundles of joy. (There were two. Brewster died of a congenital disease at a half year of age)

After a week of looking, we dropped into the Oceanside kennel and walked around. There was this little curly haired guy, turned out to be half poodle, half cocker spaniel, a Cockapoo, who gave us both a wet lick on the nose as we leaned down to say hello. There was another dog that we were somewhat interested in but he was still in quarantine, so it was either this one or nothing. I looked at Sheila; She looked at me. And to seal the deal, the shelter was having an overstock special that week. A sweet fluffy dog, with a poodle fur that doesn’t cause allergies, that gives you a wet kiss, and at a bargain price----“let’s sign the contract,” I said.

At His New House

So, we took him home. It really was a trial period like with Chumley, since they give you a free vet checkup and the opportunity to return him if it doesn’t work out. It seemed kind of strange having this creature here with us. And it must have seemed pretty strange to him too. Our memory was of Chumley, who couldn’t be close enough to us every minute of the day. Mitch, (that was his name and it sounded about right for him, so we kept it) was more aloof. We were told that the people who had him, had to get rid of him because of their health. That was it, no details, no names. The shelters protect both parties of these transactions, so no remorse can be acted on by the giver, and no recriminations expressed for a problem dog by the taker.

We fed him, walked him, played with him, all the doggie things. We got him a little round bed from Costco, that he seemed to find cozy, and we started our life together. We have a little back yard that we let him frolic around, which he seemed to enjoy. A couple days after we had brought him home, it was a Sunday morning, I let him out the in the back yard. I realized something was wrong immediately. The gate had been left ajar the previous day by our gardener, and Mitch had bolted. I dashed out the front door and saw him running down the street, ears flapping, and legs flailing. I ran after him, my plastic slippers flopping as I ran, shouting at the top of my voice, “Mitch, Mitch, Come Mitch, Mitch.” He was faster than me, and getting smaller as he made his first turn. I was tiring, and getting winded, as he flew on. We were on a residential street, but only a few blocks from a busy avenue. I thought about the little chip that was implanted for identification, but first he would have to survive the streets, which seemed like a long shot.

I remembered how it was in the country. There it was pretty common to see dogs walking alone along the road. Sometimes we would stop, but usually we wouldn’t. This was farm country, and a dog was livestock. Well, somewhat more, but too often, not much more. The county was discussing an ordinance to make it a crime to keep driving after hitting a small animal, but nothing to deter the people who let their animals roam.

But as Mitch was disappearing down the street, I thought of the shortness of our time together. Only two days, hardly time to get to know each other. How stupid, how careless of me, not to have checked the gate. And now he would be gone. But the fates had something different in mind. At the far end of the street there was a man walking his two dogs, and that’s where Mitch headed. There he was bouncing off the two dogs, putting them in shock, that they were being swarmed by this little guy who was all paws and licks. Mitch enjoys playing with other dogs with an unrestrained abandon, and there they where, two of them, right there for his enjoyment.

I walked over and picked him up, thanked the owner of the pooches effusively, and carried him the two blocks to the house. What a scare! We would never let that happen again. But we did. A few months later, when I was over at Denny’s, Sheila called in panic. Barely maintaining control, she told me that she had put Mitch out in the yard, but now he was gone. The gates were locked and the fence was intact. What could have happened. Denny jumped in my car and we took Maggie as a Mitch magnet. Ignoring meaningless red lights, I sped to the house.

Well, this time Mitch hadn’t gone far. It turned out that behind the dense high grass along the fence, was a little opening, big enough for him to get his paws into, and make big enough to crawl through, which he did, right to our neighbor‘s yard. Once again he was back in our clutches. I went to Home Depot and hammered in a triple protection of new fence extending well below the ground line. He would need a crow bar to get under this one.

And so it went. He had plenty of long walks where he could play with other dogs, but always on leash. And when we took him to a dog park, we made sure it was only those that had full enclosures, with double air locks that would not allow a dog to get out when someone is getting in. We inspected the back yard fence reinforcement regularly, and developed a standardized protocol of checking that the gate was locked after the yard had been mowed. Mitch was never going to get away again.

A Secure Facility

As the months went by there was always that gnawing doubt: was Mitch happy with us? What had his life been like in his previous home? Would he still wish that he were back there? You can’t ask a dog whether he loves you, or whether he is happy, but it does matter. Was he a part of our family, a major part to us, or was he our prisoner. He was giving us pleasure, but were we giving him the same? We didn’t really know; and the memory of his escape attempts, suggesting an answer we did not like, was always in the background.

Then a few weeks ago we found out about an area near us in Encinitas under a high tension power easement, that had been just dedicated as a dog walk area. It was maybe a half mile long and a block wide of trails and brush. What made it different from any other play area we had taken Mitch to was that it wasn’t enclosed. There was no air lock with latches, just an opening in the fence that you walk through. Now, we knew Mitch was smart. If he had been plotting his escape all of these months, he would have noticed this as we walked in. He would have known that this was his chance to break loose and find those other people, or someplace else that he really liked better. He would have known this, and that he could outrun me any day of the week.

But we had to know. We walked several hundred feet into the area, and then I looked at Sheila, and we agreed. We would take off his leash. I reached down, pushed the snap, and he was free. And he turned, and he ran down the trail, his ears flapping in the wind. He ran about a hundred feet or so, and then I called, “Mitch.“ and I waited a long second. He stopped and turned, and started back at the same speed, right past us a few yards, around again, stopping at our feet. He looked up and made eye contact; petted him, scratched him behind the ears, and he was off again.

He ran back and forth, and when he spotted the waging tails of some dogs in the distance, he made that sound, not a bark but a sort of ummm, ummm, ummm, that is best interpreted as, “hey, there’s someone to play with.” He wanted to take off toward them, but only would after I had given the O.K. And when he got there, even in the ecstasy of his wild play, he would still be aware of us. And if we called, he would break off, and come. Mitch was just as concerned about losing us as we were of losing him.

It was a joyous day. We went back home together, for the first time feeling like a family. We all wanted to be together. It wouldn’t take treats, or an electronic collar to make him come when we called, it’s just that he wants to be with us. Wow, this is why there are so may dogs around. This is why people in dire straits will buy dog food instead of a meal for themselves. And this is why every so often you read about a person who dies in a freezing lake trying to rescue a dog, sometimes not even their own.

It took some time, but once again, we have a dog---and I guess he has us.

.

Christmas Parade

2005-12-05T10:47:00.000-08:00

Christmas Parade

I would never even have known if Sheila hadn't pointed out the article from the local paper reporting that groups were outraged and were boycotting this annual event because of the name change. So, I did what I usually do, sit down and write. But this one didn't flow. It's hard to be clever, witty and interesting, when what you feel like doing is smash someone in his face.

But I tried, and I came up with a letter that described how this lovely "Brigadoon" of a beach town was tainted and soon to descend into a spiral of religious hatred that would ultimately lead to Encinitas becoming "Belfast by the Sea." Luckily, Sheila gently indicated that this was not quite my best work, so I scratched it just before hitting the send button.

What I finally wrote was the following, which was printed in the local weekly Coast News, as well as the San Diego Union Tribune.

To the Editor:

It is unfortunate that Dan Dalager who was elected only to the city council, in his ceremonial capacity as Mayor, unilaterally chose to rename the Holiday Parade “Christmas Parade.” He was either oblivious to the ramifications of creating religious controversy where none existed, or else this was his intent, with motivation I hesitate to speculate on.

Either way, the lovely city of Encinitas now has its very own virtual Soledad Cross, an issue to divide Christian from Non-Christian, Religious from Secular, Conservative from Liberal.

Perhaps it was unwise to have secularized the name years ago, but changing it back has a different meaning. Our country is now more polarized. There are those for whom the war against secularism is truly a “Crusade” to be won at all costs. For this group, changing a parade name is only a way station towards achieving their political goals.

There are real issues such as abortion, gay rights, and education where “Christian values” have become a rallying cry for one side. But there are times and places, such as this parade, that have been a no-fire zone, where we have the luxury of just enjoying our common humanity.

Changing the name back to “Holiday Parade” would not negate the damage done by Dalager’s actions. It would only change which side feels aggrieved, who feels their values are being trampled upon. His gratuitous act risks turning what has been a celebration, into a battleground of the culture wars, and no one wins on a battleground. There are only casualties.

Rather than boycott a parade that has been a source of pleasure for all, I suggest ignoring this provocation and fully enjoying this community event. Whether called “Holiday” or “Christmas” it is the Encinitas parade, a celebration of a diverse, vital community that will not be torn apart by a single person’s ill conceived act.

I was proud of this letter. So much so that I walked over to Mayor Dalagers storefront and read it to him. It was an illuminating conversation, too much for this essay.

The next day was the Parade. I spent several hours at an open house at the campaign headquarters of Francine Busby, the Democrat who will contest the seat vacated by Duke Cunningham. I liked the people there, and had good talks with the candidate and her campaign manager.

It's going to be an open election that could become a mini-verson of the circus when Schwartzenegger won in the recall of the Governor. Anyone can be on the ballot, even an old guy with a sharp pen who is able to articulate his anger at the Republican administration. But, what a lonely, and ultimately frustrating endeavor that would be.

Before the parade started I walked the route along Main Street. This is a small town and a small parade, so a half hour does it. In the finest example of American entrepreneurial spirit, someone was selling sweat shirts reading, "Encinitas Christmas Parade 2005, Christmas is Back." Other than that, and the single sign thanking the Mayor for bringing back Chritmas there was nothing different in this parade from last years.

Nothing obvious that is. One Church had an elaborate float with dozens of people recreating the life and times of Jesus. There were Roman soldier, Mary in the manger, and pilgrims on their way to honor the virgin birth. Last year, I would have viewed this with admiration of the skill,effort, and conviction of the creators of this presentation. But on this day, as part of what was now an officially defined celebration of this particular event, it was chilling.

But mostly, it was just fun. Kids and parents, old and young, chihuahuas and labs, just enjoying themselves. The Roman soldiers were only pretending, and were not really killing people for their apostasy from the State Religion. The controversy was not going to get much traction in Encinitas, and maybe not anywhere.

We really have come a long way from that time when thousands marched right up Pennsylvania Avenue in the nations capital under the banner of Christian Rights, with their faces hooded by white sheets as the crowd cheered. It's been a painful wrenching few decades from then to now. And maybe it's a sign of just how far we have come that Mayor Dalager, and those who praise him, don't even make the connection; that that era is truly gone from our national consciousness, only to be recalled by now old Jewish men who remember the hatred of playmates that they could never understand.

2005-07-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

Tax "Fairness"

Anyone reading this who lives in California is very familiar with proposition 13. It was an initiative passed in the 1970s that rolled back property taxes and limited their future annual increase to 2% a year. This has provided stability and security for homeowners, and is so widely popular that it is considered sacrosanct. When Arnold Schwartzenegger ran for governor he enlisted Warren Buffet, the second wealthiest American, as an economic adviser. Buffet commented how unfair it was that he pay one tenth the property tax of his neighbor with the same valued home. The Terminator terminated his services.

Two weeks ago the local weekly paper printed an article that ridiculed attempts to reform this law. Today they printed my response as their lead letter to the editor.

Re: Revisiting Prop.13

Since political dialogue these days is often in broad incendiary stereotypes, with a favorite enemy being the "tax and spend lobby" so vilified by Mr. Coupal's Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association a little introspection may be in order.

How many of those who cheer tax "protection" or "relief" have not benefited from what taxes have provided. How many of them, or their parents, enjoyed a career made possible by the world class education, all the way through graduate school, that had been the birthright of every Californian. It was free, paid for by taxpayers. The highways that facilitated commerce, public health, the criminal justice system,, the agencies that kept the ocean accessible did not just happen, they are the products of government.

And the greatest gift, living in a free self governing country, was not ordained by God. It took the lives of thousands of fighting men and women, but it also took the wealth, a good chunk of the earnings of generations of citizens who did not beg for "relief" from taxes, but gladly remitted them for the preservation of that which they valued beyond personal wealth.

The "unfairness" (his quotes) of Prop 13 is far from a trivial quibble; it strikes at what has been the unique quality of this land, the promise that every newcomer, every impoverished immigrant will be treated the same as those who are established. We never promised happiness, only the opportunity to achieve it. Housing overwhelms every other expense, yet for this vital necessity, it is the group that is not established, those who are trying to get a foothold onto the American dream, who are told to pay more, a lot more, in taxes.

There are ways to adjust Proposition 13 to retain many of its benefits for existing owners while limiting its adverse effect on those who are trying to become new home owners. Fairness seems like a pretty tepid rallying cry. It shouldn't be. It is what has made this country great.

Chelsea's Law V4 full

1999-07-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

This has been revised. Use this link

Suggested Titles: Chelsea's Law, a personal story V 4 Full

When Chelsea King, a popular high school student in a nearby town, was first reported missing, I was planning to drive the few miles to where her car was found to join the many volunteers who were searching for her in the wooded area near a reservoir. The next day her body was discovered, with the report that she had been raped before being murdered. I have a neighbor who had a career as a high level official with the California Department of Justice, and now works with registered sex offenders in the eastern part of the county. He wasn't too detailed about what he did, but when the subject came up there was a sense of frustration, the feeling that that there was much that wasn't right with the system that he was participating in.

As the story unfolded, after the arrest and soon later the the confession of John Albert Gardner, a young man who was a registered sex offender, my friend forwarded a document to me that few have read, It was a thirty six page report requested by the governor on the details of the defendant, with a full analysis of current incarceration, parole and supervision policy in California. This information, provided by the California Sex Offender Management Board (CASOMB) is so divergent from the public's perception based on news reports, that I felt compelled over the last few months to try make sense out of it all.

Very soon after the apprehension of Gardner and his admitting to a previous rape murder, a movement to revise existing procedures was spearheaded by the local member of the state assembly, Nathan Fletcher, named after the last victim, Chesea's Law. As part of his attempt to gather support he requested letters from local cities, including mine. Encinitas is a city of about sixty thousand about a half hour up the coast from San Diego. Local politics is usually centers on the configuration of parks, zoning exemption for developers and people getting very angry getting ticketed for having their dogs off leash. My first appearance when we first moved here a few years back was about the name of our annual parade, which the mayor, responding to the challenge of Bill O'Reilly to push back against "The war against Christmas," changed from the long time "Holiday Parade," to the "Christmas Parade."

If it had always been called that it would never have bothered me, yet by changing from the secular to the religious there was a message that I took personally. My two presentations to the council, always controlled and considerate, made the point how religious strife can bring a special intensity of conflict, something our country's founders attempted to avoid by keeping government away from this arena. I'm not sure whether I made the difference, but at the vote to return the name to "Holiday" the deciding council member echoed the words that I had spoken.

Nothing much was different about the parade because of changes in the names from, and then back to, the secular "Holiday Parade." They still had school marching bands, and the guy's with the fezzes riding little bikes, and also the local mega church with characters in costume right out of a Bavarian medieval passion play. Yet the depiction of the suffering of Christ on the cross had a different meaning in a Holiday Parade than it would have had in a parade named by the local government to officially commemorate this event. Being a Jew, for many of my era, although we don't speak Yiddish, or keep kosher, and never saw the desecration of our villages by mobs whose hate for us was unfazed by reason or law, still have a sense of the experience. Parents never tell their children about these things, yet they are conveyed in ways we can't quite figure out. Irrational angry mobs with revenge and hatred in their eyes, closed to the evidence that the objects of their ire may not have done what everyone believes they have, strike a certain chord among those who have experienced it, even if many generations in the past.

And so when the city council voted to approve Chelsea's Law, in a tableau that mirrored the very dynamics described here, that illustrated how the rules of mob pressure apply even to those elected to represent a city, I decided to speak out in objection. While the vote of support is listed as 4 to 1, the actual events recorded on video show that two of the votes in favor were by men with doubts, who felt the law would never be passed as written or wanted other issues included. Yet, when rebuked by one member who focused on the single issue of greater punishment, both sided with him. Focus anger trumped reasoned consideration, all recorded on ten minutes of video.

As the weeks went by and I read more, and connected with various officials, including Robert Coombs, the chairman of CASOMB that wrote the report on Gardner's case, I found myself in a bind, since being convinced of an injustice without attempting to rectify it is a special type of curse. If you know something is wrong and ignore it are you not partly responsible for the consequences? The injustice I'm referring to is not to the murder-rapist John Gardner, who deserved his punishment The injustice is to the those future victims who will be the next to be raped and murdered because of a law that is defective. As the CASOMB report concluded:

California has not effectively prioritized when making policy decisions about the management of convicted sex offenders. Many
decisions seem to have been made for political reasons or what feels good at the time. As a result, money and time have been wasted on policies and programs that are politically popular but do not make our communities safer.

Being in response to sexual offenses against children this has a special quality, a fundamental revulsion that elicits outrage against those who perpetrate such acts. Yet, the ability to get at the truth, to identify those offenders who can take advantage of the innocence of children either by familial, personal or institutional circumstances is elusive. Evidence of our particular society's failure to achieve this control is all around us; from the depredations of the highest level of the most ancient Christian Church, to the special privileges of selected luminaries of our own secular priesthood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. So, when we actually find someone who is not of a protected group, who is guilty, even if the damage is less than traumatic, there is enough pent up rage that demands expression. Under these conditions, it is not only the perpetrator who is the enemy, but anyone who gets in the way of of consummating the full the act of revenge.

I probably would have done what most people do, and after a while go on to other things in my life, but the San Diego Union Tribune was persistent, keeping this story alive with several articles a day for months on end. On a front page editorial they proclaimed that they were going to take the lead in addressing this problem, with their "Call to Action." I had my suspicions of their motives, knowing that the paper had just been bought out by a venture capital fund that had an immediate need to raise circulation in order to flip their investment for a profit. The owners of a newspaper have an array of methods to implement their goals. While the editorials are the official voice of the publisher; in these times of decreasing job opportunities each reporter and columnist can glean, and take their cue from, the unofficial tone of the boss. Selecting Letters to the Editor is an especially powerful way to promote the appearance of consensus, to reinforce a given movement and isolate those who challenge it. With these tools they create the image of a united community, with such image eventually becoming a reality, based on the universal human need to be part of their social group.

The Union Tribune's call to action was just that, an attempt to arouse the public to express their loathing at this crime; but not in the abstract, in the person of the individual John Albert Gardner III. Although he was the main object of scorn, he had to be made to represent every defect of the current legal and administrative system of sex offender law. The narrative of his life had to be condensed and shaped, and if need be also distorted and censored; so that rage at child sexual offenders could be represented by this individual. He was the archtypical "poster boy," pure evil to keep in mind when designing a law that would apply to everyone who could turn out like him. The tragic fate of his two victims had to be associated not only with this man, but all that he came to represent. It was all going well, when someone threw a monkey wrench into the process, in the form of a long candid interview with Gardner that showed him for what he is, a terribly damaged human being who perpetrated the most heinous crimes. But for those who listened to his hour long conversation, beyond the self serving distortions, the undeniable fact became evident, he was one of us, a disturbed tortured child of woman, and for those so inclined, also of God.

In Gardner's interview he made certain assertions, that his first conviction was an act of rage, a blowup with a friend that turned violent without sexual motivation, and that he accepted a plea out of fear of an even longer sentence. He described his life under parole after his release in 2005, which for the first year was without any infractions, something confirmed by the CASOMB report. He then described how it was only when the restrictions of Jessica's Law were implemented that he was forced to leave his apartment, without there being any acceptable housing available, causing him to live in his car and lose his job, making it impossible to continue child support and the relationship with his two children. He, requested, and recieved a commitment from the interviewer, that his statements be validated, not accepted on face value but investigated. Not only were they never verified or refuted, the substance of this interview has never been reported.

This interview could have destroyed the caricature, the personification of evil that had been carefully crafted by the Union Tribune and echoed by almost all local media. This media generated momentum was powerful enough to cause the cancellation of the planned full reporting of the interview by the local CBS affiliate. The U.T. Columnist Logan Jenkins, one of the more decent responsible members of his guild, did an about face from his previous article favoring justice for people such as Gardner, to one describing him as a loathsome monster whom he wishes to be killed by fellow prisoners. Chelsea's law ratchets up punishment for offenders such as the twenty year old Gardner, a disturbed young man whose crime was relatively minor. Like a masterful magician who amazes the audience by the seemingly sawed-in-half assistant appearing alive in the audience, in this case the switch, the unseen substitution is between the murderer rapist Gardner 2009, and his earlier troubled incarnation. We are about to pass a law that we are led to believe punishes predators who stalk, rape and kill vulnerable young women, yet when the curtain is lifted it will turn out that Chelsea's Law does no such thing, but rather destroys those who could probably be helped to lead a decent productive life.

A little background into my earlier foray into the world of penology might shed light on what underlies this article.. The location, the upper West Side of N.Y. was the Berkley of the East, about as far from conservative San Diego as can be found on this continent. I was active politically when I lived there, to the point of being invited to the local Democratic Club in 1995 to present my position on Capital Punishment. I knew If I were going to make any impact on this group that was opposed to my views, this would have to be dramatic, so I began with a narrative:

The young woman had taken a shortcut through a wooded area on her daily run. It was getting dark, and from nowhere, she was tackled, and felt the knife to her throat with the demand to comply as ordered. Helpless, she acceded, numb to the humiliation, to the terror, only hoping that it would be over. Now the attacker, physically satisfied but realizing what he had done, heard the girl promising that she would not tell anyone if he just let her go. But, growing calmer he had a moment to think, realizing that she was looking at his face, that she would report him. If he killed her, there would be no witness, no cry for help, and he could live, as miserable as his life was, he wanted to live, and so.......

About this time I had a long conversation with Ernest van den Haag, Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Fordham University and the pre-eminent defender of Capital Punishment. After a few drinks he confided in me a rationale that was quite different than mine. With a glint in his eye, he said, "When someone is facing a possible death sentence, it is easy to get them to admit to something, to cop a plea." The same would certainly apply to someone who is caught in sexual exploration with a younger friend that goes bad, where she gets nervous and he panics. Under the new law, premeditation or a pattern of such activity need not be shown, and the threat of life in prison is enough to garner admission to a reduced offense for a more moderate punishment. Most of the literature makes the assumption that the first conviction has been plea bargained down from the actual offense, but as Dr. van den Haag explained, it works both ways.

My personal dilemma is having an awareness of two truths that are diametrically in conflict. The first is that Chelsea's Law, though a defective product and a missed opportunity, represents something universal in human culture, perhaps vital to our society. It is raw retribution, but it is also an expression of organized defense against those who offend against not only the human victim but the values that stabilize our world. Understanding the sociological underpinnings of this movement does not negate its value, but ignoring it is a guarantee of excesses of unknown proportions.

It is part of a long list of such laws, some going back to 1947, that define and then stigmatize aggressive inappropriate sexual behavior, especially involving children. The power of a movement such as that driving this current law is not to be underestimated. Rational redress of actual crimes is the least requirement for what has been described as "Moral Panic." With distance, it is easy to condemn examples such as Witch Burning in Colonial America, or the Pogroms against Jews of Eastern Europe, recent enough for my own mother to have experienced them. In this country in 1942 there was a unanimity in believing that every American Citizen of Japanese descent was at his core a "hated devious Jap," who deserved "containment" similar to that which we are expanding with the current bill for all sex offenders. As is true today with sex offenders, there were some Japanese who were a danger, as they did identify with their ethnic homeland against this country, yet the "mob effect" was such that none would argue for the obvious truth that the vast majority were patriotic Americans.

Serious study of prevention of sexual predation is unpleasant, tedious and ultimately frustrating, since the causes are diverse and hidden. It is easier to ignore the reality that excesses of punishment, of over alertness to indications of pedophilia, take their own toll on society. The human condition is one of infinite risk, from instant death at the hands of drunk drivers, to contacting a fatal virus from the sneeze of a best friend, to lightening from a thunderhead that appeared without notice.....all of these orders of magnitude more probable than death under the circumstances of those of Gardner's murders. Maintaining a society predicated on the elusive concept of "Justce" is a good that we only appreciate when it is gone. Unlike other societies, this belief protects judges, prosecutors and even police who are seen as supporters of this broad invisible concept. Achieving justice is more than guaranteeing a fair trial; it is maintaining a population whose view of the world reflects reality, not distorted by a belief that every man is a would be sexual predator so that even excessive, or wrongful convictions, becomes acceptable.

In a recent conversation with the Chief of staff of the sponsor of Chelsea's Law, while his office acknowledged that residence restrictions are counter productive, they have no intention of redressing it. Not at this time, not when they are so close to passing this law, not when there is unanimous approval from those in both parties, not when this will be met by accolades from the Union Tribune that may never again mention the "grotesque" effect of forced homelessness due to residence restrictions. So those convicted of early sex crimes against children will spend their lives in containment, some inside prisons, others sequestered by constantly monitored GPS bracelets paid for by imaginary funds from a bankrupt state. And as the Union Tribune admitted, "has the likely practical effect of turning some relatively minor sex offenders into far worse and of spurring paroled violent sex offenders into acting again on their dark impulses."

Unlike with the relocated Japanese Americans, for those contained by Chelsea's law there will be no VJ day where the end of hostilities allows dispassionate reconsideration. World Wars only happen when entire countries are united in armed conflict, organized by the most competent leaders of nations, united in hatred of the enemy. Sexual predation is a pathology of outcasts, of those who for a myriad of reasons cannot direct their sexual urges according to the rules of their society. It is the product of our fallible human condition, so will continue to arise with each new generation. While it is a scourge that elicits the same emotion of mass rage as does military aggression, it is not amenable to the same marshaling of concerted force. How do we transcend this? How do we direct the primal outrage against the crimes of those like Gardner in a political system that demands response to emotions of the crowd, whether the results are effective or not.

There is something unique about the movement of Chelsea's Law through the state legislature. It has done what most American's wish for, eliminated partisan rancor, garnering the support of every single elected official of both parties. This is is so rare, that it becomes all the greater loss of an opportunity if we fail to redress the errors that have accumulated over the decades. It is only at this moment of heightened public passion that such correction can occur. We must acknowledge the truth, that the vast majority of us who voted for Jessica's law may be complicit in the death of the very person memorialized by this bill. We must demand from our media and public officials that they go beyond leading emotionally satisfying movements that result in a body of counterproductive laws. And at election time we must support those making a good faith attempt to forge rational penology, and turn against those who would castigate such effort as being "soft on crime."

Six decades of sex offender legislation, each cathartic to the public and advantageous to it's sponsors, contain defects that history shows can not be remediated in our attack ad political climate. Perhaps, doing just one, eliminating residence restrictions that are shown to actually cause more sex predations, would be the beginning of a rational sex offender penology. And, who knows, just possibly start to change the process of political dialogue in this once prosperous state that was a beacon for our country.

(c) Al Rodbell

my picture

1999-05-12T14:06:00.000-07:00