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…taking myself too seriously again…

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sold down the river by….

• Samuel Alito
  

• Stephen Breyer
  

• Anthony Kennedy
  

• John Roberts
  

• Clarence Thomas

When the Supreme Court of the United States took on the question of DNA sampling earlier this year, I thought “Well now there’s a controversy worth chewing on! ”

They recently concluded that DNA sampling of a person under arrest for a “serious crime” does not constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable search and seizure, and that the practice merely amounts to a 21st century version of fingerprinting. For starters, a five-to-four decision isn’t exactly a landside, so I’m still chewing vigorously, even if the justices aren’t. Additionally, fingerprints and DNA codes share the single fact that they are both body features that can provide information, but beyond that it becomes an “apples and socket wrenches” comparison.

How are they different?

While each is a source of information, fingerprints have limits. This is important because it helps to restrict the information collected to the identity of the individual who created the print in the first place. A person’s DNA does that, and more. In fact, scientists are not yet sure what the limits of DNA analysis might be. It is obvious from what is known however that the data can do a great deal more than simply provide evidence of whether or not a given individual was at a specific location. DNA has been used to identify the sole known living descendant of a prehistoric man whose preserved remains were found in an English peat bog. There is no reason to believe the same data couldn’t eventually be used to predict a considerable amount of information about one’s descendants many generations in the future as well. DNA research is already looking into ways to manipulate life, death, and everything in between. This is one piece of information that nobody in this world should ever control or be in the possession of except the one individual to whom it applies. Period.

In a controlled and unbreachable environment, such as that which proponents of using DNA sampling as a standard tool of law enforcement suggest would be the case, the potential for abuse or misuse might be minimal, assuming certain criteria were met. Unfortunately, when such a scenario is used as a selling point, and where questions of individual rights are concerned, the primary criterion is “perfection”, and that is unrealistic. The “ideal” environment does not exist, nor is it likely to ever exist for more than occasional brief moments in time. Policies continually adapt to new circumstances, and the personnel responsible for creating, adapting, and carrying out those policies change as well.

Maintaining consistency under such conditions remains a challenge, and our form of government was originally structured to provide that very challenge as a safeguard. Creating policies and regulations that improve consistency must be approached with great caution, and the value of individual liberty must always be weighed against the presumed value of any government activity that has the potential to diminish that liberty, with liberty holding the priority position.

Thus, as scientists play around with the challenge of cloning a wooly mammoth just because it might be a fun thing to do, our Supreme Court has pooh-poohed concerns about DNA sampling and given police departments the go-ahead to swab away. It isn’t just about whether or not it is Constitutional to engage in such fishing expeditions to see if a few bad guys might be nabbed. It’s about The Supreme Court of the United States taking an unbelievably cavalier attitude towards an issue which may arguably constitute as great a threat to humanity as did the creation of nuclear weaponry. The Justices may know all of the big words for such things, but that doesn’t preclude the posing of absolutely valid questions by any citizen able to voice them.

The argument that one’s fingerprints are already obtained prior to conviction does not segue into justification for any other tool of identification being granted a free pass to do the same. Echoes of the old “if you aren’t guilty, you have nothing to fear” rationale, used on more than a few occasions down through the ages to do harm, ring very loudly.

Blackstone’s Formulation and the dangers of expediency

.One very primary and essential consideration has obviously been overlooked, or even discarded, by the five justices who approved the practice of DNA sampling. An English jurist of the mid eighteenth century named William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer“. That principle, known as Blackstone’s Formulation, has guided our western concept of justice ever since…..at least until June 3, 2013.

More than just the practice of building a general DNA data base in the currently understood context needs to be considered. Present day supporters claim with all sincerity that such sampling would only be done in the case of “serious crimes”, but there are no safeguards to prevent awarding that designation to behaviors that might be objectionable under the unforeseen politics of any given time in the future. For example, as an outgrowth of efforts to eliminate laws and practices that denied full citizenship and Constitutional rights to Americans descended from African slaves, the “PC” culture evolved, eventually giving rise to the classification of certain actions as “hate crimes”. While many support such ideas, many others, including myself, question how a man beating the tar out of another man is any more or less traumatic or hateful depending on criteria such as “race”, which has been largely disavowed by anthropologists and geneticists, and other factors like ethnic origins, religion, gender, gender preference, etcetera. A light skinned person harming a light skinned person is not hateful, while the same person committing the same acts against a dark skinned person is? Surely, our nation and society, along with the rest of the world’s nations and societies, will continue to grow and change as long as we continue to exist, and there will arise many circumstances when it will be tempting to chip away at the components of liberty out of a temporary desire for expediency. The McCarthy era paranoia of the mid twentieth century demonstrates the danger of “expedient” redefinition of what may be considered threatening to our “national security”, and the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration shows that even the highest office in the land is not immune to corruption and bad judgment

Growing list of involuntary data bases

The establishment of any kind of involuntary database of personal information is cause for concern, and we already have several. We have centralized collections of information assembled and maintained by the Bureau of Census, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and more, and those are just the ones we know about. Protecting selected knowledge data bases such as sensitive military, business, and technical information is understandable and a matter of common sense, but personal information is another story. Complicating the numerous databases developed to further the interests of numerous government departments and agencies, statutes and procedures have broadened in recent years to facilitate the exchange of such information among the various offices.

In the case of the Social Security Administration data base for example, both its scope and purpose have expanded far beyond its original focus just in my lifetime. I did not have a Social Security number until I was fourteen, and the only reason I was assigned one at that time was because I had entered the workforce as a part time stock boy and window washer at a local Five and Dime store. I earned one dollar per hour, and my first little brown pay envelope contained eight one dollar bills and some change. I remember that day! I walked across the parking lot of the shopping center to the bank and opened my first savings account. I had to give them my name, address, phone number, and my deposit money, of course. In return, I got a little folded piece of Manila paper showing my name, account number, account balance, and so forth.

There have been a lot of changes since then. In the early sixties, the IRS began using the SSN as an identification number, and when I joined the US Naval Reserves, I was assigned a service number. When I received a commission a few years later, my Social Security Number went on my “dog tags” instead. In 1970, the IRS mandated that all financial institutions start obtaining the SSN of all customers.

Strangely enough, although the Social Security Administration in 1971 proposed taking a “cautious and conservative” position and not encourage the use of the SSN as a general identifier, they also recommended using it to identify school children, as well as for certain health, education, and welfare purposes. Today, there are few if any purposes for which the government doesn’t require or authorize the use of the Social Security Number. The huge credit industry has largely moved to factoring consumer debt through giant financial institutions, providing rationalization for the use of the once sacred SSN in the private sector as well. And, that’s just one database created, mandated, and then mongrelized by the federal government.

I therefore have little reason to trust that any other personal information databases under government control would retain the original restrictions and applications for which they were created, either should various centers of authority decided it would be in their interest to change the rules at some point. I certainly question with extreme vigor the SCOTUS approval of creating DNA databases, especially without any irrevocable, dedicated checks and balances.

I find it odd that government can justify confiscation and retention of DNA, which essentially constitutes the complete blue print and Owner’s Manual for an individual, though not yet convicted of a crime, at the same time that they are releasing the hounds with extreme prejudice against the guy who ratted on them for spying on all domestic phone and internet communications. Actually, I find it more than “odd”. I find it somewhat alarming. I’m not necessarily in favor of any carte blanche collection of DNA samples from those convicted of crimes either. The definition of what constitutes a “crime” is far too vulnerable to political missteps or excesses to be used as a stand-alone ticket to proceed.

Such practices as the homogenization and dilution of the Social Security system, coinciding with the wholesale dismantling of traditional “boundaries” within the private sector that society is experiencing as the digital revolution barges headlong through the building blocks of tomorrow’s history, increases the potential for misuse dramatically. With the possible exception of the senior generation, most have been lulled into a naive level of trust and a false sense of security, eagerly and openly gobbling up each new electronic tool or toy as soon as it hits the market. The current controversies concerning the allegedly intrusive behaviors of social media such as Google and Facebook are but the tip of the iceberg, an objectionable circumstance even without considering the government’s self-autographed permission slip granting itself the authority and right to dive into their data bases. This isn’t the first time in history that designating virtually any situation a matter of “National Security” has become a universal and unquestionable door opener to anywhere the Ghost of Tyranny Future might like to dabble.

Pogo may have been right

Unless the Supreme Court reverses itself, which isn’t likely, or unprecedented citizen initiatives bordering on Revolution change the direction in which we are headed, this experiment in a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” may saddle our children and grandchildren with a social and political environment that would be quite unrecognizable to the six or seven generations preceding them.

There is no single answer, of course, but the power does still reside in the people, the only caveat being we have to choose to express it. One particularly effective expression of that power has always been the word “NO”.

For nearly forty years, I have found little ways to say “no” and to remind myself to think before simply handing over pieces of me just because somebody with a nametag instructs, or asks, me to do so. This doesn’t mean just adopting an oppositional persona, as that would likely be counterproductive. It means thinking things through.

Who is asking for the information, why do they say they need it or want it, do I want to provide it, and do I agree that it is a reasonable request? The 2010 Census was the first survey since 1970 to which I have responded, and even then I was selective in my choices of which questions to answer. To the best of my recollection, I have never answered questions that I believe contradict my values or my beliefs regarding the proper roles and limits of government. The explanation that certain information is needed to help the federal government provide needed services is more of a red flag to me than a motivation to hand over the requested information. These days, the term “needed services” is just as likely to suggest job security for the million or so people on government payrolls. I always decline to answer questions about race, ethnicity, education, employment, or income. That option is now offered in many places, but when it is not, I either ignore the questions or cross them out.

The challenge when “bucking the tide”, of course, is being willing to stick to one’s principles in the face of consequences. So far, I have usually been willing to take that risk. A couple of years ago, while working on the family budget, I attempted to access a credit card account on line for up to date information. I was denied the opportunity to set up on line access unless I was willing to provide my Social Security Number. I was not, so I called the company in question only to discover that they wouldn’t even discuss my account with me unless I provided a Social Security Number. While I appreciate the fact that the organization was concerned about protecting my personal financial information, I explained that my Social Security Number is for interactions with the federal government only and that didn’t wish to provide it to a private company. The person to whom I spoke was surprisingly flip when she agreed that I wasn’t required to give them my Social Security Number but that, similarly, they were not required to provide me with the service I was requesting. Needless to say, that credit card went to the top of the list for replacement. To date, that has been the only company to respond in such a manner.

This is not to say I haven’t compromised. One has to choose one’s battles unless one wants to simply drop out and live in a cave or in the woods. I tried that gig back in the seventies, anyway. It was fun and a bit of an adventure, and I have always enjoyed the out of doors, but that was not the way I wanted to live for the rest of my life. I happen to like certain modern conveniences. Being employed, driving a vehicle, owning property, and a number of other everyday pursuit-of-happiness activities require a certain amount of “cooperation”.

a few final thoughts…

The Supreme Court of the United States was dead wrong on this one. It will be up to the people to change it and correct the course we are on. It will take level heads and some voice other than the traditional two parties, who are now so polarized and ineffective, lest we just continue to bounce back and forth between the extremes creating additional problems instead of solutions.

It is a short leap from collecting DNA from untried suspects to collecting DNA from kids when they enter school, from adults in order to own property, to travel, or even, like the Social Security Number, for the DNA profile to become a universal national ID. The justices of the SOCUS erred on the DNA issue, but they didn’t consider the companion question of whether or not a person has the right to say “no”. They needn’t bother. I’ve already ruled. I have that right. Period. Everyone else has that right as well, but only if they take it.

 

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NSA and Google now give us P.R.I.S.M….

The news story was discussing the recent exposure of the National Security Agency’s electronic spying program known as P.R.I.S.M. (“Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management”), which sounds like part of a bad plot from the old Get SMART television series.

“No technologist interviewed for this story believes the NSA simply vacuums up every piece of data from all tech companies. Despite advances in storage and transmission speeds, that would still be technically challenging and probably unnecessary. Why recreate Google when the agency can just ask Google for the data it wants?

”

That’s not particularly reassuring. In fact, it begs the question “just how much personal information do Google and other sources collect and retain?”

Despite a flurry of damage control activity by NSA, Google, and other parties of interest, it boils down to a lot more than just a pile of innocuous ones and zeros, although nobody is yet sure what that really means. What we do know is that a lot of people, at least among those over forty, are concerned. Younger generations have only read about the McCarthy era, the sixties, the Nixon scandal, and other less than stellar moments in our history. They grew up with digital technology and the perpetual connectedness sans boundaries as the norm. For them, being part of multiple interconnected databases is considered an asset rather than a liability.

Somehow, we must parse the caution of seniority to separate wisdom from undue fear and anxiety, and the risk-taking adventurism of youth to identify what is brilliance and creativity and that which is little more than reckless social bungee jumping.

I cannot speak well to the latter, as my credentials within that population expired many years ago. My days of “flying airplanes, motorcycles, and Buicks upside down”, so to speak, are long gone. I can, however, generate some valid opinions from the perspective of one who has experienced that sort of behavior and gained knowledge thereof whether emerging unscathed or summarily scathed.

I don’t subscribe to the more popular conspiracy theories of those alarmed to the extent that they have taken to living in bunkers, wearing camouflage everything, and stockpiling food and ammunition. On the other hand, the “my country, right or wrong” mantra of my father’s generation was beginning to derail before I finished college, joining Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy in their Dimension of Innocence. I’ve seen enough human failure to recognize the potential for harm, and I see a lot of it in the damned if they do, damned if they don’t atmosphere of dealing with international terrorism, and in the rapidly expanding dependency on an increasingly centralized and empowered federal government, among other things.

I don’t like the presumed role of decision maker and surrogate brain cells being claimed by Google and other social media. Computers making decisions for, and directing the lives of, human beings was, until recent times, the stuff of science fiction, but it is now quite real. If I send an e-mail to a friend via a Google “g-mail” account, Google computers scan the message for key words and demographic clues, and within the blink of an eye, selected ad content and “suggested areas of interest”, tailored for me, invade my screen at every turn. Google’s rationale is a desire to make my use of their product a more pleasurable experience. Google’s purpose, however, is to lead me down a path deemed statistically most likely to produce the most “hits” and therefore the most income for their corporation. I don’t fault them for that. Business is about making money. I do, however, object to their methodology, including their presumption of the right to collect, trade, store, manipulate, in fact to do whatever they please with my personal information without my permission or knowledge. The “please and thank you” system of values I was raised with has been replaced by the modern “opt out” mentality that dictates one can do just about anything one pleases without regard to personal boundaries, or even of Basic traditional courtesies, until and unless the target of their shenanigans dares to attempt a carefully constructed maze leading to the opportunity to “opt out”. Needless to say, if the hapless subject fails to figure it out and arrive at the desired Opt Out goal, all bets are off.

Google is not the only “social media” playing the game, but it serves to exemplify the process going on, and the potential for significant and harmful impacts on our society and our way of life is very real. The marriage, whether official or tacit, between such commercial concerns and the activities of government compounds both the potential for and the severity of any consequences that might develop.

The primary role of our federal government is to protect us from foreign and domestic enemies, and to handle business not otherwise designated as the province of the individual states. We have lost sight over the past 237 years of what it looks like when the government itself begins to take on some of the characteristics of potential enemies. The foundations of our system of government have been continually tweaked and adapted, as they were designed to be, sometimes wisely and sometime not so wisely. Over the past half century, the process of tweaking and adaptation has on the one hand attempted to improve the equity of formerly marginalized populations within our citizenry, but on the other hand has done so in ways that overstepped boundaries and now need to be corrected or undone altogether.

Meanwhile, the global environment has changed considerably, and the United States has almost continuously been militarily involved in those changes to varying degrees. “Defense” has been redefined, as has the art of conflict. The world is a dangerous place, and it is in our best interest that our government fulfills its role of protecting the people from foreign and domestic enemies. However, how that is done will determine whether that mission is carried out successfully, or whether the alleged foreign enemy is any more of a threat than the unacknowledged one within.

Domestic spying is unacceptable. NSA must find a different way to carry out its duties without violating the trust and sense of security of the people who employ it for that purpose. Cooperation with government can be accomplished through voluntary loyalty built upon earned trust, secretly through indirect means of questionable legality and morality, or by force. It has been a long time since the first option was enjoyed both by the people and government, the third option has never been suffered except on a limited basis during wartime, and the second option needs to be eliminated as a possibility because human nature dictates that it must eventually be abused and mutate into a wholesale expression of the third option of force.

 

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so I’ll cut the story short…,….

Part of my morning routine, after slugging down a couple of cups of black coffee, reading the paper, eating my breakfast, and putting my teeth in to prepare for the day’s grind….in that order….is to log on to my computer and scan the latest offerings of MSN. I’d like to compare the task to scanning the lawn for the neighbor’s dog’s latest offerings. There, I did.

Much as I hate to admit it….which is a gratuitous lie, because if I was truly averse to admitting it, I’d simply lie about it…I glean the offal heap of internet journalism for blog inspiration. Admit it….so do you. Or lie about it.

This morning, I was presented with a pointless little filler piece about whatever happened to such icons of American character as Monica Lewinski, Casey Anthony, et al, including a particularly mesmerizing “who gives a shit” piece about Lorena and John Bobbitt. John, if you remember, had to be reMEMBERED after he was DISmembered in gruesome act of domestic violence by his slightly annoyed wife, Lorena. It’s not the type of story that warms the cockles of my heart, so I try not to spend much time on them, but this one, in a strange twist, actually induced a belly laugh (I just can’t bring myself to say it “left me in stitches”).

While John undeniably delivered a less than stellar performance as a human being and husband, that certainly shouldn’t justify paybacks in kind, or in spades. If removing a man’s penis with a kitchen knife doesn’t fall under the general definition of “domestic violence”, I don’t know what does.

Nevertheless, having given up on any fantasies about becoming a surgeon, Lorena now heads up a non-profit organization called Lorena’s Red Wagon, dedicated to providing financial and educational support to groups striving to raise awareness about Domestic Violence.

Um….film at eleven?

Oh, God, I hope not…..

 

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I love irony, especially when I see it coming

As much as twenty years ago, I remember being accosted on the Post Office steps by some character in a tie-dyed shirt carrying a clipboard and a pen. He approached, and went into his sales pitch about the benefits of “medical marijuana”, tentatively holding out his petition for me to sign. I was in a good mood, so I decided to engage him briefly. I allowed as how I was supportive of any medical advances and thought it would be a fine idea if they would isolate the therapeutic components present in Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol for the treatment of certain maladies. In fact, there are such pharmaceuticals, but they don’t make the headlines because patients don’t get blown away on them. I declined to sign his petition, and bade him a pleasant afternoon. I didn’t bother to tell him that I was a substance abuse counselor at the local hospital based rehabilitation center.

Many years later, their movement gained some traction and we began to see various state legislatures, including my own, approve the concept of “medical marijuana”. I was retired by then, but still hadn’t changed my mind on the matter. I fired off a few word salads to the local newspaper, suggesting that I questioned the sanity and ethics of any physician who could push patients to quit smoking tobacco products and then recommend that another set fire to a bunch of dried vegetation, inhale the resultant smoke, and hold his breath as long as he could, all in the name of living up to the Hippocratic Oath. I haven’t changed my mind about that either.

Since then, I have remained relatively quiet on the matter, but have kept a curious eye on the drama as it plays out. It was clear many years ago that the drive to legalize the recreational use of marijuana was not going to go away. Every culture throughout history has used various intoxicants in one way or another. Those with strong religious taboos restricted their use to religious purposes, though I suspect more than a few rituals were devised for reasons other than service to whatever god or gods were in favor.

Our own society has had it’s time in the ring with opium and alcohol. Opium derivatives became the preferred treatment for pain, while the “recreational” use of raw poppy byproducts became a major felony and retreated to the back alleys. We gave up on prohibition of the production and use of beverage alcohol after finding that the consequences were as bad as, or worse than the original problem.

Alcohol is now regulated, but that doesn’t eliminate the problems associated with its use such as traffic fatalities and alcoholism. “Street” use of opium products, such as heroin, is still very much with us, and in fact has seen an increase in recent years as the abuse of legitimate pharmaceutical products and an extensive black market in them developed.

So, I wasn’t particularly surprised when the folks with the tie-dyed shirts and clipboards managed to get a foot in the door, and I wasn’t surprised at the rush to get licensed as “growers” and “dispensaries” in the fledgling “medical” marijuana industry. Nor was the growth spurt enjoyed by the list of (allegedly) treatable conditions much of a forehead slapper. And, yes, I still believe that any physician who would prescribe the use of raw marijuana should have both his head and his urine examined. Don’t laugh. I had a few doctors as clients over the years.

*****

Redefining marijuana as a “medicine” hasn’t changed its innate properties or its traditional usage.

In the case of pharmaceutical “medicines”, as the field has traditionally been understood, trained and licensed providers prescribe selected compounds at specific dosages to address specific conditions, and undesired secondary effects are taken into consideration.

“Take this pill for your digestive issues”. Refrain from certain foods and beverages. You may experience diarrhea and (a list of side effects).

“Take this pill for your lower back pain”, but don’t engage in certain activities because your coordination, reaction time, and judgment may be affected.

“Medical marijuana”, on the other hand, presents a significantly different scenario.

Medical practitioners who prescribe marijuana aren’t required to have any expertise or special training in the field of substance abuse or addiction. Providers who dispense the product aren’t required to have any education or training in the pharmacological profession. There is no system for measuring or identifying dosages.

Marijuana has always been a recreational drug. People smoke it or ingest it to get high, and along the way it was discovered that some of the side effects could also have certain medical benefits. It is known to stimulate appetite and diminish nausea, for example.

Despite all of the passionate arguments, orations, and denials of “medical marijuana” advocates, however, the primary motivation for the use of cannabinoids is to get high. Any identifiable medical benefits are fortuitous and secondary. If the same secondary benefits could be obtained by smoking marijuana but without the “high”, the entire industry would hit the ground like an overly ripe banana within days. If legitimate pharmaceutical products such as the opiate based pain management medications could be produced with the same efficacy but without the side effects, there would be no such upheaval or change in treatment approaches.

*****

When a substance such as marijuana is inched over from the underground, recreational world of “stoners”, where it has historically been a “substance of abuse”, to the legitimate world of medical treatment of undesired conditions, that transition should include the participation of experts in the appropriate science. Physicians with A.S.A.M. certification (American Society of Addiction Medicine) should be the only ones cleared to write such prescriptions. Your neighborhood Family Practitioner cannot legally prescribe Suboxone, a pharmaceutical used in the treatment of recovering opiate addicts. Special certification is required.

Physicians prescribing Oxycodone for pain management wouldn’t think of instructing a patient to set up a mini poppy farm in his back yard to produce his own “natural” opiate supply, nor would he or she hand out prescriptions for the random ingestion of raw poppy byproducts.

I remember observing not too long ago that, in addition to being essentially stupid to begin with, the legalization of marijuana use for “medical” purposes would most likely prove to be an ironic roadblock to the age old campaign to simply legalize “weed” and regulate it much as was done with alcohol. It’s not that I approve of using marijuana, nor that I am naive to the devastating affects it can have, particularly with young people, but a half century of the SWAT team approach to the marijuana question has had about the same impact that Prohibition had. Strict regulation may be the smartest answer in the long run.

Thus, I felt somewhat vindicated in my opinions on the matter (as well as, admittedly, amused) when I began to see rumblings in the news that licensed “medical marijuana” growers and operators of “dispensaries” were among those lobbying the legislature against those still lobbying the legislature for the general legalization or decriminalization of marijuana for general recreational use. Hey, that’d be bad for business , man….

Yup. Irony.

 

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“Some things never change.”

I don’t know who coined that phrase, usually delivered with a rolling of the eyes. Well, most things do change in one way or another, except, perhaps, the underlying “laws” of physics or of nature that describe the processes by which change occurs.

For example, to the best of our knowledge, basic biological processes, such as cell division, haven’t changed a whit since “life” first happened, though life itself has progressively become more complex and variant.

So, the things that really “never change” are few indeed. One thing that does change is human perception and understanding of the universe around us, as well as of ourselves. “Understanding” should not be misinterpreted as some state of being correct; it instead refers to how we observe, interpret, and draw conclusions about our environment. That does change, sometimes quickly and sometimes quite slowly.

Take the question of “race” , for instance, a subject as loaded with potential energy today as is has been at just about any point in recent history. I encountered a write up on the matter in an article about one Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts and Sciences at Washington University. In a nutshell, he concluded that “race” is essentially a meaningless term. There’s no such thing. Interesting.

In part, the idea is interesting because I first encountered a similar train of thought nearly fifty years ago. Among my early college courses were electives in anthropology, and I recall the professors minimizing the essential physiological differences among human populations and discussing the cultural and behavioral aspects of related human interactions. The sequencing of DNA and the general utilization of that science that are now beginning to be considered “normal” procedure had not yet been developed in the mid nineteen sixties, but even then the assertion that we are far more alike than different was commonly heard, at least in academia.

Advances in the knowledge about DNA, and expanding applications of that knowledge, have enjoyed continuous change. What has yet to change, however, is the concept of “race” and all that it entails among the general population. This is not a process that comes under the microscope, so to speak, of the physical sciences, but one which will be addressed and studied by the social and behavioral sciences. Historically speaking, the word “race” and the concept it conveys today is quite new and grew out of the slave trade of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Prior to that, the term was applied to breeds of horses. By the time of Shakespeare, it had been expanded to describe people, as in the phrase “happy race of kings”. The English, constantly at odds with the Irish, referred to the “Irish race”.

In spite of the changes occurring in our society and culture during the past half century, we still cling doggedly to the archaic meaning of the word “race”. Even those most strongly aligned with the Civil Rights Movement and the changes it has brought about, including those of African heritage, still see “race” as a way of classifying and sorting people into distinctly different groups.

Dr. Templeton’s work brings the assets of the latest in DNA science to the table and, hopefully, will contribute significantly to the elimination of our traditional belief that there exist inherent genetic differences among human populations that justify classification into what amounts to sub-species. Many have proposed over the years that the physical characteristics used to differentiate one group from another are meaningless and arbitrary and not supported by science. Modern DNA science supports that view. The time is now here that notions of “race” can be dispelled as the myth and politics that they really have always been.

There is a potential for great irony here as virtually anybody alive today relates to the term in some manner. Those who have made their living in any way connected to “Civil Rights” and perhaps developed a sense of personal identity accordingly will face changes they may find threatening to some degree. African American activists, fighting for two generation to achieve “equality” may discover that they might have to accept that they are more “equal” than they may like to be. For many people, the elimination of “race” as a reality-based criterion for differentiation may therefore present an ironic and difficult conflict, even though it essentially endorses the very outcomes they have desired.

 

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I remain adamant that allegations over the years claiming I do not have “both oars in the water” are patently FALSE. The possibility that they might both be on the same side of the boat……….is irrelevant………….

 

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will aid the healing…..

It’s hard not to get angry.

The Chechen leader blames America for molding the beliefs of bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Their father called them angels. Their mother says she is “100 percent sure this is a setup.”

But these are people as shocked by the events of April 15, 2013 as those who were in the midst of the mayhem.

The brothers Tsarnaev brought shame and dishonor to their family and to their native country. How do the innocent defend against the inevitable broadening of culpability in the public mind to include them by default because of kinship or ethnicity?

Within moments of the released identities of the Boston Marathon bombers, the internet was aflame with diatribes against Chechens and Muslims, with comments ranging from stunned disbelief to the requisite street corner garbage largely driven by adolescent testosterone. Just about anybody can drop into classic “black and white thinking” at some advanced level of pressure, but some do so on a regular basis and at the drop of a hat. We heard a lot from them, right from the start, and I suspect they’ll still be dictating the One Step Path to Eternal Peace and Tranquility when books about the incident can only be found at yard sales. Their answer doesn’t vary much from “exterminate everybody,” except for their clones and selected wannabes. I always find myself wondering, how is that different from the approaches taken by those who committed the offending acts in the first place?

So, the Chechen leader “blames the victim” and the parents of the suspects can not yet break through 20-25 years of family memories to start the agonizing process of dealing with their own losses. They lost two sons, and in a way that forever tainted the family name.

My focus remains on the surviving suspect. I want to know why he did what he did, not to forgive him or to make it “ok”, but to help my brain recover from the impact of a huge incongruity. I want to try to understand what twisted thinking convinced him that their plan was acceptable and had purpose. On a gut level, I suppose I feel some of what the “kill ‘em all” crowd has written or given voice to over the past few days, but I know that is adrenaline talking. Rational thought can only grow out of a broadened view of all that is within sight, not by intently staring through a straw at a speck and redefining it as “Everything”.

If there is more to this series of events than the despicable acts of two young brothers, we will know that in due time and can then respond accordingly. Drawing conclusions based on news bites, internet chatter, and raw emotion would preclude arriving at an accurate and complete response. The time to simply “react” has passed.

The traumatized, injured, and maimed will heal, to whatever extent their bodies and minds are able. The survivors of those killed by the explosions will somehow experience the years ahead. The loss will not go away, but hopefully will at least become bearable so that family members can grieve and move on.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is only nineteen, and his life, too, is over, whether he survives his injuries or not. Whether he dies, is executed, or spends the rest of his life in prison, he will likely know the obscurity of one Sirhan Sirhan, whose actions similarly brought an end to his own life, as well as that of another, in 1968. Most people under fifty either don’t know that name, or have to scratch their heads and retrieve it from some long-faded school memory. For some as yet unknown reason, a promising young man turned to fully embrace evil and commit murder and terrorism.

Except for the tasks of trying to figure out what led him to turn to evil, holding him accountable, and then figuring out what to do with his empty and purposeless shell, nineteen year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has ceased to exist.

 

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and a few thing-a-ma-jigs.….

Ya gotta love my brother in law. He’s man of few words and many retirement hobbies. While some men who have forgotten where they used to work and why like nothing more than a challenging fairway or a feisty trout on the other end of a line, Dick is perfectly happy in his sandbox. At least, that’s what I call it.

Encompassing some five acres on the side of a small mountain, he has been digging holes and filling them back in, pushing boulders around like a dung beetle, felling selected trees and moving others from one spot to another for the past twenty-something years. It isn’t quite the way he’d like it yet, but then again that’s the whole idea.

I remember the old trailer and muddy set of ruts leading to it from the dirt road when I saw the place for the first time many years ago. Today, there is a well maintained gravel driveway leading to the house sitting not too far from where the old mobile home had been. The utilitarian chipboard shed has been demoted to a place for firewood and spiders to dwell, and there is a new garage that has never seen the wheels of a car but has served as a workshop for the last ten years or so and in that roll has sheltered various wheels of different kinds.

Where to begin? More than a few discarded tractors from back yards and barns around Maine and New Hampshire have found their way to Dick’s shop, where they’ve been restored to full function and more. While he could certainly buy most of the various attachments and modifications he has discovered a use for over the years, spending unnecessary time in a retail establishment for some men would be worse than having to live on tofu and sprouts. He is one of those men. If he can’t fashion it out of something else, he doesn’t need it. He’s a mechanic, welder, excavator, and more, if not by credential then by trial and error.

Take his airplane, for example. After forking over $600 to try his hand and risk his ass at tooling around suspended from a powered parachute a few years back, he decided to build an ultra-light airplane. Prior to that, the farthest off the ground he had been was the roof of the garage he had built in which to restore old tractors, fix ATVs and motor scooters, and to build the airplane. Whenever I hear that distinctive buzz on summer evenings now, I look up to see if he is making his rounds to dip a wing over the home of one family member or another. We now have several aerial photographs of the place.

His tractors and other big boys’ sandbox toys are the main thing, though, like the bulldozer he rescued so he could dig bigger holes. A few years ago he bit the bullet and bought himself a fancy new tractor, too. That didn’t stifle his need to tinker though.

He bought the machine the same way he buys cars, I imagine. When he or my sister in law decide it’s time for a new vehicle, he quietly window-shops and reads up on the various choices they may have in mind. When he’s ready, he visits the dealer.

Ambling in with no indication of urgency or interest, he’ll nod politely and greet whatever salesman happens to have drawn the short straw at that particular moment. Bypassing as much of the requisite small talk as possible, he soon lets the salesman know exactly what he wants and exactly what he is willing to pay for it. Any response other than “Yes” earns a polite “Nope”, and he walks away. To him, a vehicle needs no more bells and whistles than a pair of socks, which tends to raise hell with a salesman’s commissions. Being a nice guy, he doesn’t want to waste their time with pointless haggling.

Anyway, the shiny new tractor was Plain Jane true to his style, so when he decided a bucket loader would be useful for pushing boulders around or giving the dog a ride around the Sandbox, he made one by cutting a 55 gal. oil drum in half and welding the two parts back together end to end. He put together a system to suspend it from the tractor and adapted the hydraulic system to power it. I’m not sure if he ever actually did anything with it, but he clearly had a ball building it and couldn’t wait to show it off.

He has a regular factory made bucket now, and his latest project was to rig something up to convert it into a “grapple”, just in case he might want to pick up small boulders instead of having to climb down and maneuver them by hand. I haven’t seen that particular item in action yet, but I did receive some pictures via e-mail the other day.

I understand he showed it to someone not long ago, and the person asked him what the hell he needed a “grapple” for.

I can picture Dick, hands in his pockets, moving something on the ground with the toe of a boot, shrugging, and casually replying……. “Who said I needed one?”

Ayuh……….

 

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and their allegorical kin.….

I don’t know what made it all come together like that, but I put down the morning paper and thought of a childhood novelty toy. I was thinking of those simple tubes woven of reeds. When you put one finger into each end, the harder you pull to extract them the more firmly you are held. I was reminded that there are situations in life when the best way to win is to let go and stop fighting.

That isn’t an across-the-board principle, of course, as there are also circumstances in which the opposite applies. Tenacity has its rewards. The trick is to recognize the difference and respond accordingly.

The analogy, whether one lines up on the Pull Harder or the Let Go side of any particular issue, seems painfully apt today, and I suspect the solution lies not in applying more effort to one’s chosen approach, but in reviewing how one has parsed the perceived differences in order to arrive at a position in the first place.

This is not a new concept, and there is value in dusting off the wisdom of the ages from time to time just to see if it still fits. Strange as it may seem, it almost always does. The traditional Southern story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, told through Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus character, is in fact an ageless concept of unknown origin told by numerous cultures around the world. The tale can easily be tweaked to parody today to a “T”. Our fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and much of our most treasured lore were all born as some sort of social, religious, or political allegory. After all, before early forms of writing were developed, and then until literacy began to enter to province of the common man, teaching and the commerce of ideas was accomplished exclusively through demonstration and story telling.

Take Congress, for example. Petrified for several years now, pathetically few of our elected representatives demonstrate the wits of a five year old removing two fingers from a penny toy, and as a society, we seem to delight in flogging that equine corpse. Is it Congress that can’t recognize the differences between pulling harder and letting go, or us? From national issues such as gun control to local life-changers such as an immobilized Board of Selectmen in some crossroads community finding themselves incapable of deciding between a $200 dollar budget for the Animal Control Officer or $250.

Gun control versus the Second Amendment, gay marriage versus Judeo-Christian tradition, in fact, religion in general versus not just secular viewpoints but versus decidedly anti-religious viewpoints, are just a few of the current headliners.

In a broader sense, however, it is not so much specific ways of living, speaking, and thinking that are under attack, but control over those very activities themselves. The net result seems to be that, regardless of the issue being argued or defended, we resemble ranks of chromosomes lined up mid-mitosis, but instead of simply dividing and going about our respective ways, we are linked by intellectual and moral finger-traps, each fighting vigorously to move while at the same time determined to prevent any movement in the other except into one’s own camp.

Biologically speaking, life would end immediately should such a perversion take place. I don’t understand how we can believe it would be a winning strategy socially and politically. Hell, it wouldn’t even work in a game of checkers.

 

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and the Second Amendment….

It’s not about guns. It’s not about the twenty first century definition versus the eighteenth century definition of “militia”. And, fundamentally, whether we like it or not, it isn’t even about the recent string of insane behaviors involving firearms. It is about all of these things, to varying degrees, of course, but at its core it is about “power” and the relationship between the federal government and the people.

Pundits and kitchen table geniuses offer glib interpretations of what the Founding Fathers meant by each word and phrase of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but none that I know of got their information first hand. Every one of us who has an opinion formed that opinion by digesting the output of multiple resources and presenting an analysis, or simply by pulling it out of a body orifice.

I’m lazy. I don’t want to go to all of that trouble, only to have some intellectual snot-ball re-roll the dice just to come up with another number. So, I dug out a book about James Madison to see what he might have had to say about the whole thing a couple of hundred years ago:

“Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American….The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or the state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.”

James Madison

It caused me to wonder how those who would restrict the right of Americans to own firearms by defining “militia” as an organized standing military organization came to that conclusion. It causes me to wonder where those who would limit private firearms possession to manually loaded shotguns suitable for hunting got their supporting information. It causes me to wonder by what process some have concluded that Congress did not mean for the people to be “well armed”, but simply to plink at upland game birds. Which reminds me, … it has also become the rage to snort with self satisfaction when declaring that nobody needs an AK-47 to hunt with. Well, nobody buys a Rembrandt to fry eggs in either, but what the hell does that have to do with anything? I doubt anyone spewing that kind of genius around has ever even considered “hunting”, unless perhaps they thought once that it might be fun to go out and scare up some hamburger.

Government has a pretty tough job, actually, having to continuously maintain a balance between the liberties as described in the Constitutional framework of our society, and the safety of that society as a whole.

A number of things have progressively made that task more difficult.

The population has grown in size and diversity over the course of more than two centuries. Once almost exclusively made up of European immigrants and their descendants, today one would have to do some hard work to find an ethnic or cultural group not represented. The population in 1790 was less than 4 million, while today it has surpassed 315 million.

The world is a different collection of circumstances and relationships than it was 220 years ago as well.

Science and technology have taken us from exploring the globe in wooden sailing ships to exploring space in vessels composed of materials and driven by forces unknown back then.

While we must adapt to growth, scientific and technological advancements, and cultural changes in order to keep our governing structure in context, that structure and the underlying principles according to which it was designed, remain fundamentally intact.

I think we take a great deal for granted in the United States today and have become complacent. Those who so glibly dismiss the idea of the People owning firearms, or the need for the People to be wary of the government must live in glass bubbles where they watch cartoons and breathe nitrous oxide all day. They are the compliment of those who live in stocked bunkers as though The End began last Tuesday, but they’re keeping it a secret unless you know the password. The gap between such extremes is vast, with plenty of wiggle room for intelligent disagreement and discussion.

Just to give those who might be interested something to chew on for starters, I’d like to repeat, with emphasis, the poignant quote by the Father of the Constitution himself, cited earlier, who also spearheaded the creation of the Bill of Rights, and the man who was the fourth President of the United States, James Madison:

“Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American….The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or the state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.”

One can’t get much closer to the Horse’s Mouth than that…..

 

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