Beavers

Beavers, it now seems, have been around a long time, a lot longer than we have. They swam, if you can believe recent headlines, with the dinosaur. A mammal hanging out aeons before we showed up.

For an entire summer, the wettest in memory, we tried to defeat the attempts by the beavers on our pond in Vermont - who were there long before we were - to construct a new lodge and a new dam. We were convinced it was raising the water level of the pond so it would threatent the road, and another family of beavers would hopelessly pollute the pond. Of course for more than 100 years our house had a straight pipe that emptied into the pond and I don't remember any attempts to destroy our house as a result.

We failed. The beavers could replace what we tore down before we had paddled our canoe back to the house.

We are rethinking our place in the order of things.

Income Inequality

Yes, I know Paul Krugman, like the NY Times for which he writes, is a target for conservatives who believe he is a muddle-headed socialist. But in today's column he cites statistics that, even if you are a free market person - or even a libertarian like the much feted Alan Greenspan - might make your eyes roll.

The column was sparked by testimony by the new fed chair, Bernanke, saying the income discrepance in the country - which Greenspan has said is a threat to democracy - is best addressed by more investment in the education - particularly the tech education - of more Americans so we can better compete in the fast growing global technical economy.

Krugman says he is wrong, about the source of the inequality and about its remedy. Bernanke's analysis, says Krugman, comes from the long popular notion that our economy is divided between the 20% of us who manage to get a good education to make us competitive, and the 80% who do not. That assumes that, while there is undeniable inequality in the nation, it can be remedied through education, merit and hard work. And, that 20% of us enjoy growing affluence.

Krugman cites these startling statistics. He doesn't even reach down as far as the 20%, but starts with the top 10%, those who supposedly are rocking along finacially. Between 1972 and 2001, the income of the top 10% of Americans rose 34%, or about 1% a year.

The incomes of the top 1% however, rose 87%. And the top .01 - 1/10th of 1% - rose 497%.

Krugman's point is that these numbers are generated not by merit or education but by various forms of favoratism generally associated with an oligarchy that has the power to reward itself. It is a practice for which we scold dictators in Latin America and Africa.

We seem to have a lottery mentality in the United States. When we see someone flaunting great wealth, we think, "With some good luck that could be me."

But the reality is that economies which are so heavily loaded at the pinaccle are sustained by corruption and graft. They not only finally demoralize people who see they can never have access, but they dedicate vast sums to people who are not providing commensuurate value to the economy.

Strikes me that since Ronald Reagan days, we have as a nation adopted the notion that making it possible for a few to become wildly wealthy is the best way to guarantee better lives for all of us. But the numbers in Krugman's column do not support that picture.

You don't need to be a socialist or poverty stricken to think perhaps there is a better way to run an economy; just be excluded from that top 1%. If we have a semblance of democracy left is us, surely we 99% can out vote them.

Parochial Safety

The uproar over the UAE company's contract to protect our ports is, as the NYTimes columnist suggested today, of President Bush's own creation. We will likely never know whether this is in fact a good or bad idea because the administration has so thorougly poisoned the waters in the matter of rational consideration of what best protects us from terrorists that, like the boy who cried wolf, we could be eaten while skeptics who have tired of the warnings stand by.

I have a friend who has a big role in private companies' contracting with the government to protect our ports. From conversation with him I have become persuaded that t is likely the number one concern we ought to be focused on, and the conventional wisdom about how best to do that is flawed.

But we will never be able to have an informed debate about it. Because the administration arbitrarily targeted Iraq and, by inference, the entire Arab world, following 9/11, it is impossible to make discerning judgments about what makes good policy sense.

How devoutly I hope we dodge this bullet. My friend has put the fear of God into me about what it would mean for a dirty bomb to be set off in a container in Long Beach. The technology exists to examine all cargo - it is being done in Hong Kong. But the combination of an inept Homeland Security agency and the administration's political avarice that keeps them creating new fears to further their ambitions, has done much to limit our ability to focus resources and energy where it could be the msot critical.

The irony is that if we suffer a major attack it will be at leas in part because this administration has failed us. But we will be told it is yet further evidence that we need these "tough realists" to protect us.

Cartoons

The debate over the cartoons making fun of the prophet has become quite nuanced.

My first take was that this is an apparent difference between the level of tolerance in the two cultures. And I still believe that is a factor. Whether it is improper or chauvinistic to say that the more mature a culture the less threatened it feels by being criticized or made fun of, I'm not sure.

On a personal level that seems to be so. And it varies from day to day, depneding on how secure within one's self one is feeling. There are days when I can laugh at myself and find being teased great fun. And there are days when I want to kill anyone who looks at me cross-eyed.

And I tend to associate those different responses with how emotionally together I am feeling.

But there is another dimension raised in this week's New Republic; that of thoughtfulness and consideration. If I don't know someone very well, or don't have fairly intimate knowledge of his customs and traditions, I am cautious. I go out of my way to avoid offense. I am what has come to be called politically correct. That is, I try to observe the rules of his culture as I know them.

I read that Denmark has a long tradition of teasing and political attack. One Dane was quoted as saying everyone should relax a little and not take it all so seriously. And for a Dane to take such an attitude toward another Dane is admirable.

Strikes me that we might want to cut people we don't know well a lot of slack. I am appalled that people have died and lives have been threatened - bounties place on the heads of those who published the cartoons - and I am grateful not to live in a culture in which such violent response is triggered by political satire.

But unless we really want to escalate this into something which will require us to respond with equal violence, I don't think President Bush's response on this one is so bad. He said he deplored the violent reponse, but one of the obligations of free people is to consider what the limits of consideration might be.

LA & 2002

So today the president - he must have read yesterday's blog in this space - reveals that survelliance prevented a planned attack in 2002 on the tallest building on the west coast, the library building in LA.

Putting aside for the moment the substance - the question of whether unauthorized, illegal eavesdroping is required to prevent such attacks - what galls me about this administration is their bald-faced, in-your-face adolescent sticking its tongue out at those who challenge them. You just know they're not serious strategic thinkers when their attitude is all about making their opposition look bad. Maybe it's too much to ask that our leaders behave as adults, but I still do.

Now, as to the substance. If it is true that they stopped terrorists from flying a plane into the LA building I am grateful. Wihtout knowing enough to hazard an opinion, I'd still guess that the network of global intelligence uncovers at least the intention or wish of people to make mayhem, many times a day. When the threat level is high enough to say it would have happened without some intervention and apprehension of those planning it, is also a judgment.

The fact remains that we have laws that provide for acting under the gravest and most urgent matters. I doubt this is the first president to act without legal authority, but he may be the first to claim the right.

If the president can act as he pleases, regardless of or contrary to law, then what it is we say we are defending is a sham. I am enough of a realist to understand that a president might contravene a law under dire circumstance, and if discovered, have to face the consequences. I could even consider such an action brave and laudable. But to say the Constitution provides for that, or that he has some unwritten authority, is, in its own way, as dangerous to our nation as a terrorist attack.

I am unimpressed by the Democrats use of the issue; trying to embarrass the president in order to gain votes. Where are the voices of true patriots who understand what it is about this nation and its laws that make it worth defending?

Spying & Incompetence

Someone recently pointed out to me that I had given out the wrong address for finding this blog. You may make your own decision about how seriously to take a blogger who gets his own blog address wrong.

The big dust up about survelliance of our own citizens in search of terrorist plots has so far shed more heat than light. My side, liberals, shout about civil liberties, while the other side - Cheney - stare us down as pathetic wimps unable or unwilling to defend ourselves.

My guess is that this is not a new issue. For instance, I assume anything I put into cyberspace is in the public domain, whether a personal email or not. If I were assigned the duty of trying to figure out the actions and motives of potential terrorists, I would set my computers to pick up certain words, phrases, and patterns, as well as correspondence with known terrorists in other countries. I hope we do that.

But unless we are to become just like our terrorist enemies, we had better sober up about ignoring our own laws about how to go about this. While it is easy to make the case for acting percipitously when the danger is imminent - and we are still hysterical, as the Bush administration seems to want to keep us - we have provision in our laws for how to behave under those cicumstances. In fact the law seems a little silly, since the survelliance can take place before asking for a court order. But the important thing, in this nation of laws - not people - is that there is a law and everyone has to obey it or face the consequences.

During the civil rights struggles, we were advised that when we broke the law - even if it was an unjust or unconstitutional law - we should expect to face arrest, trial and jail.

The argument is being made that we musn't tip off our enemies by passing laws in public that tell them how we function. I say the opposite. Let's show them how we function right out there in the open. If the law is inadequate to the situation, change the law.

My suspicion is that this is more of the two term effort this administration is making to focus as much power in the presidency as possible. A bad idea that will come back to haunt them as well as the rest of us.

Richard Nixon believed he was acting in the bst interests of the nation when he authorized spying on the Democrats, because he believed his reelection was critical to the well being of the country. That's why we have these laws; they curb the skewed judgment the best of us have when our own power is on the line.

Super Bowl

What a relief it was to have a football player and not the president toss the coin to open the Super Bowl.

I am a total fair weather fan, paying no attention all season long except to fill an occasional rainy Sunday afternoon. But for a few playoff games and then for the Super Bowl, I love the idea - much like the Final Four in NCAA basketball - that a huge part of the nation is engaged in the same thing at the same moment.

The French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, wrote what was then revolutionary suggestions about how our species was going to evolve. He wrote of a noosphere, a layer around the earth like the atmosphere, made up of mental activity and energy. As I read it now it sounds eerily like the internet and satellite communications.

Teilhard believed that the homonisation of the earth, when human though and imagination energy covered the planet, would cause us to become a single phenomenon - his best known book was titled The Phenomenon of Man - and that would lead to world peace.

Half of his prediction has been coming true. What of the other half?

God knows. But yesterday, as I drank a beer, ate guacamole and chile, I felt at one with the country - and a significant part of the world - in a way I seldom do.

Swing Vote?

One response to yesterday's blog suggests that Judge Alito has cast his first vote, to stay an execution, making the responder (who is from NJ as Alito is) think perhaps all the worry about Alito shifting the court to the right may be misplaced.

There is historical precedent for justices surprising people, especially their sponsors who thought they knew how they would vote. I have not waded in against either the Roberts or the Alito nominations because they both pass the basic tests of being able legal minds with at least a semblance of reasonableness.

And one of the spoils of our system is that if you win the Presidency you get to name judges, with advise and consent from the Senate. In recent years the parameters of acceptability seem be about extremism on either end of the political spectrum. But it seems that Republican presidents (two Bushes and Reagan) were more eager to name ideological justices than Clinton was.

I am glad that Alito's first vote has been cast and that it at least confuses all of us who thought we could predict his mind.

State of the Union

Something slightly sad about that speech. Except for the comic moment when the Democrats cheered the president for failing to pass his Social Security bill, there was no life in that chamber last night.

Since I deplore most of what this president would like to do -spend American power to bully other nations, dismantle the role of government in protecting the weakest, turn the decision making at the highest levels from rational to supernatural - I am not sorry to see his energy and his ability to cow the Congress disappear.

But one wonders whether he has managed to steer us on a course -with the appointment of judges and the alienation of a significant portion of the world - that will be difficult for those who come after him to alter.

A member of his cabal was famously heard to say that he hoped to shrink government to such a small size that one could drown it in the bathtub.

Having wreaked havoc in Iraq and the entire Middle East he has created a dilemma that has no simple solution, for us or for the rest of the world.

So we wish for a mid-term election of sensible people. And a step back from the swagger and bullying that has poisoned our nation's spirit.